The Rise and Rise of Conversational AI

Covid19 has helped transforming the manner our customers are reaching out to the various service providers and mind you I am not just talking about the B2B and B2C but every mode possible i.e. C2C, C2B, B2G, G2B and G2C.

The impact of which, AI is no longer termed as a key corporate tool to “just” increase automation and in turn the productivity, but now marked as an emerging technology to be leveraged to handle global challenges.

Some of the key insights from top market analyst out there clearly suggest the above:

• Conversational AI Platform Market to grow at 30% CAGR to hit $17 billion by 2025
• Close to 60% of CIOs, CTOs and CDO's surveyed have stated in affirmation that conversational bots are driving disruption in their industry
• You will see by 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human but a robot (powered with human voice)
• Changing the game plan, 43% customers reports that their competitors are already implementing the technology
• Contact centers customer service face would be changed and by 2021 more than 20% of customer service interactions will be dependent on AI, an increase of 400% from 2017
• The change is not going unnoiced, ~60% agree that conversational bots would deliver huge return on investment for minimal effort

Few good reads Link1 Link2 Link3

You would have noticed it yourself, whenever you have called a contact centre the key expectations that you would have had from the other side, a very responsive, engaging, and an intelligent conversation ultimately leading into resolution of queries.

Our expectations as customer are rising as quickly as technology is evolving. Today virtual agents and insights from speech analytics represent an exciting opportunity, tomorrow they will be a competitive necessity and a basic expectation for the digital customer (i.e. for all of us).

What is driving the Conversational AI rise? In 2014, voice search traffic was negligible. Before Covid19 it was a bit more than 10% but now due to Covid19 it has gone close to 20% of all search traffic, nothing has impacted the technology landscape more than Covid19.

Would you believe me if i say that by 2020, over 200 billion searches per month will be done with voice. Let us talk about of the key benefits that we can realize from conversational AI:

• Happy customer and exponential reach: Much improved speed of service and timeline commitments and handling much larger customer base with the advancement in the conversational AI space. Spoken conversation is our natural way to interact with each other. It’s faster, friendlier and more direct than using text-based channels.
• Stop worrying about the user habits: The challenge of a channel shift can be tackled by integrating voice bots into an existing telephony system so that benefits can be realized more easily.
• Being hands free opens up a new set of opportunities: Voice can change the way people work, such as factory or laboratory workers who wear gloves and cannot interact with a standard keyboard or buttons and it does not stop there, think about your better half or yourself busy in kitchen or taking care of your kids would just need to give your home automation a voice command and magic happens.
• Reduction in cost and better ROI: Now you can address the most common customer queries via chatbots, VA’s and thus reduce the waiting time for your customer and help deliver 60-80% cost saving compared to “completely” human powered contact centres.
• Always on service and supports multiple languages: Conversational AI does not get tired and is always on, isn’t it a great agent? Voice can be more accessible for users who struggle with standard computer interfaces such as elderly or persons with disabilities. With this you will achieve 24/7/365 access to information and ability to address various language needs. Do note with this you do end up leaving a mark to the “carbon footprint”.
• Customer satisfaction and high retention: If conversational AI is designed effectively, it would help in adding to positive customer experience and help you realize significant retention/renewals improvements. Traditional user interfaces need us to adapt our behaviour and learn how to interact with a computer and thus with spoken natural language, we can communicate on human terms.
• Focus on strategic initiatives: Remember, AI should not be taken as a threat but as an opportunity to reskill/upskill resources to focus on more strategic activities (advising vs. bugs fixes).
• Powered with analytics that helps in focus outcomes: If you do not run the analytics that will help you focus on outcomes then we are not using it effectively. Combining voice-driven interaction with a screen to display complementary information can provide a rich and detailed user experience. It enables our customers/decision makers to focus on strategic objectives using analytics to drive decision making.
• Highly proactive and responsive: Powered with setting up real time alerts, messages, advanced warning when information is available, or threshold breached.
• Enhanced compliance and auditability: Increased visibility and the capture of information by ensuring all customer interactions are securely recorded. I would suggest reading something really interesting about synergy that Blockchain and AI bringing in together here.

The terms used in conversational AI are not new, chat interfaces, voice usage, and NLP etc. but are only being added with new terms like Blockchain, Quantum, Cryptography etc. and mind you this space is outperforming Usain Bolt.

It is becoming very commonplace for our customers and they are expecting us to be saving them time and providing support effectively and the challenge is our competitors who are also trying to fill in that gap.

Do take a note, the organizations that are ignoring this paradigm shifts in not just the customer behaviour but also in technology will get left far behind. Prepare yourself for this transformation, either change your business or change the way you are running your business, simple isn’t?

Not that simple, in order to achieve the above, we need a technology agnostic conversational AI platform that is powered with modular architecture and integrates with different artificial intelligence algorithms and offers the ability to switch them quickly and evolve the solution without a vendor lock-in (now that is what I call, simple ??).

I will cover my view on this platform agnostic conversational AI in my next write up.