Guest Post: What is the Importance of a Voice-enabled Bot in a Contact Center?

This week we feature an article by Shruti Bansal, Digital Marketing Expert at Ameyo, an AI-powered contact center solution. She shares how contact centers can use voice bots to capture, interpret, and analyze verbal input from the speaker and reply in a similar natural language. 

In the contact centers, customer agents are swamped with numerous customer queries during the peak seasons such as holidays, festivals, the new year, etc. Due to the excessive incoming calls and strained bandwidth, agents have to leave a few of the calls. Ignorance leads to bad customer experience and support, making customers feel ignorant. The last thing that any business would want is to make their customers feel bad and provide a bad customer experience.  

However, it is a non-denying fact that call centers struggle to meet the ever-rising customer standards and queries.  

Technology solutions and automation have the power to improve customer service in multiple ways. And thus, the upcoming future of businesses seems to be all about leveraging the power of AI and automation. Perhaps this could be one of the main reasons businesses nowadays embrace new-age technologies and tools like voice bots and chatbots.  

Contact center agents’ efficiency is highly impacted by various factors such as browsing multiple data centers for data acquisition, large call volumes, and poor access to crucial information. These challenges eventually increase the call waiting or on-hold time, spoil the customer experience, and increase operational costs. 

What is Voice bot?

Voice bots are conversational AI-powered software tools used in contact centers to capture, interpret, and analyze verbal input from the speaker and reply in a similar natural language.  They are capable of interacting with inbound callers. Users can interact with a voice bot and receive contextualized, relevant responses with voice commands.  

Thanks to technology, ML, and NLP, interacting with the bot is easier than before. It allows users to  navigate an IVR menu and explore self-service options. If users get stuck while browsing or feel like having a query, they can easily interact with the inbuilt voice bot. While interacting with voice bots, users can receive real-time, contextualized, and relevant responses. With Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, people are already accustomed to interacting with voice assistants in their homes. 

According to a Gartner report, Conversational AI bots are all set to take up about 40% of all customer service communications.  

While chatbots are currently the most widely used artificial intelligence (AI) communication tool, voice bots quickly catch up. Voice bots are AI-operated software that is built on conversational AI. With a voice bot, you can not only route customers to the right agent but also facilitate service.  

The difference between voice bots and voice assistants

Inbound-Outbound Calling: The Voice Bot optimizes your end-to-end inbound and outbound calling with voice automation over a high-speed internet connection. Unlike traditional call centers, Contact Center Cloud does not have hardware installation and maintenance requirements. All the automated operations in cloud space promise faster response time, higher precision, and greater efficiency.

Real-Time Communication: The cohesive integration of NLU, NLP, DB, and CRM systems enables the contact centers to deliver real-time voice-based interactive solutions. Its groundbreaking sentiment analysis model assigns an emotional score to the customer inputs. This score dictates the response of the Voice Bot. So, be it a disgruntled customer or a satisfied user revisiting you, the Voice Bot addresses the customer concerns with remarkable sentimental acuity.

Voice to Text Transcription: As the customer is voicing his query, the voice is transcribed into text simultaneously. The text is stored in the database for data analysis.

IVR & Telephony: The Voice Bot engages with customers and resolves their queries with precision and care. In case of complex issues, the Voice Bot facilitates a smooth handover to the respective Live Agent to ensure seamless query resolution.

Upgrade Legacy Call Centers With Next-Gen Benefits of Voice Bot Solutions

1. Improve first contact query resolution 
2. Bring down the waiting time 
3. Reduce the operational cost 
4. Increased accuracy in query responses 
5. Boost the customer satisfaction score

Conclusion

We have seen legacy call centers struggle to deliver optimal solutions at reasonable operational costs. It is evident from the benefits that Voice Bots have the potential to change the way your customer support functions and guide the customers for better customer engagement.  

With the latest AI technology, this article demonstrates how Voice Bot imbues contact center operations with real-time intelligence, precision, and efficiency. 

It achieves what was previously thought impossible – scaling up the efficiency and bringing down the operational costs. Simulate conversation, simplify interaction. 

Shruti Bansal is a tech enthusiast who wears multiple hats for Ameyo’s marketing to manage content, social media, and inbound marketing. She is passionate about business technologies that are reshaping the customer experience.

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors, go to customerserviceblog.com.

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