Offer 24/7 customer care with conversational AI

24/7 customer care powered by conversational AI is playing an important role in redefining how businesses interact with their customers.

The increasingly global nature of business online and advances in technology have all helped drive changes in consumer behavior and expectations. Global lockdowns created an incentive for people who had previously shied away from using ecommerce and online shopping to engage with it seriously. Along with this shift in consumer behavior came an expectation that digital transactions should be accompanied with immediate customer service 24/7. 

It’s not just retail and ecommerce that are feeling the impact of the shift towards 24/7 sales and customer care. 

• Health and insurance businesses experienced their own challenges during the pandemic with telephone-based services stepping in to support patients and customers during lockdowns. 
• Banking was already making a transition towards 100% online transactions before Covid and the pandemic has exposed many more customers to these online services and driven expectations for better digital experiences. 
• For other industries such as logistics, the increased reliance of consumers on home delivery and international shipping has come along with increased expectations for well executed customer experiences.

Technology powers the future of customer care

With customer service playing such a crucial part in attracting and retaining customers, the challenge for businesses is to find ways to offer 24/7 customer service which offer superior customer experiences and improve the efficiency of their business.

A McKinsey report noted that businesses anticipated that on average 40% of customer issues in the future would be resolved using digital or online services. 

The same report states:

“Analog channels may lack the luster of their digital counterparts, but they remain a crucial element in the customer experience […] The telephone, for instance, continues to be the most-used channel for customers across industries, especially in the health insurance sector, where more than 80 percent of customers call their insurer when they have a problem or query” [p.4]

If your customers want to call your business rather than use an online form or chat, then voice automation solutions can play an important role in offering 24/7 customer care.

Voice AI as frontline customer support

Virtual assistants – voicebots powered with conversational AI – can handle a remarkable range of tasks from start to finish at contact centers. This makes them an effective way to automate 24/7 frontline support for your customers.

Here are just some of the tasks that are frequently automated with virtual assistants:

Customers no longer need to wait for a human operator to be able to perform their most frequent transactions over the phone. Furthermore, customers can access the self-service at any time.

Voice AI can understand what customers are asking, allowing for two-way conversations between the virtual assistant and the customer in natural language, often with multiple languages supported.

Retail case study

Jean Louis David, a hairdressing franchise, uses Talkie.ai virtual assistants to answer customer calls 24/7. The virtual assistants help customers make appointments, manage their appointments and ask questions about the business. Customers can call and book at any time. Jean Louis David is able to handle around 100,000 calls per year without the need for a physical call center, making their voicebot solution one of the most sophisticated self-service automations for voice calls in the world. Read more about the case study here.

Proactive 24-hour customer services with voice automation

For some businesses, 24/7 services are essential to their business model. Voice assistants can take proactive steps to contact customers when certain events have been triggered.

For security companies, being able to reach customers any time of day or night is critical. If an alarm is triggered at a customer’s business site, voice assistants can instantly make a call to the client to notify them of the alarm and confirm if the alarm has been activated legitimately or just by mistake. It’s a time saving feature that is both valuable to customers and easy to implement using voice AI.

Another scenario where it is helpful for voice assistants to contact customers proactively is when customers are waiting for an appointment slot. When an appointment slot becomes available, the voicebot platform can either call or SMS customers to alert them of the slot availability and help them make the booking.

The benefits of revamping your customer experience

Voice AI is a powerful and affordable way to start revamping your customer experience and offer 24/7 customer support and care.

There’s been a shift of perspective that is happening across industries to see customer service not as an expense, but as an engine of growth. Hubspot reports, for example, that 67% of customers surveyed were willing to pay for better customer service. In highly competitive industries such as ecommerce, the businesses that invest in creating excellent 24/7 customer services will have the edge. Zendesk noted that 50% of customers said they would switch companies after a bad customer service experience. And Hubspot also revealed that 93% of customers were willing to make repeat purchases with companies that offered excellent customer service.

The McKinsey report cited earlier notes that between 20-40% of businesses surveyed were looking to use technology to improve their customer experiences to increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs and boost their conversion rates and growth. 

Voice AI can help your call center achieve these with automation.

Increase customer satisfaction

Instead of waiting to speak to a human operator, callers can interact with the voice assistants to complete common transactions from start to finish, no matter what time of day or night they are calling. This is of particular value to businesses which operate in a global environment but where the main contact center is based in one country. Voice assistants can cater for callers from different time zones.

Reduce costs

Voice automation offers an affordable and effective alternative to outsourcing to be able to provide 24/7 customer support. With Talkie’s voicebot platform, you only pay for the time voice assistants actively talk with customers. Since the service is infinitely scalable, your costs scale with the actual numbers of calls handled by the voice AI.

Boost conversion rates

Offering strong customer service helps businesses grow and voice AI offers customers fast, accurate self-services that help acquire new customers and retain existing ones.

Self-service voice AI for businesses is taking off

Sophisticated voice AI solutions are still at an early stage of adoption but things are moving fast. Most businesses using voicebots now plan to expand their use of virtual assistants to cover a wider range of business processes at their contact centers in the near future.

The barriers to entry for implementing voice AI for your contact center are surprisingly low. Not only are voice assistants affordable, they will also help reduce your overall costs from the moment you implement them.