Artificial Intelligence can streamline and automate the workload and enhance work processes, bringing businesses numerous benefits. It has already transformed the sales funnel in many ways rendering it more efficient, including managing calendars, writing emails, and nurturing leads.
But besides improving efficiency, artificial intelligence can support businesses in more equally significant ways—one of the most important being building customer relationships via conversational AI.
Read on to find out the ways conversational AI can help you better serve your customers and build customer relationships.
What Is Conversational AI?
Conversational AI is a technology that can simulate human interaction and generate meaningful feedback to users in a highly personalized manner, still keeping the natural feel of the interaction. Relying on natural language processing (NLP), conversational AI can now understand the context of interaction and the sentiment behind it, comprehending the meaning and producing spontaneous and adequate responses.
For this to happen, AI needs to integrate with all the data resources, monitor and make a real-time analysis of the ongoing conversations, turning its insights into actionable information.
Automating Customer Service
Customers’ needs and expectations have changed significantly with the latest technological solutions. Nowadays, when customers need support or information, they want it immediately. A study has shown that 90% of clients find an immediate response essential when making a query defining “immediate” as 10 minutes or less. In similar research, nearly 60% of customers consider a long wait and hold times the most frustrating parts of the customer service.
That’s where conversational AI comes in to automate specific tasks and provide the customers with complete and timely service. In the form of chatbots or virtual assistants, conversational AI can interact with customers autonomously in a human-like manner and without any need for human interference. Leveraging conversational AI in the customer service department, available 24/7/365 to respond to multiple queries simultaneously, can significantly decrease hold and wait times.
As it can successfully solve up to 80% of most common customer queries, it can delegate to human representatives only those queries that are too complex for it to handle.
The best thing about conversational AI is its ability to learn and improve over time. It learns from each interaction and the new data it gathers and uses it for a more meaningful response.
By automating menial and repetitive tasks, conversational AI can reduce the pressure on human representatives. Having conversational AI onboard leaves human representatives more time and energy to focus on complex matters, providing the best customer experience.
Personalizing Customer Experience
Overwhelmed with messages and offers that don’t match their needs and interests, 86% of customers would pay more to get a personalized customer experience.
Apart from automating many tasks, conversational AI can enhance the service businesses provide by personalizing the customer experience. Conversational AI collects data about existing and potential customers monitoring their behavior on every touchpoint with the company, so it can spot different patterns, make predictions, and offers a highly personalized customer experience as a result.
Think of Amazon or Netflix as an example — customers hardly even need to search for the product or content they want in the first place. The more they use these platforms to explore, the more the system knows what they’re looking for.
As AI can better target individual customers based on their behaviors, it provides personalized suggestions and moves to more proactive offers. The fact that there is hardly any friction and that the whole process runs seamlessly makes it more likely for the customers to come back and become loyal consumers. As a result of getting proactive suggestions, the customer will feel like the company knows them better, resulting in a more rewarding and sustaining relationship.
Omni-Channel Interaction
Customers use different channels to talk with their friends, families, and colleagues. They also often decide to switch their conversation from one medium to another. It only seems natural to them to want to communicate with their favorite companies and brands in the same manner.
With conversational AI onboard, customers can begin their interaction with the company using Alexa, continue it on Facebook when it suits them better, and then switch to Viber if they see it as the more appropriate choice. By addressing their communicational needs properly, companies can make the bonds between them much more substantial.
Implementing a conversational AI platform to improve your customer relationships could be just the solution you need to keep your business growing.
