Battle labor shortages with intelligent voice assistants
From QSRs to retail, call centers to HR departments, no matter what type of business you’re in, it depends on people. Like most organizations, Voicify customers, suppliers, and partners are struggling to cope with the current spike in labor shortages. Intelligent voice assistants can help.
Earlier in the conversational AI revolution, we often talked about the opportunity for businesses to leverage in-home smart speakers as an ‘always on, always available’ employee. Some of our customers have done just that. For example, Wolverine created mechanisms to handle their most frequent call center inquiry, ‘Where is my Order’ or WISMO, to Alexa and Google. They’ve begun rolling this feature out across their sub-brands and realized incredible gains in call center efficiency.
It is essential to know that the interest in intelligent voice assistants is rarely about reducing headcount. Instead, customer experience and better resource management is the goal. Layering in automation allows humans to spend more quality time engaged in the most difficult or essential moments in a customer’s journey.
As more companies abandon Alexa and Google Assistant, electing to employ an assistant within their own (and owned) digital ecosystems, an intelligent voice assistant brings the same benefits of previous ‘leased assistants’ (how I refer to as Alexa and Google Assistant) plus more. For brands who choose to own an intelligent voice assistant and run multiple leased assistants, all endpoints should share the same functionality and be managed in one place. Build once, deploy everywhere functionality becomes a must-have feature.
For example, it can cost an average quick-serve restaurant outlet more than $2k a month to accept phone orders. Intelligent voice assistants can drastically reduce that cost, increase the accuracy of orders, and free up critical resources from the distraction of answering phones. Multiply $2k per month across thousands of locations, and the attractiveness of a custom voice assistant strategy quickly becomes clear for globally recognized QSR brands.
We can run this same business analysis for the hotel industry (front desk/concierge), retail (personal shopper), warehouse operations (removing tap and swipe interfaces), and many more.
Any business will have an overwhelming number of places they can start. Some brands are more comfortable with novel use cases. Others prefer to dive deep into a very impactful use case with direct ROI; this decision often boils down to culture and position on risk.
Revisiting the labor shortage challenge, we see a heightened interest in allowing an intelligent voice assistant to supplement low- and mid-level complexity touchpoints in a customer journey. The trick is to focus on those moments where the labor shortage impacts your business, and it is possible to meet customers’ expectations with an intelligent voice assistant.
For intelligent voice assistants, general-purpose is better than point solutions
There are many point solutions for common business problems in various industries, but they are typically rigid and inflexible, forcing users down concrete adoption paths. Further, once down the point solution path, organizations need several point solutions for disparate business challenges, none of which work with one another without costly customization and integration. Beyond a poor and complex business management issue, this creates a disjointed customer experience.
With Voicify, a general-purpose platform for creating, publishing, and managing enterprise-owned intelligent voice assistants, organizations can start small with a narrow use case like call center deflection and expand into other valuable applications when ready.
Keep in touch
If you have questions about custom voice assistants or how Voicify can help, please don’t hesitate to contact us for a no-cost, no-commitment conversation.
About Voicify
Voicify, LLC is the world’s only end-to-end solution for creating, managing, and optimizing enterprise-owned voice assistants Our platform enables brands to create highly engaging and personalized voice experiences that can be automatically deployed to web and mobile products and services as well as a broad array of voice platforms, including Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, IVR telephony systems, and more. You can learn more at www.voicify.com and on Twitter (@Voicify) or LinkedIn.