It’s time to replace decision tree IVR with Conversational AI; the secret is manageable NLP

While digital assistants embedded in web, mobile, and other digital endpoints are popular and continue to gain traction, for many brands, their inbound telephony system represents a historic and high-volume channel to streamline further.

Whether the telephony channel is oriented around sales or customer service, the customer won’t tolerate a sub-par experience. Consider these statistics: 

• A recent survey showed that 49% of customers named ‘long hold times’ as one of the top reasons they find telephony channels frustrating.
• 60% of customers abandon a telephone experience after waiting too long on a call, and 62% if customers are frustrated by businesses that only offer one or two ways to reach them 

Putting conversational AI in your phone system accomplishes several business objectives:

• Increased Customer Satisfaction – by giving addressing customers immediately in the phone channel, you remove the frustrating element of wait times
• Scale – a voice assistant, is an always-on, always available, message-consistent asset (think employee)
• Targeted skill sets – humans are most valuable when they solve complex customer issues, not rudimentary and repeatable issues/tasks
• Reduced call center costs – reducing call center throughput by solving problems before a human gets involved
• Humans as backup, not primary – conversational AI doesn’t prohibit connecting with a human, it optimizes it

Double up Conversational AI for Call Center Deflection

Additionally, with Voicify the same conversational AI inside your telephony system can live in various other channels. Any solution built on Voicify can live on the website, mobile app, SMS bot, kiosk, and others.

But not all of those are voice capable, like SMS, how do you do that?

While a voice interface is a notable advantage when customers are communicating with you, a text interface can always be additionally offered or solely used. So, with channels like SMS, where text is the primary UI, the same conversational AI powering the phone experience can be leveraged conversationally across user interfaces.

Keep in touch

Please subscribe to our monthly newsletter if you’d like to keep up with the work Voicify is doing and our most current content and events. If you have questions about how Voicify can help you deliver custom voice experiences, please don’t hesitate to contact us for a no-cost, no-commitment conversation.