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Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology that adds human flavor to machine-user interactions. It grows beyond conventional chatbots with improved intelligence and better voice recognition capabilities. Conversational AI draws on other advances in cognitive computing like Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing to replicate and deliver near-human-like responses during interactive sessions.
Today, influential megatrends are reshaping the industry adoption of Conversational AI, reimagining value delivery in unforeseen ways. It includes the emergence of voice commerce, data-driven chatbot design, customer sentiment analysis, multi-lingual support, M2M conversations, voice assistants, and much more.
With proven benefits, enterprises are increasingly putting Conversational AI into action for enriching customer experience, improving bottom-line performance in the process. As per Deloitte’s Beyond Touch: Voice Commerce 2030 study, voice commerce will increase online sales. The decisive factor here is unimagined convenience for the customer, with the study predicting that over 30% of e-commerce sales will be driven via voice commerce by 2030.
Applications of Conversational AI
Businesses leveraging Conversational AI can become an emphatic organization that is more responsive to the customer’s needs. Chatbots depicts one of the most popular forms of Conversational AI. However, there are diverse applications of this emerging technology across business verticals, some of which include:
Online Customer Support: Conversational AI is being implemented by many companies for providing 24/7 customer service support at an optimized cost and much greater reliability. E-commerce platforms use virtual assistance for product selection and customer service, which helps the business achieve higher customer satisfaction and service relevance.
HR Processes: Most of the time, employees call HR managers to know the information they can look up themselves. To maximize the HR department’s efficiency, a 24/7 employee service AI chatbot can be implemented to answer all the employees’ FAQs. The HR chatbot is also helpful in passing any relevant information and real-time updates related to any changes in the company’s policy.
Retail & Ecommerce: According to Statista, worldwide e-commerce retail sales are expected to reach 5.4 trillion USD by 2022. At this growth rate, e-commerce platforms often struggle with manual sales and support systems that have their limits to delivering a seamless customer experience. As a respite, e-commerce and retail platforms are shifting towards Conversational AI to increase engagement, elevate the customer’s purchase journey, and offer personalized communication for the buyers.
Gaming: Gamers are usually engrossed and if there is a challenging level to complete, and they happen to face a technical glitch, they want it resolved immediately so that the momentum is not lost. Nowadays, many gaming companies have set up service centers to assist gamers whenever they feel stuck at a level. To help resolve common issues, an AI chatbot is set up to answer these queries. With this help, there is a high chance that the slump faced by gamers will end, and they are less likely to end the game mid-way.
Travel & Hospitality: The traveling customers expect to have their queries resolved on demand. It is where an AI-based chatbot can come in handy for companies that provide travel & hospitality services. Conversational AI is used to keep track of customers booking details, room preferences, opted traveling packages, travel dates, and many other details.
How Does Conversational AI Add Value to A Business?
Conversational AI is a technology that guarantees optimized ROI for growth-oriented enterprises. It brings value for both the customer and the employees and promises exceptional benefits for businesses, some of which include:
Substantial Cost-Savings: About 15 -70% of cost reduction opportunities are available for businesses with Conversational AI depending on customer channel interactions. The algorithm powering the Conversational AI bot can be trained to answer repetitive questions, allowing valuable human resources to focus on more strategic roles like customer relationship development and grievance redressal.
Increased Sales & Customer Engagement: Conversational AI allows customers to engage more frequently with the brand, creating a sense of trust among the target audience and ultimately increasing revenue.
The personalization feature can keep track of customer activity and recommend products or services depending upon their previous preferences.
Deep Customer Insights: The customer’s interaction with the Conversational AI-based bot provides companies with data on what problems customers face and which issues need to be targeted and resolved on priority.
How Are Enterprises Implementing Conversational AI?
Let’s take a look at some real-life instances of some world-class organizations using Conversational AI to improve value delivery.
A Leading Airline Company Applies AI Chatbots
Germany’s largest airline company implements Conversational AI to update passengers on canceled or missed connection flights. The AI chatbots can answer all the FAQs that a passenger can have while boarding the plane. If passengers are not satisfied with the answers of Chatbot, then they also interact with human agents without any waiting period. This way, customer service executives can spend more time answering complex and specific queries.
A Mental Healthcare Chatbot
A mental healthcare company makes use of a conversational AI-powered mental health chatbot that has made mental healthcare services more accessible for patients. It breaks all the barriers of mental therapy and allows people to have real-time interaction with the bot. Researchers developed the AI chatbot in collaboration with Stanford University to deliver behavioral therapy to patients at their convenience. It provides psychoeducation to the users and offers insights to deal with their mental issues by conversing with them.
Implementing Conversational AI:
- Making A Smart Adoption Strategy: While making the adoption strategy, businesses should figure out detailed customer persona, narrow down the scope, and use the data that is already available to set up the scene.
- Conversation Design: A lousy conversation design can lead to a bad customer experience. Conversation design plays a massive role in delivering a superior customer experience. A suitable conversation design must be sought out earlier in the development stage as it is easy to change.
- Choose The Right Channels for Integration: Before jumping into the development of Conversational AI, you should figure out which key channel and existing software you are to integrate with it, for example, company website, social media channels, CRM, emails, etc.
Even though Conversational AI has many applications today, there is still much room left for its development. Chatbots will become more personalized with time. According to a survey carried out by Deloitte, personalization is one of the significant fields of innovation and is responsible for 16 % of patents filed today.
Sources: Deloitte, Statista, Juniperresearch,