Voice-based chatbots – a revolution in customer relations

Chatbots are on the verge of an unprecedented disruption to customer relations.

While phone is still the most important channel for customer service, voice-based chatbots represent the holy grail of customer service automation, enhancing customer experience to the latest digital standards and delivering a rapid return on investment.

After transforming games such as chess, Jeopardy and Go, artificial intelligence (AI) is set to radically transform customer services. Fast in exchanges and self-learning, providing precise answers to customer requests and offering a personalised business transaction service, chatbots are set to replace contact centre agents, mobile apps and websites.

Machine learning changes everything. Put simply, machine learning recognises a pattern after first learning it. Specifically, in customer relations, machine learning can identify a customer’s need, and a well-trained intelligence chatbot can deliver truly impressive results that can be compared to those obtained through human intelligence.

Learning consists of giving examples of sentences to the learning machine and detailing the corresponding intention. To be efficient, this learning has to happen before a chatbot is launched and continue throughout the first few weeks after launch. If the chatbot doesn’t recognise the intention with enough reliability, human intervention becomes necessary.

Beyond machine learning, some providers are offering an ensemble of mature and accessible technologies that are enabling the construction of chatbots—speech to text, text to speech and API management—which can:

• Strike up an anytime, anywhere, any device conversation with a customer.
• Understand and process the customer’s need.
• Chat “just like a real person,” providing an appropriate answer to each request, and if appropriate, forward the request to a real agent.
• And with social networks having already paved the way for mainstream use of written conversations as a method of expression and communication, chatbots are all set to enhance customer experience to the latest digital standards, providing seamless customer authentication, emotion analysis to monitor the conversation and synthetic voice adapted to the customer’s profile.

While phone is still the most important channel for customer service, and because call centre costs remain high, voice-based chatbots powered by AI represents the holy grail of customer service automation—delivering a rapid return on investment, including an increase in self-service utilisation rate and increased customer satisfaction. All this amounts to a complete revolution in customer experience.