Top 5 Benefits of Voice Tech in Customer Service

One of the first areas in which AI-powered voice tech made its mark is in customer service. By now, most of us have already engaged with a bot in our communications with one brand or another. That translates to voice-powered customer service - and it's fair to say it's so far been a success. The benefits of AI-powered voice tech in the context of customer service abound for both the customer and the brand.

This post looks at the top five benefits AI-powered voice tech brings to the customer service experience.

Customer Service Around the Clock

AI-powered voice tech is always available to your customers. It provides real-time, 24-hour support every day. It won't get tired or need a lunch break. Hence, by deploying AI-powered voice tech, you can simultaneously serve more customers while freeing up your customer service teams that can now focus on more meaningful and high-impact tasks.

And because AI-powered voice tech can resolve customer queries faster than humans, the average length of customer calls will be shorter, which typically translates to fewer spikes in customer calls, reducing their wait times and driving up customer satisfaction.

Optimization Gains & Less Human Error

It's a given: AI is better at repetitive tasks than humans. Humans can get bored, distracted, or frustrated; chatbots cannot. Your AI assistant will never load the wrong file, look in the wrong column, or offer customers the wrong product or promotion. It simply will not happen with AI. It also doesn't matter how rude the previous customer was; your voice assistant will remain friendly and bubbly when the next call comes in.

Beyond that, voice tech can also streamline certain processes within your organization and improve productivity. Things like scheduling meetings and setting reminders, for example, can be easily automated using AI. And doing that translates to more optimized workflows within your organization, yielding cost savings and other benefits you can pass on to your customers. The less time your staff spends on minutiae, the more resources you can allocate to improving other parts of your business.

More Personal Customer Experiences

This one might seem a little bit counterintuitive. Can a bot really provide a more personal experience than another human? Yes, it can. Here's how:

As a customer chats with an AI-powered voice assistant, the software (obviously) listens to what they're saying to provide an appropriate response. But AI voice tools can also transcribe and tag what they're saying and automatically suggest helpful information or offer a specific product or service based on age, demographics, past purchases, keywords, etc. Ironically, the machine is better able to personally cater to each customer than humans, who, despite all our brain power, are easily distracted.

AI-powered voice tech can also take things one step further by personalizing the experience based on the speaker's emotional state. The amount of valuable information a voice assistant can pick up by analyzing a speaker's tone of voice is staggering. And voice assistants can leverage those troves of subtle data to suggest relevant products and services to your customers. And you'd likely be surprised at how good AI can be at hitting the mark with product suggestions. Amazon can recommend books I should read better than my friends and family.

Accessibility

AI voice assistants can lower the barrier to access for older people or those living with a disability. People with visual impairments, for example, will likely find it easier to interact with your organization using voice rather than tapping on a keyboard or a smartphone's small screen. The same goes for those with mobility challenges, such as arthritis or hand tremors.

Deploying AI-powered voice tech levels your customers' playing field. It provides all your customers with an easy path to get in touch with you.

Conversational AI Gets Smarter With Time

Conversational AI learns over time. That means it can continually enhance how they communicate with your customers, yielding more benefits to your organization as time goes by. Because AI is self-learning, your voice assistant will learn new skills with every answered call. Hence, your voice assistant will continually enhance its capabilities and increase the types of tasks and queries it can handle.

So you can expect continual efficiency gains and tighter and more streamlined interactions with your customers as your bot becomes smarter and smarter. And as the tech behind it keeps breaking new ground, you can also expect next-generation voice assistants with new algorithms and added functionality. The experiences this tech will enable moving forward are hard to imagine, but we can be pretty sure they will be transformative in more ways than one.

Wrap Up

Those are the top five benefits of AI-powered voice tech in customer service. Of course, this post represents a bird-s eye view on the topic and that there are other benefits to adopting the tech. Still, these are the most salient points. And they make the case that now is the time to start the conversation about integrating voice tech into your business.

About Modev

Modev was founded in 2008 on the simple belief that human connection is vital in the era of digital transformation. Today, Modev produces market-leading events such as VOICE Global, presented by Google Assistant, VOICE Summit, and the award-winning VOICE Talks internet talk show. Modev staff, better known as "Modevators," include community building and transformation experts worldwide. To learn more about Modev, and the breadth of events offered live and virtually, visit modev.com.