A Conversational AI (Artificial Intelligence) is the pillar of a forward-thinking Customer Success platform. Its accurate and autonomous solutions are designed to fulfill the customer’s objectives and leverage persistent and purposeful conversations, thereby thinning the lack of human touch.

Quick and seamless to deploy, they have been pre-trained to interact in the language of the customer. With simple yet significant domain expertise in the customer success niche, conversation AI is the doorway to the future. Here, in the blog, we will walk you through some of the details and how this can be brought to umpteen help in the industry.

Table of Contents

• What is Conversational AI?
• Technological Components of Conversational AI
• Types of Conversational AI
• How Conversational AI works for Customer Engagement?
• Conversational AI solves Customer Success and Business Needs
• Benefits of Conversational AI in Customer Success

What is Conversational AI? 

Conversational AI is an innovative set of technologies that allow human-like interactions between a machine and a human. Now, this could be an AI chatbot, WhatsApp Chatbot or a voice assistant too With its big bag of applications that range from superhuman to super-machine, AI has paved the way for endless possibilities that were once surreal to imagine.

Interestingly, they have given the brand marketers and managers a whole new category of engagement with the brands where they can ask questions, execute transactions, get support and achieve a relevant and contextual answer through such conversations. With this, the Customer Success Managers can get more insights about their customers and frees them up to be more productive. On that note, let us now look at some of the various versions of Conversational AI that a Customer Success company can implement.

Technological Components of Conversational AI

1. Voice Optimized Responses: The Conversational AI can engage in a human-like manner and showcase the emotions to deliver an optimized customer experience.
2. Dynamic Text to Speech: It converts the written text to natural human speech, thereby supporting various languages, accents, and voices. Further, it incorporates an emphasis on the capital letters ad tonal inflection as well.
3. Machine Learning: With this, you can learn how to respond better to the user by analyzing human agent responses. This has been deemed necessary to augment intent recognition.
4. Contextual Awareness: It is the ability to follow conversational history, translate, recall, and memorize information over the conversations. It is necessary for natural, human-like, back-and-forth communications.
5. Natural Language Processing: This is the ability to ‘read’ or parse human language text. It is a pre-requisite for understanding the natural sentence structures over simple keywords.
6. Intent Recognition: The way you understand what the customer is requesting about, even if it is not correctly phrased is what intent recognition is all about. Good intent recognition is vital for your business if you don’t want to annoy your users with any roadblocks in the way.
7. Entity Recognition: This allows the AI to understand that some text refers to the informative abstract categories or entities, such as ‘March 4’ = ‘Date’. It is of high pertinence for the more complex commands and analysis.
8. Fulfilment: It is the ability to pull data from the web services or databases using APIs, run conditions and inform the Dialog Manager about any concerns.

Types of Conversational AI 

• Mobile Assistants: Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa have rocked our world completely, crippling us to be enslaved by their magic. Consumers too are using their mobile assistants to perform the tasks that they need to be done as fast as possible. With this, you can raise a query while you drive or order a shipment on the go, even when the mobile is not in your hands.
• AI Chatbots: AI chatbots have unfurled their wings in almost every social channel and are responding to more than the basic support questions. In fact, they are allowing the customers to explore the services that they adore and wish to purchase. Aside from this, it lets the customers think things like that with the help of an expert assistant. It is the AI chatbots that have also reduced the number of tickets that were being originally raised to talk to a customer executive.

• Voice Assistants: Deploying conversational AI over voice assistants has rendered an enticing entry point for the customers. This includes asking for product searches, putting up consideration questions, and looking into their recent history to suggest personalized feed or products that they are considering offering. This is what makes it a segment of a multifaceted conversational AI strategy. Statistically stated by a study report by Capgemini, it has been proven to yield high benefits globally.

• Interactive Voice Recognition Systems: This was the original system of conversational AI that was introduced to cut down on customer service costs. This technology automates the customers’ calls by letting them interact with the business through a pre-recorded message. This then garners vital information and connects to the correct agents.

How Conversational AI works for Customer Engagement? 

• Liberates and Supports the CSMs: Wouldn’t it be nicer if the CSMs could spend some quality time with the loyal customers and worry less about the routine duties? As and when you deploy conversational AI, you tend to automate customer conversations, garner product feedback, arrange for business meetings and conduct customer health checks with the click of a button. In a way, it helps take the pressure off these managers, and can now focus better on building strong relationships with the customers when it matters the most. It calls out to be a win-win for both parties.
• Offer personalization on the go: Conversational AI steers away from the mundane, scripted chats that add a robotic spell to the users. Instead, customers want to receive personalized experiences throughout their journeys. There, deploying conversation AI complements the customer success platforms by reaching out to the customers and giving them a two-way conversation of speaking and listening. This enhances the personalized aspect and leads to higher customer engagement rates. This way, more and more customers would like to stay retained with your business and not churn away so easily.

• Scale the Customer Success Operations efficiently: When you take the help of a 24×7 conversational AI, it automatically allows you to revamp your efficacy and drive customer engagement programs throughout their lifecycle. Now, you can seamlessly manage more prospects and fetch their demands. Not only that, but you may also use it to support the work of your other teams and zero in on building businesses while achieving optimum efficiency. Increase your care for more customers, right from lower-tier to the top-tier ones, and allow room for scaling those accounts more effectively.
• Contains Costs and leads to increased Revenue: It is all connected in a circle. The more loyal your customers are to your brand, the lesser are their chances to leave your business, this way their customer engagement score increases, even without burning a huge hole in your wallet. This is exactly what a win-win situation looks like. 

Conversational AI solves Customer Success and Business Needs

Benefits of Conversational AI in Customer Success

• Reduces Cost to Serve: With this, one can see 15 – 70% of the cost reduction opportunities depending upon the customer channel interactions deflected into Conversational AI-enabled channels. Additionally, you can enjoy short payback period with low integration costs and high potential return on investment. Moreover, these algorithms are organically trained as customers use the virtual agents, enabling cost-efficient continuous improvement.
• Minimizes Churn: This offers the customers with all the support needed to resolve issues whenever they want, thereby increasing customer satisfaction. It also renders the employee’s insight into customers’ feelings to inform the next best step recommendations as well.
• Augments Employee Satisfaction: The basic routine tasks can now be automatically completed by the AI-enabled virtual agents, allowing employees to perform more high-value and meaningful work. This offers employees support from a virtual agent on how best to support the customer. Also, it shares sales leads recommendations with employees, allowing them to better achieve their sales targets.
• Increases Revenue per Customer: Basic routine customer interactions will be performed by the virtual agent, freeing up employee capacity to sell products and services. It gathers, analyzes and acts on the customer’s preferences and irritations to design tailored products, offerings, and promotions.

That’s a Wrap

Conversation AI is the future of technology that is waiting for us to lure us with its capabilities. It is set to be another important milestone in the customer success industry that will aid more businesses in a multitude of ways. Be it automating routines, driving tangible business results, or encouraging the customer to engage more, the future is left to be seen. Deploy this as a powerful assistant to help surprise and delight your customers throughout every touchpoint of their lifecycle with you. Whatever it is, the satisfaction of a customer is all that should matter to you at the end of the day. And if AI can do it seamlessly, so be it. 

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