It has been under the concern of several customer experience professionals whether the voice assistants of contact centers are degrading. The professionals in customer experience enhancement roles are constantly searching for ways to deflect to low-cost channels and mitigate call volumes. This is a cautious balancing move for leveraging cost-effective methodologies and curating a customer-centric journey. In fact, the voice channel is far from going obsolete. It is evolving abreast the cloud computing space.
According to Gartner, nearly 25 % of customer interactions will be via voice assistants by the next couple of years. While there are practical use cases for almost every industry vertical, eCommerce, insurance, finance and healthcare are key industries, which are already at the forefront of advanced voice adoption. Enterprises in these sectors are piloting image & speech recognition, data-mining capabilities, and automated insurance agents for offering their customers with a personalized experience.
With every revolutionary cycle of the cloud-native technologies, along with artificial intelligence (AI), enterprises are delivering new capabilities that mitigate the need for creating custom solutions. The future will see an amalgamation of modernization techniques and voice assistance. This will further help enterprises create a roadmap for matching the standard of voice assistants to evolving customer expectations.
Voice Assistants will Go Mainstream as Focus on Personalization and Convenience Grows
Customers are ever willing for next-level engagement, once their trust is gained. Value, personalization and emotional connection are some of the key engagement attributes that are essentially sought after. Voice assistants are the media for customer interactions in the future, gaining value for their convenience and operational efficiency they deliver. A greater number of customer base now sees voice assistants as the go-to choice for engagement with their service providers.
The focus on security and privacy also remains intact and of paramount importance. While customers are concerned for their data security and privacy, companies are putting efforts to address these concerns while meeting consumer expectations. Alongside all this, the conversational assistance continues its move to the mainstream.
A key perception that is common among customers and enterprises alike is not to look at voice assistants as a solution for all issues. They should be leveraged for augmenting human intelligence, making it a lot more productive. Voice assistants or chatbots are capable of communicating with multiple customers in parallel, helping reduce the amount of strain and stress on human agents.
The Advent of Next-Generation Conversational Assistants
Modern voice assistance developments perfectly fit with modern customer expectations, and enterprises are preparing themselves to meet these expectations. Voice assistants offer a splendid interface for collecting customer information and leveraging it to deliver a personalized experience. If an enterprise is not ready for deploying AI-enabled assistants, there are other key approaches to leverage new voice technologies and modernize customer experience, which are
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Preserving context across channels to provide context continuity and personalizing customer experience.
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Using queue management systems for eliminating hold times by considering services like scheduled callbacks and self-service queuing.
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Gathering route calls and customer information by using conversational assistants.
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Anticipating the intent of customers through past interactions.
Most of these approaches need conversational solutions for driving proactive outreach and automation. The conversational design and voice strategy must always commence with natural language processing (NLP).
Overall, voice assistants are gaining more and more trust of customers, ridding the social discomfort of having a conversational assistance in creating actions and reminders. The voice assistants space will continue to grow in the near future, as businesses leverage social media platforms as prime marketing channels. AI will remain a fundamental driver to meet customer expectations and budget constraints.
