How Do Voice Assistants Enable Better Customer Experience?

With the users building a relationship with voice command receptors, these interfaces present a great opportunity for businesses to humanize the interaction and relationships they share with their customers. In this article, we are going to look into the impact that voice technology, particularly voice assistants carry on defining the customer experience for a business and how can you employ the technology as a part of your Contact Center Solution to redefine your business offering.

But before we head on to the part, let us look into how voice assistant works and some statistics hinting towards its prominence in the industry.

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A machine voice driven interaction involves two prime processes: speech production and speech recognition. In order to perform these processes, applications make use of a number of APIs and technologies.

The speech recognition part of the process works around the analysis of sounds, filtering of speech, and its digitisation in a language that can be understood by computers. For this purpose, developers work around specially designed algorithms which engage the linguistic science concepts. Machine learning improves this entire process through teaching a machine the ways for adopting its understanding of the human speech. 

The machine, in turn, can then present the language as a written text, or deliver a verbal response through synthesised speech.

• According to a report by Juniper Research, the number of voice assistants will triple by 2023. If this extrapolation is correct, 8 billion voice assistants would be deployed worldwide. 

• Capgemini estimates that the spending through voice assistants will grow by around six fold compared to other channels, like local businesses, websites and apps within three years.

• Juniper Research expects sales in voice commerce area to be around $80 billion per year by 2023.

• PWC found that majority of the population is aware of voice assistants. There were only 10% of respondents who said that they have never heard of it. 

There are multiple ways through which voice technology has proved to be pivotal to customer experience. Here are some of them:

1. By helping people talk to a brand

From voice searches to voice interactions with an IVR Calling System or Assistant, voice recognition is bringing people closer to a brand. Customers are not just able to find information they are looking for by asking the voicebot on a company’s website but are also able to find more personalized information by interacting with voice assistants on a company’s helpline number.

2. By tapping into voice analytics

Through voice assistants, brands have started shifting their focus on the context and usefulness of the users’ queries. The modern day voice assistants like the one from C-Zentrix are developed to not just understand the queries and respond in near-human manner but also help contact centers analyse the interactions for information like emotion of the caller, gender etc. This analysis when clubbed with other information like location of call origination, time of day, queries history, browsing details, etc. give an unparalleled understanding about the customer and creates a pattern for contact centers to estimate important figures like a user’s life-time value.

3. For simple & fast experience

Everybody loves technology that offers fast experiences and is easy to use. By being an always available, hands-free technology, contact centers can employ voice assistants as a convenient technology for the end users.

4. To enhance personalisation

Voice assistants are probably one of the biggest breakthroughs for Contact Center Solution when it comes to offering personalized content to the end-users. Alexa and Google assistant can recognize voices to offer customers personalized preferences in shopping, content, and music, etc. Similarly, voice assistants in contact centers can authenticate a caller by their voice pattern and personalise the IVR flow for each caller, thus giving them a stitched-to-their-needs customer experience

Travel Booking

Managing call traffic during the peak travel seasons becomes a challenge for travel businesses. They can use voice assistants to pitch packages to customers based on filters like domestic or international packages, travel budget etc. With the help of artificial intelligence, a voice assistant can also pitch the most sort after travel packages. A voice assistant can easily transfer the call to the right contact center agent if some customisation is needed in a package.

eCommerce

In addition to guiding the customers through the buying process and helping them choose the right product, multiple ecommerce brands are employing voice assistants to attend basic customer care tasks like telling customers their refund status, order delivery timeline or assistance in their buying process, etc. 

Hospitality 

Hospitality industry can use voice assistants for both in-hotel customer and for prospects. For in-hotel customers a hotel can use voice assistants perform several tasks like giving an alarm service when requested by a customer, enabling guests to call for housekeeping/room services, and even book pick up and drop off for a customer. For prospects, a hotel may use voice assistants to inform about room availability to a caller or handle booking related calls.

Home Healthcare 

Healthcare sector is making use of voice assistant capabilities to deliver people information related to their health status, notifying them to take their medicines, informing their family members of their health through push notifications, amongst other tasks. Also with elderly care, voice is an easier interface than digital interfaces. 

Customer experience has become a key differentiator for businesses, which drives unquestionably high business results, like rise in revenue growth and loyalty. 

The rise of Artificial Intelligence driven voice assistants have helped Contact Center Software take a leap forward in Customer Experience and have promised greater results and progress. With AI continuing to learn from the gathered customer data, feedback, and interactions, new use cases are coming up.  These use cases are directed towards the creation of natural language-based interfaces for offering in-store/in-branch immersive experience, customer engagement augmentation, etc. This enables not just the streamlining of operations, but also highly personalized and immersive experience delivery by contact centers alike.

It is key to identify the customer touch points which can be handled by AI and do not need human intervention. Secondly, it is important to develop the customer interaction flow that should be guided or followed by the Voice assistant. Ultimately, the growth of your voice driven customer experience comes down to the level of usefulness your Contact Center Solutions team is able to deliver with every interaction - something that will come through a complete understanding of your business and your customer's needs. 

To summarize, Voice assistants are at their primitive stage and it has potential to take over a large part of customers’ digital journey and will also have a strong positioning in the brick and mortar space.