1. What is Conversational AI and how it improves CX
2. The Conversational AI benefits for companies and customers
3. Pat's framework: Conversational AI for an engaging CX
How to customize conversations for an effective and smooth CX Next-Gen?
Connections, digitalization and speed of interaction: the success of companies, in addition to the product and service, is measured by the ability to support customers in Customer Journey, always more engaging and articulated. This is why it is essential to invest, both strategically and operationally, in Customer Experience Management, enabling a technological level of the company by involving different areas ranging from Chatbot to Data Science.
By combining these factors, the CX moves to a higher level of evolving conversations: the intent of the requests is better understood, bringing the effectiveness of the virtual conversation closer to that with a human operator.
Hence the term Conversational AI.
What is Conversational AI and how it improves CX
In this age of pervasive digitalization and with an infinite number of contact channels, the secret of success is the personalization of the customer experience.
The numbers related to the CX centrality speak for themselves: consumers are willing to pay up to 16% more for products and services associated with an extraordinary shopping experience.
Any consumer, regardless of whether they are buying an electronic product or taking out an insurance policy, wants to live a personalized experience.
When it comes to challenges, many companies are faced with a growing amount of touch-points, channels and digital contacts, which makes the traditional customer management approach unsustainable.
This, in fact, can be the cause of endless expectations that generate an unsatisfactory experience and the immediate dropout of the brand for a more adequate competitor.
It is no coincidence, in fact, that modern, digitally and mature companies invest a lot in their Customer Care, ensuring to customers an at least acceptable level of service according to the daily frenetic dynamics and hyper-connectivity.
The need to manage, in an efficient and personalized way, an infinite number of contacts justifies the increasing centrality of the Customer Experience in companies' strategies and operations.
Customer Centricity entails knowing your customer, their needs and purchasing behavior: it means being a data-driven company that directs operations and strategies to support and anticipate the needs of its interlocutor.
The Customer Centricity influences the production, the logistics, every supply chain relations, the contacts with the sales points, and of course beyond marketing, communication and Customer Support.
Here we introduce the Conversational AI, the intelligent solution dedicated to every company that wants to improve the Customer Experience.
A complete and effective definition is found in Deloitte study "Conversational AI", in which they define it as "A programmatic and intelligent way of offering a conversational experience to mimic conversations with real people, through digital and telecommunication technologies".
The concept is to virtualize the relationship, that is the conversation, between the customer and the operator of the company, thanks to the support of the modern technologies of Artificial Intelligence.
The Conversational AI can take on different forms: the Chatbot, the Virtual Assistant and the Virtual Agent that operates in the Customer Care and Contact Centers context.
However, should not be neglected hybrid forms in which the customer interacts directly with a human operator, who exploiting the AI, can obtain information, forecasts and suggestions.
The Conversational AI benefits for companies and customers
Conversational AI must be a key element of a customer-centric strategy, which generates important benefits for companies, customers and also for employees, who can deal with the most added value activities and leave to the AI the first contact activity with its interlocutors.
As follow, here are the four main benefits of Conversational AI for the Experience and customer satisfaction.
• Experience customization
A Conversational AI system does not answer simple questions, instead it accesses to the entire customer knowledge (purchase history, previous conversations, through integrations to CRM, ERP, e-commerce, etc.) so to customize the conversation, suggest ad hoc offers and treatments that especially maintain the retention of already active clients, and simplify the acquisition of new customers.
• Omnichannel and Context Awareness
Conversational AI allows companies to offer superior, highly scalable and top quality customer service. In addition, it grants the integration of systems and communication channels in an omnichannel, single and natively interface, which guarantees the care of the customer regardless of the way of contact. The system interacts by knowing the interlocutor, the company and the market, and so raising the CX and availability 24/7.
• Streamlined relationships and reduced churn
A streamlined experience guarantees a high degree of customer satisfaction and represents the first direct benefit of these systems: the Conversational AI reduces long waiting calls and unanswered emails to go back to the direct conversation, available at all times. As a result, a reduction in the dropout rate as the company can set marketing strategies customized according to needs and trends.
• Improved engagement
Certainly the conversation is one of the most "engaging" points of contact between a customer and his operator (human or virtual). With the Conversational AI, thanks to the particularly advanced technological layer, it is possible to understand customer requests, give a quick solution or make an automatic escalation to competent service operators for the most complex cases.
Pat's framework: Conversational AI for an engaging CX
If the strategy is fundamental, it can not miss a correct technological qualification, without which the risk is not being able to guarantee a CX of excellence. In fact, it is no coincidence that - according to MarketsandMarkets – the market of the relative enabling solutions is expected to grow from 8.6 billion in 2021 to 15.4 billion in 2026.
For years, Pat has been a reference player in these fields, developing technologies based on Artificial Intelligence, semantic models and Machine learning useful to ensure interactions and conversations between companies and customers.
CX Studio is ideal for companies and brands that want to start or strengthen their digital strategy. It allows to create dialogues with users through different channels, totally One-To-One, multi-lingual and make possible the 24/7 interaction.
The multi-channel interaction framework integrates the company’s diverse touch-points (website, social channels, contact centers, apps...) to offer customers a unified experience through conversational interfaces.
CX Studio boosts self-service and increases customer satisfaction, while also improving operators' experience and service team or contact center results.
Some of CX Studio features:
• Natural Language Processing (NLP): the ability to manage expressions in natural language, manifested both in voice and in text form.
• Sentiment Analysis: ability to perceive the emotion that is hidden in a telephone or text conversation by analyzing words, expressions, but also silences and tone of voice.
• Semantico engine and analysis: that allows the system to understand the meaning (intent) of the requests made and enrich its contexts. It’s a pivotal aspect of AI.
• Machine Learning: the ability to progressively improve the performance as a result of continuous training dictated by practice.
• Text Explorer: the purpose of data exploration is to collect unstructured textual information from conversations and customer interactions through human operators or chatbots and return intuitive analysis, useful to organize texts in homogeneous and specific clusters, analyze customer sentiment, bring out the feedback of service satisfaction and highlight the most frequent searches to enhance the KB or semantic engine.
By simulating operator behavior as much as possible, the Conversational AI platforms aim to become the cornerstone of a good Customer Experience.