What is a Voice Bot?
A Voice Bot is an automated voice assistant that uses a voice to interact with individuals in any customer service or contact center context. Voice bots make customer service easier to implement and often provide more effective customer support for your clients.
But if you’re not familiar with virtual assistants, chatbots, and voice bots, you might have been reluctant to integrate them into your customer experience strategy.
Let’s start with the basics. A “bot,” in this context, is simply an automated system that performs the work a human would otherwise have to do.
An AI voice bot platform uses machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and artificial intelligence (AI) to understand what users are saying with voice & speech recognition in real time. Sophisticated AI voice and AI chatbots are capable of recognizing and processing human speech as well as text-to-speech at the same level as proficient, natural language speakers.
Voice bots are also capable of forming appropriate responses to spoken queries. For example, if a customer asks a question that the voice assistant recognizes, the bot may be able to answer it directly.
Otherwise, the voice AI bot may be able to ask clarifying questions to learn more about the situation or might acknowledge that it doesn’t have the necessary information to address the query about the products and services.
At that point, the voice AI bot may direct the customer to a different resource, such as a human customer service representative.
4 Benefits of an Voice Bot Platform for Businesses
These are some of the primary benefits of AI Voice Bot platforms for the businesses that use them:
- Reduced overhead. The most obvious advantage is reduced overhead. You’ll have to invest some money to get access to the conversational AI that is powered by Natural Language Processing you will need to process customer queries, and it may take some time to optimize your system. But once that’s accomplished, you might be able to reduce the size of your customer service department, improve your efficiency, and eventually spend less money without sacrificing customer satisfaction. In other words, voice bots enable your operation to become more profitable.
- Fewer inconsistency issues. Voice bots depend on their programming. They’re already capable of understanding what people are saying, and once you teach them the proper responses to the most common questions your customers pose, they’ll be capable of providing highly consistent service. With human agents, there’s always a chance that someone will go off script or your rep won’t be able to locate the appropriate answer. With a voice bot, this isn’t a concern. You can rest assured that all your customers are going to have consistently good experiences and hear dependable answers to their most pressing questions.
- Measurable results. Are you confident that your voice bots are doing their job effectively? You don’t have to speculate; you can measure the results. With voice bot software, you can gather significant data on all customer interactions, and the time each exchange consumes, closely inspect each customer conversation, and eventually develop conclusions about the effectiveness of your operation.
- Opportunities for optimization and expansion. What if you’re not satisfied with the performance of your voice bot? Or you discover there’s a common question your voice bot is consistently unable to handle? There’s good news for that: you always have opportunities to optimize and expand. You can provide your voice bot with more knowledge or enhance it with upgrades and better programming to make it more robust and capable of serving your customers better.
Benefits of Voice Bots for Agents
Your customer service agents will also derive some benefits from your company’s use of voice bots:
- Smoother transitions. Most customer service agents dislike the process of fielding new queries and having to ask the same initial questions during every interaction. Voice bots take care of most of the tedious and repetitious steps, by gathering customer information and handling some of the most common queries automatically. Only on occasion will voice bots forward queries to human customer service agents, and when they do, the humans will be equipped with the preliminary information they can use to help the customer solve their problem.
- Reduced workload. Depending on how your customer service department is structured, most of your live agents should experience a reduction in their workload. That means they can work on other, higher-level responsibilities and are more apt to remain engaged in their work.
- Greater assistance. Voice bots can also provide assistance to customer service agents, providing them with more structure and greater knowledge they can use to serve your customers more effectively.
Benefits of AI Voice Bots for Customers
The most important people in the equation are your customers, and they will benefit from your use of AI-powered voice bots, as well:
- Immediate availability. Timing is one of the biggest priorities for customers who seek assistance. They don’t care to wait in line, nor do they wish to be placed on hold indefinitely. They want to talk to someone and start solving the problem right away. With a voice bot, you can serve absurdly high numbers of people at the same time, because your voice bot will be instantly and perpetually available, which will save your customers time and hassle.
- Streamlined communication. Voice bots are designed to be as comprehensible as possible, offering streamlined communication via experienced speakers. You won’t typically hear problems with diction, accents, or poor microphone habits with voice bots, the way you sometimes do with customer service agents.
- Convenience and simulated conversation. Many customers find it more convenient to talk to a voice bot, rather than typing an email or engaging in an instant message chat. The conversation feels natural and can be done hands-free.
- Faster resolution. In many cases, voice bots are capable of providing faster service and more immediate resolutions than their human counterparts. They work quickly and efficiently, to give customers the exact answers they require.
AI voice bots are incredibly efficient customer service tools that can improve your customer satisfaction and save you money at the same time. But you’re only going to see the benefits if you use the correct tools.
Learn more about our conversational AI platform, or reach out to us to schedule a conversational AI demo today!