Why voice AI is customer service's secret weapon

Voice AI has huge potential to solve some of the most critical pain points for customers in every industry.

A great customer service experience creates an emotional connection between the brand and the buyer. These emotional connections are the primary drivers of maintaining loyalty and increasing sales. Voice AI can help.

Why? On the other hand, poor service risks driving customers to competitors. In a 2020 Statista survey, 40% of respondents said they had stopped doing business with a company due to poor customer service. Industries with low service scores, such as banks, cable TV providers, airlines, and health insurance companies, are most likely to lose business this way.

Over the past few years, companies have continued to invest more resources into their service offerings. They invest in the latest innovative tools like live chat and chatbots, but there is one channel that is often forgotten: voice. Picking up the phone and calling a company engages customers instantly in a very natural way.

The power of voice can make a real difference in customer service, and voice AI can be their secret weapon. Here are three ways voice AI can help companies supplement their workforce and improve customer service.

1. Provide a frictionless customer experience

When people contact customer service, it’s usually in between daily life events like work meetings, housework, or running errands. They want a quick way to flag and resolve their issues so they can get back to their daily lives. That's often not what they get.

To their credit, many brands today have multiple online and offline touchpoints for customer interaction. However, the number of touchpoints often creates complex customer journeys that only make customers more frustrated. While omnichannel is still important, it’s also important to focus on the best channel strategies, especially when it comes to voice. Optichannel is designed to support the customer's channel of choice.

For many, this is the sound. A HubSpot survey found that 69% of participants prefer to contact customer service via mobile phone, online chat, or any other channel. However, when people think about talking to automated voices, they tend to think about repeating themselves, robots misunderstanding their purpose, and other frustrations that often occur.

Voice AI can help customer service departments develop optimal channel strategies: serve customers better in their preferred channels. Today’s voice AI can be trained to understand customer pain points and navigate complex conversations. Voice AI agents have access to the history of previous conversations with the company, can review and act on open requests, and can provide important information such as payment due dates, balances, and order status.

In fact, voice AI can quickly guide your customers through the most common query types at any time, day or night, without human involvement. This way, customers get faster resolution times, real-time information and a consistent brand experience.

2. Personalized services to help customers feel value

A 2021 survey found that more than 80% of consumers believe that trust is the determining factor in their purchasing decisions. If consumers don't trust a company, they won't buy from them.

Trust often comes when they receive personalized service that makes them feel valued. If a person feels like they're heard and their needs are met—such as a quick resolution of an issue through customer service—they're more likely to become a regular customer. Voice AI is a great way to help customers solve their problems, personalize services based on current attitudes, and help them feel valued.

Voice AI is modeled on human conversation, and some voice AI companies are very good at understanding the context and semantics of conversations. Advanced speech AI engines can extract cues such as pitch and speaking rate from conversations to gauge customer intent and behavior. With this information, AI is able to provide personalized and contextually accurate responses.

For example, when a customer calls a contact center using their registered mobile number, a voice AI agent can query details such as product preferences and products they have ordered in the past. The voice AI agent can then have a conversation with that context. They may be able to help them order or recommend new products, remind them of upcoming maintenance requirements, or handle their requests without exchanging basic personal information. This seamless capability is a game changer.

3. Achieve scalability and cost efficiency

Voice AI provides automation capabilities for contact centers and enhances the work of human service agents in powerful ways.

Today, contact centers are facing record attrition. While their turnover rates are typically high, the pandemic has exacerbated the situation. For example, T-Mobile's call center turnover rate increased from 45% to 65% during the pandemic. The pandemic has also increased the number of difficult calls and significantly worsened the customer service experience.

Because of these problems, simply expanding a call center is often not feasible. These centers face client, resource and team management issues. Even if these issues can be addressed, scaling to handle a surge in call volume won't be possible overnight.

Voice AI can help contact centers seamlessly scale their operations as needed to handle any number of calls. Industries notorious for long wait times and high call volumes, such as banking, health insurance, or airlines, could use voice AI to answer every customer question without wait times and only adding to the complexity of calls to AI. With the help of voice AI, the same AI team can handle any surge in call volume.

Voice AI agents can solve repetitive customer service issues and automate routine tasks so real-time agents can focus on high-value and complex customer issues. This helps companies transform their contact centers to generate more revenue by delivering a world-class customer experience while reducing customer support costs to a fraction of the cost.

Voice AI has huge potential to solve some of the most critical pain points for customers in every industry. There’s no better way to increase revenue than making sure your customers feel heard and helped. Now is the time to take customer service initiatives further into the future and add a service component that many people lack a voice in.

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