Telephone voice assistant, the revolution at the service of customer relationship
The era of the voice server DTMF is coming to an end. Too heavy, too rigid, but especially no longer in line with the expectations of callers who know better than anyone the art of bypassing navigation menus, touch tone voice servers are doomed to disappear from the customer relationship universe. Thanks to innovations in recent years in the field of voice recognition and natural language understanding, voice assistants are outpacing DTMF. Major names in telephone customer relations trust these assistants to communicate directly with their clients and identify their reason for calling to enable a quick connection to an advisor or an automated service to respond to callers.
Because the stakes of voice assistants in customer relationship services are indeed there: it is about responding to a caller's request in the simplest and fastest way. In terms of voice customer relations, the essential thing is to assist customers in resolving a problem, much more than to discuss for hours. Thanks to natural language understanding, the use of a channel suited for simple exchanges that easily integrates into the information systems of large companies, it is only natural that voice assistants are becoming part of the customer call handling process.
Implementing a conversational assistant for a French telecommunications operator
A pioneer in voice assistants for customer relations, Bouygues Telecom continuously improves the understanding capabilities of its solution to make it simple and effective. And the effort pays off! More than 30 million calls are directed to the group's tele-advisors or to autonomous modules 24/7 with performance rates exceeding 95%. By optimizing the connection process, the caller gains in fluidity and speed of request handling, while the operator optimizes its call flows to improve the service provided by its advisors. Indeed, calls are now immediately directed to the right skills and the first contact resolution rate is significantly increasing. A win-win relationship is thus established between callers and the operator. The latter can give its clients more autonomy when possible, or offer expertise and support during the exchange phases between its clients and online advisers.
Sensitive to the issues of the data lifecycle and compliance with GDPR, players like ViaDialog have taken the opposite stance to the cloud services implemented by major international players. By prioritizing data security and a specialized approach for each client, these French companies stand out by offering a personalized experience and mastery of the entire lifecycle of assistants and data.
Callbots, an operational reality
Today, voice assistants feed customer relationship management tools before the connection and thus facilitate the handling of calls so that the online advisor can fully concentrate on the client and their needs. This is not a revolution in the making; it is an operational reality that contributes to renewing the customer/advisor relationship. One thing is for sure: artificial intelligence will never replace human relationships but it significantly reduces irritation for callers and offers a significant operational gain. The hybridization of customer relations is no longer a myth, nor an exploratory area, and in France, hundreds of millions of calls per year are directed thanks to telephone voice assistants. Some players are permanently establishing themselves in this landscape, like ViaDialog, which alone handled more than 40 million calls per year in 2019.
Update of the article: October 26, 2021
