The irresistible emergence of NLP in natural language
Thanks to innovations developed in the field of voice recognition and natural language understanding, voice assistants are gradually dethroning the Dual Tone Multi Frequency keypad system and refreshing IVRs. While the IVR using DTMF presents increasingly limited functionalities, the IVR using natural language exploits the early moments of the conversation to quickly identify the reason for the customer's call. The stakes are crucial: by offering better understanding of the customer and a good direction towards a competent advisor, waiting times and call abandonment rates are largely reduced and the customer experience is streamlined.
Conversational artificial intelligence in the service of customer relations
The last thirty years have seen conversational artificial intelligence tools drastically improve, under the combined effect of several factors. The establishment of fixed and mobile networks allowing real-time exchanges, the increase in computing power and storage capacity, along with the creation of labeled corpuses explain the explosion of voice assistants and conversational agents, which are largely omnipresent in our daily interactions.
The contribution of artificial intelligence is at the heart of the revolution represented by the new IVRs in natural language. Their performance is indeed based on a complete technological foundation:
ASR, Automatic Speech Recognition, which analyzes human voice to transcribe it into a text format that can be used by a machine via a STT (Speech-To-Text) module;
NLP (Natural Language Processing) and NLU (Natural Language Understanding), which enable comprehension of natural language through recognition and extraction of intents and entities, and the contextualization of the exchange;
A dialogue manager, which, when coupled with natural language understanding, constructs scenarios based on the different responses given by the user;
NLG (Natural Language Generation), and TTS (Text-To-Speech), which offer the capability to transform text phrases into phonemes and associate them to generate natural language, using a wide catalog of different voices and intonations.
The level of development reached by these technologies facilitates the deployment of smarter and more efficient applications, capable of routing callers to the appropriate destination point in record time. Let’s decrypt the advantages of these personal voice assistants!
The development of IVRs in natural language: a real technological leap...
Thanks to natural language, users can easily interact using their own words without being restricted by a predefined list of responses. From the IVRs’ side, they are capable of better understanding human language to route the caller to the concerned agent. And the facts are there:
A greatly improved rate of resolving customer requests on the first call: by identifying the reason for the caller’s call, a suitable competent agent takes over directly, and the misrouting of calls is significantly reduced;
A call abandonment and recall rate much lower than using the DTMF IVR: the caller actively interacts with a Callbot. They feel supported and understood, and particularly do not have the impression of waiting indefinitely for the presentation of pre-recorded options that do not correspond to their needs;
An increase in the self-service (without the intervention of a tele-advisor) call processing rate.
These elements have two major impacts:
An optimized customer experience: by fostering better understanding of the customer and better final direction, the customer journey is perfected end-to-end.
Financial and operational savings for companies, thanks to a significant reduction in costs of processing customer phone requests.
Thus, conversational AI ensures an improvement in the working conditions of tele-advisors, strong benefits for companies, and a positive transformation of the customer experience. Nevertheless, technology does not have the capacity to meet all customer requests...
… Which does not replace human contact!
Let’s make it clear: a conversational assistant is not intended to replace tele-advisors. It qualifies the call prior to making a connection, refocusing the agent on high-value human tasks. It acts as a true switchboard capable of adapting to different customer profiles to facilitate a simplified connection. The human contact remains a crucial element in the context of a customer’s relationship with a company, and is often the most preferred in exchanges. According to a study conducted by the AFRC*, “the use of virtual assistants is appreciated for their speed, cost savings, and ease of use, while the Human remains central for relational aspects, personalization of the relationship, and trust.”
Indeed, as impressive as the capabilities of AI may be, it is still far from being perfectly autonomous. Its real goal is to assist agents and relieve them of repetitive low-value tasks, allowing them to dedicate themselves to the human aspects of the relationship. Routing and responding to your customers’ requests by phone using conversational assistants is no longer a myth; it is now an operational reality!
ViaSpeech, towards an enhanced customer relationship
This desire to place conversational AI at the service of customer relations has manifested itself at ViaDialog through the development of ViaSpeech.
ViaSpeech offers a comprehensive solution for automating the customer journey in natural language thanks to tools enabling the creation of voicebots, callbots, and assistants that can be integrated into your voice servers. For more information, our teams are available to advise and support you at every stage of your projects!
*ARFC Barometer, INFOGRAPHIC “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE VS HUMAN: WHAT FUTURE FOR CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP?”
