Conversational AI is emerging as a critical component of most modern contact center operations. Rapidly evolving algorithms are offering companies a range of ways to improve customer experiences, boost efficiency, cut costs, and even access more valuable data.
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The AI revolution isn’t just driving the creation of higher quality chatbots (with generative AI). There’s also an incredible opportunity for businesses to leverage AI across a range of channels, including in the voice landscape.
Contact center Voice AI allows organizations to design voice bots that can streamline the IVR experience, and enhance customer conversations. After all, studies show that 73% of all contact center interactions involve voice.
Unfortunately, deploying contact center Voice AI solutions can be challenging. Here’s where most businesses go wrong with their strategies, and how you can boost your chances of success.
The Main Challenges with Contact Center Voice AI
Voice AI and automation can optimize contact centers in a variety of ways, delivering unique advantages to both employees and customers alike. But leveraging the power of voice AI in your contact center requires meticulous planning, the right strategy, and support from the right vendor.
Here are the biggest challenges businesses face when implementing Voice AI initiatives, and how you can sidestep them with your initiative.
1. Using the Same Framework Everywhere
Building effective voice bots and voice AI solutions can be complex. Voice bots aren’t exactly the same as chatbots. They rely more heavily on algorithms for natural language processing (NLP), text to speech (TTS), and speech to text (STT). Plus, it’s often more complex for bots to understand spoken language than written text, thanks to varying dialects, speech clarity, and other factors.
The complexity of implementing a voicebot into your system may prompt you to use the same framework for every region, country and target audience. However, this can be a dangerous approach. Some platforms are stronger at understanding certain languages and weaker at dealing with others. Additionally, the framework used to process data can lead to compliance issues, as the regulatory environments of different countries can vary.
For an outstanding solution, you’ll need to find a solution that can adapt and change to handle different languages, voice channels, call flows, and requirements simultaneously. You should be able to create multiple versions of your voice solution, to suit various needs.
2. Not Prioritizing Integration
Most companies investing in contact center voice AI know their solution needs to integrate seamlessly with their contact center solutions, phone systems, and any other platform they might use to manage voice. However, they often fail to recognize the importance of comprehensive integration.
Your AI systems shouldn’t just work seamlessly with your contact center, they should also integrate with a range of back-end systems and processes, from your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools to your analytical resources, databases, and more.
To unlock the full benefits of voice AI for automating crucial processes, whether it’s customer self-service, note-taking, or customer journey analysis, you need a flexible ecosystem. Look for a solution that can easily integrate with all voice engagement channels, recording tools, biometric systems, and anything else your business might use.
3. Failing to Consider all Use Cases
Often, one of the most common ways companies implement voice AI into their contact center, is by creating a conversational IVR solution. Adding voice AI to your IVR technology is an excellent way to improve the customer experience. It can enable more intuitive self-service experience via voice channels, and reduce the number of customers routed to human agents for common queries.
However, conversational IVR technology is just one potential use case for voice AI. You can also unlock a range of benefits by creating your own virtual agents, which offload simple and repetitive tasks from your human agents, and deliver them to bots instead.
You can even use voice bots to enhance the employee experience, and boost productivity. For instance, “Agent Assist” tools can monitor conversations and send real-time guidance and directions to your employees and supervisors, boosting workplace efficiency.
Look for a voice AI solution that supports a range of use cases, so you can scale your AI strategy over time, and unlock additional benefits as your business grows.
4. Overlooking the Human/ AI Balance
AI is a powerful tool for the contact center, but it can’t completely eliminate the need for human agents – at least not yet. Voice AI in the contact center can accelerate response times, improve customer service, and automate repetitive tasks. However, some consumers will still want personalized, humanized interactions with live agents.
Any Voice AI system you implement should be able to easily transfer a customer to a live agent, when necessary, to preserve the customer experience. Look for tools that can analyze customer sentiment and intent, and determine when to transfer a call.
Additionally, make sure your agents know how to take full advantage of the AI solutions available to them. Show them how they can use AI tools to streamline processes, automate routine tasks, and achieve their professional goals. This will help to strike a better balance between the AI tools and human employees in your ecosystem.
5. Forgetting to Measure, Optimize and Improve
Finally, adding voice AI solutions to your contact center shouldn’t be a set-and-forget process. Even if your AI bots have the capacity to improve automatically over time, with machine learning, you still need to ensure you’re actively reviewing their performance and looking for opportunities to improve.
Integrating your voice bot solutions with systems that allow you to track important metrics about issue resolution times, customer satisfaction and more, will ensure you can guarantee your bots are always delivering the right results. The more data you collect over time, the more you’ll be able to train and tweak your models to deliver better results.
Notably, make sure that the voice AI solution you choose gives you the freedom to consistently customize your bots, with developer APIs, integration options, and flexible frameworks.
Master Contact Center AI with the Right Partner
Notably, virtually all of the challenges mentioned above can be addressed with the same strategy: working with an effective voice AI partner.
The right Voice AI solution provider will help you to build and implement best-of-breed bots and systems with ease, and customize those tools to suit different requirements. They’ll give you the freedom to choose how you want to deploy your AI systems, and provide the back-end technology to ensure consistent quality. Plus, they’ll ensure you can fully integrate Voice AI into your ecosystem.
AudioCodes VoiceAI Connect service is an excellent example of a solution that can help companies overcome common mistakes. The unique solution facilitates the voice enablement of conversational AI solutions for a range of use cases, with comprehensive flexibility and support.
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