Can next-gen AI voice assistants drive more inclusive customer service?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is part of our lives. It spans everything from how we work, play, shop, and also how we communicate. But can it break down barriers, such as language, to provide an inclusive customer service? With next-gen AI voice assistants it can!

Adam Cheyer embodies all of these aspects of next-gen AI delivering benefits to just about any industry. He is an AI legend—Adam Cheyer co-founded Siri,  that eventually became Apple’s voice assistant, Viv Labs that was sold to Samsung and a founding member of Change.org.

Adam Cheyer cares deeply about creating inclusiveness through technology, which is why we invited him to be a guest speaker at our upcoming webinar Can next-gen AI voice assistants drive more inclusive customer service? to share his knowledge and insights about how next-gen AI voice technology empowers contact centers to provide not only a  top-notch customer service, but also a fair one that treats all types of customers with respect and courtesy, regardless of their language skills, disabilities or physical location.

There’s no going back on the need for businesses to become more digital—that’s not a trend—it’s a necessity, especially at the contact center. From automating the most tedious tasks, such as uploading and updating data, eliminating repeated calls, or sending out SMS or email surveys to the customers to delivering next-gen customer service, much of the AI potential in the contact center is yet to be explored.

As businesses become more digital, they also become more global and increasingly serve a worldwide customer base and multilingual markets. Business models are rapidly changing, and so are customers’ behavior and the desire for more inclusivity in society, giving everyone a voice.

Older Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems can no longer scale a customer service department with changes in the business environment. The good news is: you don’t really need any magic to nail evolving customer service. AI voice assistants will do the trick for you.

Traditional voice assistants.

First generation voice assistants, such as Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and a few others have become part of our routines and our living rooms. We use them for trivial tasks, such as asking them to play our favorite song, on a daily basis. However, the adoption of voice assistants reaches far beyond trivial use.

We interact with voice assistants almost every time we reach out to entities we have a relationship with. For example, when calling the dentist’s office or the customer service of the water company’s contact center because water stopped running and we need to know why and for how long the problem will persist. The problem is that, more often than not, some businesses still have us frustrated with legacy automated response systems that leave us frantically pressing 0 for speaking with a human agent, especially if you have an accent or if you don’t speak the language fluently. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Contact center AI voice assistants.

AI has gained a big momentum in contact centers as a way to enhance customer service. AI assistants are hassle free, intuitive, efficient, and can be leveraged as follows:

• Aid customer self-service, if necessary. This type of assistance quickly provides relevant information to customers, helping to increase customer satisfaction (CSAT).
• Act as a supplement to the contact center human workforce through the deployment of virtual agents, essentially chatbots that can handle simple, automated activities, such as account or balance lookup, password resets, and other low complex tasks.

89% of CX professionals believe in the importance of leveraging AI in the contact center to improve customer experience. This is why contact centers, and customer experience professionals, are demanding a new kind of artificial intelligence solutions: next-gen AI.

Next-gen AI voice assistants.

Next-gen AI voice assistants empower contact centers with a hybrid model customer service approach that combines AI with human agents to provide personalized and delightful customer experiences, and improve key operational metrics, such as first call resolution and handling time. One key aspect of delightful customer experiences is the existence of an inclusive customer service.

However, it’s quite difficult, if not impossible, for human agents to be able to provide that inclusion. It starts with the need to provide service 24/7 and given the globalized world we live in, the need to support a great number of languages. Human agents, regardless of how large the contact center workforce is, can’t possibly handle these requirements. Next-gen AI voice assistants remove these barriers and help you give top-notch customer service to all customers, any time, anywhere.

Being able to use next-gen AI powered assistants, that deliver a more inclusive customer service and carry out conversations with all customers that reach out to your contact center, brings out a new era in customer service.