Conversational AI is one of the most influential technologies of the future. It is dramatically evolving the way businesses communicate and engage with their customers.
Enterprises can leverage conversational AI platforms for various objectives, from driving higher operational efficiency to improving customer experience through enhanced conversational engagement.
The future of conversational AI is very promising, as some statistics show that the volume of interactions conducted by conversational AI agents has increased by up to 250% in many fields since the Covid-19 pandemic. (Gartner)
So, let's explore the role of conversational AI in enhancing customer engagement after going through the definition.
What Is Conversational AI?
The term "Conversational AI" refers to the broad range of technologies that are driving automated messaging and speech-enabled applications. Through using these technologies, computers can interact with humans.
Conversational AI provides recognize text and speech, understands intent, and responds in a way that simulates human conversations, relying on sophisticated capabilities such as:
- Machine Learning (ML)
- Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
Chatbots and virtual assistants are the most popular conversational AI examples. They are primarily structured around linear interactions based on pre-determined flows of conversations. But conversational AI is much broader and can perform multi-turn conversations and handle judgment-intensive tasks like humans.
It also can provide users with choices beyond typical chatbot responses and perform a wide range of activities, including blocking cards, upgrading data plans, filing claims, and more - all directly from the chat window.
Now that we have a better understanding of conversational AI, let’s explore the ways this high-level technology can contribute to boosting customer engagement.
Read more information about ➡️ Conversational AI Trends for 2023
Conversational AI for Better Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is a reactive experience related to the actions a consumer takes beyond making purchases.
It is described as a motivational state of mind regarding a brand, which is determined by the context that ultimately generates different levels of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral activities toward the brand.
Customer engagement is critical for corporate value as it assists in establishing a stronger connection with the consumer. This can result in customer contentment, trust, and loyalty.
It is possible to see customer engagement as a circular process that involves seven stages:
- Connection
- Interaction
- Satisfaction
- Retention
- Commitment
- Advocacy
- And finally, Engagement.
Conversational AI can significantly contribute to supporting this process through the following:
- Enhancing assistance speed
- Maintaining reliable availability
- Providing a proactive strategy for customer support
- Utilizing high levels of personalization
- Enhance understanding of customers and improve their experience
Let's delve deeper into each one of them.
1. Enhancing Assistance Speed
Customers are often busy and in a hurry, they expect real-time assistance and may discontinue services if they do not get the information they need quickly enough. Therefore, having pre-planned responses ready is critical. Providing fast and right resolution can improve customer support significantly.
However, this is not always within reach, as it is expensive and labor-intensive. It represents a difficult challenge for the customer support sectors. But conversational AI could help overcome this challenge effectively.
Conversational AI can achieve that through equipping virtual agents and automated chat platforms with preprogrammed answers and an understanding of different intents. Which allows responding to customers immediately. Increasing the level of customer engagement as a result.
Conversational AI capabilities can also allow:
- Analyzing consumer behavior and trends.
- Helping businesses monitor prevailing challenges.
- Make data-driven business decisions, such as determining how most effectively to meet the needs of consumers.
- Providing quick resolutions within predefined frameworks, which leverage customers’ interaction and minimize their resolution time.
2. Maintaining Reliable Availability
To achieve customer-centricity, well-run businesses need to be available all the time. Essentially, to stay competitive and drive customer engagement, round-the-clock support requires hiring customer service executives in shifts, which can be rather costly.
More efficiently, by implementing AI conversational solutions, customer service costs can be reduced, while customer engagement can be maintained continuously.
Conversational AI-enabled platforms can deal with common queries, which allows human agents to focus on customized customer support using customer support tools, which offer cross-functional collaboration to manage complex customer inquiries.
Moreover, conversational AI interfaces provide all the time answers to FAQs and links to articles in the knowledge base for easy self-help. The latter contributes to keeping customers engaged when it is quick and intuitive.
3. Providing a Proactive Strategy for Customer Support
A proactive communication function is an essential part of outbound communications that many businesses lack. Identifying at-risk customers, for example, before they defect, is vital. Taking proactive measures also helps to avoid unnecessary inbound interactions.
The capabilities of conversational AI can be harnessed in order to achieve proactive targeting through conversational engagement.
Conversational AI can be used to provide proactive customer support by anticipating potential issues at the planning stage. In this way, customers' issues can be resolved before they occur and escalate.
Additionally, it lets customers know that they are not neglected and that the support of their companies or organizations is readily available, thus increasing customer loyalty.
Moreover, conversational AI-enhanced platforms have superior capabilities to collect, classify and analyze information while interacting with users, allowing for efficient implementation of the proactive strategy. Besides contributing to converting leads into customers by designing programs to target them based on the information collected.
4. Utilizing High Levels of Personalization
Customers usually want more personalized interactions. This entails addressing them by their names, determining their gender, age, and location, identifying what products they prefer, and quickly accessing their transaction history.
Data like these become a valuable instrument for increasing customer engagement via optimizing personalization.
Using a conversational AI platform allows harnessing these data to increase the level of personalization with customers. This is done by quickly delving into the databases to adopt a specific approach for each lead or customer.
It also can conduct two-way dialogues with customers to find out more about their needs, preferences, and even deficiencies in the businesses' offerings.
Additionally, the multilingual support of conversational AI interfaces can be utilized for making inroads into the market and improving company recognition among potential customers who speak different languages by providing AI chatbots in their native languages.
5. Enhance Understanding of Customers and Improve Their Experience
Since many customers don't prefer repeating information they’ve already shared, it's better to filter information that has already been shared by looking at their data.
Conversational AI interfaces help access customers' profiles without requesting the same information. This can assist in discovering potential opportunities to increase customer engagement.
As it is possible that the previously provided information identifies certain purchasing habits of customers, and thus allows targeting them in the future with offers that are relevant to these habits or trends.
Ultimately, the result is a better understanding of customers and their attitudes, and dealing with them in a manner consistent with these attitudes, which improves the customer experience and achieves a higher level of engagement.
In Conclusion
Conversational AI is a powerful tool for businesses looking to boost customer engagement. By leveraging this technology, you can create personalized, real-time interactions with your customers that meet their needs and exceed their expectations.
To get started with conversational AI, you'll need to select the right solution for your business needs and goals. Once you've chosen a platform, you can begin implementing conversational AI across your customer engagement channels, such as chatbots, voice assistants, and messaging apps.
Remember to focus on the user experience and ensure that your conversational AI interactions are natural and easy to follow. By continuously monitoring and optimizing your strategy, you can ensure that your conversational AI efforts remain effective and provide value to your customers.
Want to see the powerful impact of conversational AI on boosting customer engagement?
Contact us now. We at DXwand, build innovative conversational AI solutions that can contribute effectively to developing the efficiency of your organization.
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