What Is Conversational AI?
Stay ahead of customer expectations by learning how conversational AI chatbots can help you better serve customers through chatbot and voice channels.
Why Conversational AI for Call Centers
More and more, conversational AI–powered intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) and chatbots are serving as the first level and in some cases multi-turn customer customer support to provide fast, efficient, automated, always-on service that many customers have come to expect. Whether through voice or chatbot, this form of automation allows customers to directly ask a question or present their problem in a natural interaction with the system and receive an answer. When the AI cannot resolve the query, the matter is escalated to a live agent.
Fast Response
This marks a tremendous improvement over the traditional Intelligent Voice Response (IVR), where customers can find themselves trapped in a press-key or voice-response loop. Customers consistently say that a fast response is a competitive difference maker when making a buying decision. And contrary to popular opinion, many customers across all age groups and geographies prefer to handle basic inquiries without interacting directly with a person.
Boosting Call Center Workflow
The challenge is figuring out how to get in the AI game in a way that minimizes the investment risk, yet quickly produces real results. Thanks to the agility of the cloud and the more widespread availability of API libraries that get developers up and running quickly, there are more agile and efficient ways to build or integrate conversational AI into your sales and support processes.
How it Works: NLP & Machine Learning
Natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, and machine learning (ML) work together in the contact center to deliver an improved customer experience.
Improved Customer Experience
NLP is the technology that allows people to speak or write to a device and enables the device to understand what’s being said. The technology has improved tremendously in recent years to become highly accurate. The speech recognition module — a subset of NLP — processes and rationalizes the spoken word while listening to the human voice.
Text To Speech
Turning text into speech enhances the quality of the interaction. Text to speech allows IVAs to speak naturally in various languages and hundreds of voices to deliver lifelike, engaging self-service experiences.
The final part of conversational AI — the ML module — identifies how to respond to the verbal input while working alongside the speech recognition module. These technologies are continually learning and improving as their algorithms process more data.
Automating Conversational AI in the Contact Center
A large percentage of customer interactions involve the exchange of routine information for which you can automate the responses. For example:
- What are your hours?
- Where is my order?
- When is payment due?
- Is this in stock?
Speed and accuracy are paramount for inquiries like these.
In addition to improving customer satisfaction and lowering abandonment rates, automating routine queries with conversational AI and chatbots can deliver significant cost savings improve. In addition, benefits include:
- 100% call acceptance, 24x7
- Ability for customers communicate via their channel of choice
- More robust metrics and reporting
- Automatic language detection and conversation in the customer’s language
And for contact centers staffed by live agents, conversational AI can run in the background to complement agents with options or solutions they may have missed. This can also automatically gauge agent performance (including call sentiment) and suggest alternate solutions.
Why Choose Five9 Conversational AI
Trusted Solutions Custom Built
Bringing conversational AI–based IVAs and chatbots to the contact center isn’t simple, but Five9 makes the process as easy as possible. These solutions are custom built for every customer, with the ability to integrate with existing legacy or current cloud apps, and without requiring specialized AI personnel. There’s also a library of apps and functions that can be dragged and dropped to develop Intelligent Virtual Agents for use in a contact center environment.
You might also like:
- Discover the three most common use cases for conversational AI in the contact center.
- Watch an on-demand webinar as our AI experts show you what intelligent virtual agents can do for your business today.
- Learn how conversational AI can enhance the effectiveness of any contact center.
- Explore how Five9 Intelligent Virtual Agent lets you automate routine and repetitive tasks so your live agents can focus on higher value work.
Cloud-Based Agility
Moving to the cloud will allow for faster, easier deployments, seamless upgrades, flexible scalability, and reduced capital expenditures associated with on-premises systems.
Connected Journeys
The contact center should support customer journeys across web chat and social messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and others.
Omnichannel Unification
Shoppers will be coming in from many different channels, so it will streamline the customer experience to route interactions using the same logic.
Customer Context
Agents must begin the conversation right where the customer left off online. When the customer’s needs are transferred to an agent in real time, your brand is creating a seamless transition from web to contact center. Remove customer stress, unneeded customer repetition, wasted time, and deliver a world-class customer experience
CRM 
Integration
Customer relationship management (CRM) system integration can improve the shopper experience by using CRM data to find the last person spoken to, use shopper purchase history to find the best expert, etc. In addition, once the connection occurs, your staff can access past interaction history and CRM information to understand the customer’s journey and deliver a more personalized experience.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI can deliver next- best-action recommendations and assist in responses that will improve conversion rates, increase shopping cart value, and speed up responses.
Real-Time Management
Supervisors should monitor messaging interactions in real time and assist if needed, even if they are not in the same location.
AI & PCI Compliance
Intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) can automate payment processing across digital channels and reduce your compliance risk by collecting sensitive customer data without revealing it to a human agent. Make sure that the IVAs can easily integrate with your payment gateways.
