A lot of people start the day by saying “Alexa, turn on Radio Two”. In fact, many of us rely on AI-powered VoiceBot technology to make everyday tasks easier and faster, whether it’s asking Google for directions or asking Siri to return a missed call. AI (artificial intelligence) voice technology has entered our lives and it’s here to stay.
What is a VoiceBot and how does it work?
A VoiceBot is essentially software powered by AI, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning that allows users to interact with a service through their voice. In other words, a VoiceBot is capable of understanding, interpreting, analysing requests and responding to them verbally with natural language. VoiceBots offer intelligent, natural and intuitive interactions, which provides a great opportunity for self-service voice applications.
From a technical perspective, a VoiceBot is based on conversational AI. First, as the user is speaking, the system detects voice through voice activity detection (VAD). The sound is then transformed into text via an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. These two components make the speech-to-text (STT) engine capable of transcribing the voice into written text.
Then, NLP is able to analyse the text and understand the objective and context of the user’s request and, finally, the VoiceBot then chooses the most appropriate response and verbalizes it through a text-to-speech (TTS) engine.
Given the rise of AI and ASR technologies, interactive VoiceBots are becoming one of the most used customer self-service tools. VoiceBots offer natural and user-friendly communication and allow customers to interact with them over the voice channel, which is why they have a huge potential for improving the level of customer service a contact centre offers.
What are the benefits of using a VoiceBot in contact centres?
VoiceBots can positively benefit customer support in contact centres, working as a self-service tool that performs simple operations without the need for human intervention, thereby simplifying the workload of human agents, reducing operational costs and offering a fast, efficient and autonomous resolution for customer issues.
Here are three quick and simple VoiceBot solutions that can benefit contact centres:
Automation of Simple and Repetitive Tasks
VoiceBots can significantly reduce service contacts by automating simple customer interactions, saving agents from boring and repetitive tasks and giving them more time to focus on complex customer issues.
Effectively Handle Call Spikes and Seasonal Demand
VoiceBots don’t have a fixed limit for the number of customer service conversations they can handle, which means businesses can easily scale up or down based, based on call peaks and seasonal demand.
Automated ID&V (Identification and Verification)
Almost every customer interaction starts with ID&V, where agents ask the caller for details, such as name, account ID and date of birth. VoiceBots can automate this process, significantly reducing agent handle time.
VoiceBots are already becoming an indispensable part of our lives. They offer customers speed, convenience and time saving, across a wide range of services. Within the contact centre, there is a great opportunity to embrace VoiceBot technology to significantly improve the customer experience, with the added benefit of reducing operational costs.
If you’re interested in exploring VoiceBots further, please contact us here to arrange a demo of the DigiDesk Bot solutions available across voice and digital channels!
