Today’s consumers have evolved over the last few years; they have higher expectations, look for more meaningful conversations with brands, and seek instant gratification.

In fact, meeting customer demands on their preferred channels and at their preferred times is now considered the bare minimum by them. Instead, they look for the ‘X-factor’ in their interactions with brands; they are quick to appreciate them on social media but quicker to publicly express their disappointment with them.

A whopping 84 per cent of Southeast Asian consumers expect brands to respond to their queries within 24 hours, and 87 per cent expect them to solve their problems in less than three interactions without having to repeat themselves. Their mantra: “Say it quickly but say it well.”

This behavioural shift certainly keeps brands on their toes, with Customer Experience (CX) becoming the top C-Suite priority.

Brands are not oblivious to the challenges they face in their mission to deliver optimal CX to their customers, as they’re increasingly turning to technologies to navigate these challenges and improve their CX.

With the increased adoption of CX automation, voice has emerged as an important channel for engaging with customers. Even customers are gravitating towards the convenience, accessibility, and personalisation offered by voice AI.  In fact, we’ve also observed an astronomical jump of 300 per cent in the number of voice AI agents on our platform. 

Voice AI agents are seeing increased deployment in industries such as BFSI, healthcare, retail, and quick service restaurants (QSR) as brands aim to build a “hyper-personalised” relationship with prospective and existing customers. 

What is the primary factor behind this increased adoption? Voice is native to how humans interact.

As such, it appeals to the emotions, instincts, and intentions of the customer, thereby giving them the sense that the voice AI agents, powered by Conversational AI, understand their query, bringing in the “human” element of having a “voice” to interact with them. Also, in certain situations, customers feel more comfortable interacting with voice AI agents about their mental health challenges or other intimate matters.

Also Read: ‘Neobanks can create a better digital CX by leveraging AI, blockchain’: banco CEO

This is because while they deliver an experience akin to talking to a human, at the same time, they facilitate a judgement-free environment that helps eliminate customers’ inhibitions.

From zero-wait times to increased self-serve, voice AI agents enable it all

Currently, brands are adopting both an inbound and outbound voice-first strategy to effortlessly implement customer-centric activities, including ordering, payments, query resolutions, information gathering, feedback surveys, etc., to meet increasing demands efficiently.

With round-the-clock instant responses and accurate query resolution, brands can leverage voice AI to deliver a true, hands-free and convenient experience to their customers. Also, voice AI enables the next level of hyper-personalisation when it comes to engaging with customers in their preferred languages, from Mandarin to English to Malay.

In addition to benefits like having more calls answered, increased first call resolution, and room for more complex issues to be dealt with through brands’ customer service agents, self-service customer support via voice AI agents is also more scalable and customer-centric.

When implemented correctly through the deployment of automotive multimodal customer support systems, the self-service model drives significant value in terms of ROI and customer satisfaction for the business.

In fact, at Yellow.ai, we’ve seen up to 60 per cent call deflection with automated responses to repetitive queries, thereby freeing the customer service agents’ bandwidth to focus on more complex and high-value conversations.

Delivering highly targeted and hyper-personalised consumer campaigns

Voice technology enables brands to run highly-targeted multilingual, hyper-personalised campaigns that drive better leads and conversions. Through leveraging smart insights on customers’ persona profiles, voice AI agents are capable of speeding up the process of qualifying leads.

In addition, qualified leads can be obtained by setting up a specified set of questions as a gateway, utilising voice AI. For instance, a voice AI agent for an insurance brand can be leveraged to proactively reach out to a customer whose car insurance is about to expire: “Hello, I’m Tay calling from insurance company X. I’ve noticed that your car insurance will end in two weeks. Would you like to extend it?”

According to the response, the voice AI agent can tailor the response and choose the next course of action. Not only that, voice AI agents enable the full automation of communication for the entire sales cycle, from awareness to delight, as these agents are capable of assisting customers with prompts throughout their journey.

Marketers and sales representatives also benefit from this automation, as voice AI agents can streamline interactions by automatically scheduling meetings with qualified leads and instantly pushing them down the sales funnel. With these features, brands can gain an edge over their competitors by delighting customers with a zero-effort conversion process.

The utilisation of voice tech to transcribe text also enables brands to gather increasingly accurate data and analysis, which then provides insights that can be utilised to further optimise operations and CX, even to the point of anticipating customers’ needs and the best time to contact them.

Bringing scalability, reduced operational costs and increased productivity

Deploying voice AI agents can help brands save costs in multiple ways. Firstly, the number of queries resolved by a voice AI agent is much higher at a very low cost. Secondly, the passive effects of their deployment include higher customer satisfaction, which saves the cost of acquiring new customers.

Also Read: How AI and automation can shape the future of farms

Furthermore, they save customer service teams a lot of working hours that are usually devoted to doing mundane, repetitive tasks. Voice AI agents increase the team’s productivity by taking care of all repetitive queries and enabling them to focus on critical queries, saving a lot of time and money for the business.

In fact, with our customers, we have recorded up to a 70 per cent reduction in operational costs due to deploying voice AI agents as part of their CX automation strategies.

Next in voice tech for CX elevation

Today, advanced voice tech features such as interruption handling, configuring pre-post speech pause duration, recording pause-resume feature for customer-sensitive information, and custom models for decoding alphanumerics accurately enable voice AI agents to deliver more human-like experiences to customers.

In particular, the ability to create branded voice AI agents in a specific language or even dialects, accents, pitch, and tone is opening up new and unimagined avenues for hyper-personalisation. So much so that, going forward, customers would not need to select their preferred language. The voice AI agent will automatically identify and respond in the language that they are speaking.  

In order to remain competitive and relevant in an increasingly digital world, it is necessary for brands to stay abreast and open to the immense potential of voice technology.

Consumer expectations will only continue to rise and change dynamically, so brands will quickly need to acknowledge that relying solely on call centres and customer service agents will not be enough to provide the best experience for their customers.

Essentially, it’s not about human or voice AI technology but about the collaboration between human experts and voice AI agents to achieve the end goal of serving the customer better and supercharging their experience.

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At e27, we are kickstarting a new articles series to know startup professionals and their lives beyond working hours.

Vinod Raman is the Chief Product Officer at Endowus, a leading digital wealth platform in Asia. Raman brings priceless institutional finance and product management knowledge and experience to Endowus.

In his current role, Vinod is in charge of product management, data and design functions and is responsible for driving product strategy, roadmap and execution at Endowus.

Before Endowus, Raman spent more than two, years at Stash heading the Invest and Crypto product and business areas. He previously worked for eight years at Fidelity Investments, where he held various roles in the internal strategy and product management functions.

In this candid interview, Raman talks about his personal and professional life.

How would you explain what you do to a 5-year-old?

Product management is like taking all of your Lego bricks, building something, and then sharing it with your friend to see if they can figure out how to use what you’ve built. That is probably the best way to explain it!

What has been the biggest highlight/challenge of your career so far?

The opportunity to work at different types of organisations has been a great learning experience – large established firms like Fidelity and IBM and young and upcoming startups like Stash and Endowus. Unique challenges, very different geographies and great learning experiences.

How do you envision the next five years of your career?

I don’t like to plan my career. Learning new things, taking risks, and growing personally and professionally are all important ingredients in my work life.

What are some of your favourite work tools?

Looker/Mode/any other analytics tool, Figma and Google Docs in the same order.

Also Read: What Pierluigi Cau loves most about working at GitHub

What’s something about you or your job that would surprise us?

I am an introvert, but my job requires me to be more extroverted! That’s an ongoing process!

Do you prefer WFH or WFO, or hybrid?

Definitely hybrid. In today’s world, flexibility is key. However, working from the office is critical to get together every so often to brainstorm/problem solve or to bond/build relationships.

What would you tell your younger self?

Failure is okay if it makes you wiser in your next attempt.

Can you describe yourself in three words?

Optimist. Relentless. Explorer.

What are you most likely to be doing if not working?

Travelling and exploring new cultures.

What are you currently reading/listening to/watching?

Reading – Listening to a whole bunch of podcasts. I am mostly reading books to my kids!

Watching – Started watching ‘Breaking Bad’ one more time!

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Be a part of the e27 contributor community of thought leaders and share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic

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If there’s one thing that startups need the most in this post-pandemic era, it’s resilience. Of course, survival remains a priority, especially for early-stage startups left staggering as they find potential investors willing to take risks in the current landscape. On the bright side, however, many promising startups are driven enough to adapt to the new normal.

Ever-changing business landscape

COVID-19 changed consumer behaviour, limited workforce movement, and disrupted supply and demand, forcing emerging and aspiring startups to shake up their processes and operations to stay afloat. These days, digital communication and relationship-building skills, new marketing strategies, flexible business plans, and creative use of technology are integral in raising funds.

Also read: Echelon: A founder’s approach to fundraising at different stages

In addition, investors want to know how startups keep it going. Maintaining teams intact and effectively tapping talents’ potential are some ways to demonstrate a startup’s strength, and so does continuously interacting and nurturing its customers amidst the pandemic’s impact.

What’s great about Singapore’s startup ecosystem is its lasting vibrancy that allows the industry to heal by turning the crisis into an opportunity to expand beyond traditional capital raising. The post-pandemic era is a high time for innovation, redesigning worn-out strategies, and letting go of things that no longer work in the present. 

How startups should approach fundraising

Learn how to move forward from a panel discussion on “The evolution of early stage investing and fundraising in Southeast Asia” at Echelon Asia Summit 2022. The panel, moderated by ScaleUp Malaysia Co-Founder and General Manager Aaron Sarma, aims to answer critical questions about the challenges companies face in fundraising in a post-pandemic world and the platforms and tools they can use and maximise. The panel will include experts Hsu Ken Ooi (Iterative), Shiyan Koh (Hustle Fund), Shao-Ning Huang (Angelcentral), and Tiang Lim Foo (Forge Ventures).

Also read: Echelon 2022 to discuss the state of the SEA startup ecosystem

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Echelon Asia Summit 2022 (October 27-28) returns after a three-year hiatus. It aims to gather the most influential decision-makers and industry leaders from the Southeast Asia tech and startup ecosystem.

Register for Echelon Asia Summit 2022 now!

Photo by Mikhail Nilov via Pexels

The post The evolution of early-stage investing and fundraising in SEA appeared first on e27.

Singapore-based food delivery software startup klikit has announced the completion of US$2 million in pre-seed funding led by Global Founders Capital and Wavemaker Partners.

Gentree Fund, AfterWork Ventures, Reshape Ventures, Nordstar, Pentas Ventures, Uber alumni syndicate Moving Capital, and Gojek Co-Founder Kevin Aluwi also participated. 

Other angel investors involved include NasDaily’s Nuseir Yassin, YouTuber LazarBeam, Radish Fiction Founder Seung-yoon Lee, and unnamed executives from Gojek, YouTube, and Flash Coffee.

klikit will use the funds to help restaurants across Southeast Asia grow their business with the more efficient food delivery and extra revenue from virtual food brands.

Also Read: Cloud kitchen startup CloudEats raises US$7M to expand to more SEA markets, develop its brands

Established in 2021 by Christopher Withers, a former executive with Gojek and UberEats, klikit aims to help restaurants operate more efficiently through its SaaS platform, klikit Cloud, which aggregates and analyses all of a restaurant’s food delivery orders on a single mobile device.

To date, the startup claims to have facilitated over US$2.8 million in food delivery orders across 150 brands in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Australia.

Klikit is also partnering with creators and consumer brands to develop limited-time offerings of virtual delivery-only food brands sold to fans. The initiative will kick off in the Philippines and Australia with two “creator drops” and digital collectibles later this year.

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Echelon 2022 aims to provide intimate and focused discussions on key topics and business matching services to facilitate business-driven connections during the two-day event. e27 will curate and invite key stakeholders of startups, investors, corporates, and ecosystem enablers to drive towards fruitful business outcomes at Echelon.

The 2022 Echelon edition will be co-located with SWITCH at Resorts World Sentosa from 27 to 28 October 2022. Learn more here. 

The post Singapore’s klikit raises US$2M to bridge restaurants and creator economy appeared first on e27.

The acceptance of digital wealth is growing exponentially in Asia, with retail investors, high-net-worth individuals (HNIs) and even private banks starting to use robo-advisory tools for wealth management, according to Ned Phillips, Founder and CEO of Bambu, a robo-advisory platform for financial institutions.

“When we started Bambu in Singapore six years ago, many said people wouldn’t save digitally and that robo-advisors were only for first-time investors and wouldn’t catch on with mass affluent, high-net-worth individuals,” said Phillips. “But the high growth of companies like StashAway has proved them wrong. This means the resistance to wealth being digital has almost disappeared. Although digital wealth is still only a few per cent of the market, the speed at which it grows is exponential.”

He, however, added that Southeast Asia — particularly Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand — is still an immature market compared to Europe and North America when it comes to using tech solutions for wealth management. Singapore is an exception, where many HNIs, mass affluent, mass retail investors, have access to products and advice they never had before.

Also Read: Are retail brokerages really democratising finance for individual investors?

“That being said, there is far greater adoption of digital advice by mass retail customers now, especially during and after COVID-19. We are seeing phenomenal growth, with more and more people wanting to save digitally,” he said.

Launched in 2016, Bambu provides digital wealth technology solutions for B2B businesses. It uses Machine Learning tools to enable companies to make saving and investing simple for their clients. The firm serves businesses of every size and industry, from finance to commercial or even new disruptors.

Bambu is present in 11 markets around the world, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, the UAE, and Germany, and is growing rapidly in the US and the MENA region. Its clients include Standard Chartered, Franklin Templeton, and CIMB (Malaysia).

The company recently partnered with True Global Ventures-backed German AI asset tech and portfolio management firm quantumrock to enhance its cloud-based robo-advisory solutions.

In Phillips’s view, the advent of digital-only banks bodes well for Bambu. They bring a lot of data. Digital banks, which start with savings accounts, lending and wealth trading, have great opportunities in wealth management as they grow.

“Over the years, many traditional banks have focused on what they traditionally do: holding people’s cash, opening savings accounts, and lending. Many started as product companies selling loans or funds, whereas digital banks are customer companies. For digital banks, the keyword is wealth automation. Robo-advisors can analyse customers’ data and tell how much their monthly leftover, credit card bills, etc. So digital banks need technology from companies like us. It is hard to build the wealth platform we’ve built.

Phillips also believes that the popularity of digital assets like crypto won’t make much impact on robo-advisory. “Crypto is just another asset class like a stock, ETF, and mutual fund. It makes no difference to robo-advisory, which is about helping people achieve their financial goals.”

In July 2021, Bambu acquired Singapore-based Tradesocio, a developer of wealth management software for advisors. Two years earlier, Bambu closed US$10 million in a Series B funding, co-led by Franklin Templeton and PEAK6 Strategic Capital.

“We are not raising more funds now as we are getting close to being profitable. That is our goal for now,” Phillips concluded.

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