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.
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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.
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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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