3 key insights from the chatbot summit marketers and products should know
This is the 5th time the chatbot summit is gathering a lot of chatbot and voice professionals. This time, it seems it has grown even bigger, the industry has evolved, along with new challenges and technology.
Let’s start with the good news — seems that everyone agrees machines are not going to replace humans anytime soon, nor should they.
Now that we’ve got this covered, here are my 3 key insights about the voice and chatbots space; mainly focusing on the marketers and product side:
Customer experience is (still) a crucial key for successful bot/voice service
Eventually, regardless of the channel you use to connect with your customers, it needs to be speaking the same brand language and tone of voice through each of these channels.
The challenge in a bot or a voice service is leveraging NLP and AI so the service will understand the customer’s intent and will still be able to give a personally tailored service while scaling this experience to millions.
Using the existing customer journeys and pains can give you a lot of insight when building your voice/bot service — both from a data perspective and from strategy point of view.
Try to uncover these main pillars to define your product strategy and data structure :
- What are the most frequent use cases? Should you provide them in one service/a specific bot or is it better as a standalone service per each use case?
- How to use sentiments to determine if this case should be routed to a human or not?
- What is the level of service you want to provide in a voice/bot channel?
Top Articles on How Businesses are using Bots:
1. Is Chatbot a synonym for great Customer Experience?
2. Five Inspirational Startups Using AI and Chatbot Technology
- Is this use case repeating itself? If yes, is there a quick way to automate this for a bot service?
- How does your service sound? Does this reflect your brand vision?
And so on.
A lot of financial services (banks and insurance companies) prefer the “bot for every task” approach, allowing their customers to get a short, focused A-Z customer experience.
One to remember: In order to transform customer experience to a brand, you need to connect the conversational AI to behavioral science practices.
Your business goals are still the same. The shift is towards new channels.
According to Liveperson’s CTO, Alex Spinelli, companies need to choose AI in order to transform their business, not to replace humans.
Companies always wish to have a direct communication channel with their customers. AI and NLP on top of the social messaging platforms are the new, smart, personalized channel which brands can and will use.
Using a bot service is not only cost sensitive; it’s an approach to teaching machines your business logic, so the learning will grow to improve the service. Lloyds banking group created what they call “super agents”. In order to scale millions of interactions, they retrained their customer service employees to be conversational designers as well. Leveraging human knowledge to train the bot so eventually, the business goals will be achieved through these conversational channels as well.
Voice is everywhere
Bots included, the ability to create a combined service tailored for multi use cases and different contexts is now becoming a reality. Whether you are in a mobile app, smart speaker, browser or desktop, you can get the relevant service — image, text or voice — in one conversational service.
According to Accenture, voicebots are leading the evolution toward blended physical and digital experiences and the satisfaction levels are standing at 94%, which is a very positive indicator for future customer behavior.
Voice has come a long way from the days of IVR, and what we experience now is not IVR 2. 0, but an advanced technology, NLU based dialog. According to Nimrod Borovsky, Audiocode’s VP marketing, technology today allows much more flexibility in providing contextual omnichannel service and this will shape the Human to Bot future interaction.
There were more discussions on the conversational parts and audio usage, but I will save these to a later post.
If you have gotten here, and want to learn more about how to think of a voice persona to your product, make sure to read my “how to design a voice persona” publication.
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