How Voice Assistants are Creating an Excellent Customer Service Experience
In today’s digital world, almost everyone knows about voice commands thanks to Google Assistant and iPhone Siri. It’s becoming more and more common for people to call a friend, open an app, or search for a café using voice commands.
In addition to phone-based voice assistants, Amazon has introduced an exclusive product named Alexa that can play music, do online shopping, initiate payment transaction and make your home smart solely based on your voice commands.
Also, there’s Google Duplex which is an AI system that can conduct natural conversations over the phone and carry out your tasks like table booking and appointments. It’s been out for real-world testing this summer and everyone is baffled with the very human-like conversing Google Duplex.
There is a lot of excitement around voice assistants and many companies have big plans on implementing them in their businesses and customer service experiences. In fact, Gartner1 predicts that 30% of our associations with innovation will be through “discussions” with Artificial Intelligence in near future.
How to Use Voice Assistant to Enhance Customer Service Experience
#1 Customized Conversation Opening
When it comes to a conversation for help or guidance, the initial moments are very crucial for setting the right tone for the conversation. In the absence of such moments, the listener might lose their interest and feel irritated to continue the conversation.
With voice assistants, this won’t be much of a problem as it invites clients with a marked welcome to establish trust over voice. For example, this year at the Google I/O 2018 conference, Google team announced six new voice variants for its voice assistant, and not long from now, another six voices are to be added, including that of artist John Legend2.
The company has consolidated the voices into the voice assistant repertoire in such a way that it can promptly reply and increase the overall quality of call openings.
#2 Clear Understanding of the Client’s Goal
The main purpose of voice assistants’ knowledge is to understand your client’s prerequisites accurately. A competent voice assistant is one that comprehends the whole setting of the discussion and not only a couple of sentences. When the customer makes an inquiry, the voice assistant should be able to gauge the issue they are facing and their expectations. The customer expects a prompt answer or a sequence of sub-answers to their query. This is where an intuitive voice assistant helps please the customer and makes them feel valued.
For example, let’s say you want to buy dog food from Amazon through Alexa. All you need to do is say, “Hey Alexa, order me dog food”. Alexa searches the relevant products and places the order based on your choice. So the next time when you tell Alexa to order dog food, it smartly searches from your past orders and tells about the price difference. This way, it improves from past conversations and doesn’t ask you the same questions multiple times.
#3 No Need to Put On Hold
Before any demo or negotiation, customers are frequently requested to give individual data to check their personality. This procedure can be streamlined with voice assistants as they respond significantly quicker in perceiving numbers, name or address spell-outs, or some other secret data without putting the customer on hold.
Additionally, since voice assistants store the gathered information, all divisions in the organization can access the data without the need to contact any person. Such line exchanges where one has to re-confirm the client’s character from the beginning can be eliminated with voice assistants. This helps create a better customer service experience.
#4 Human-like Conversations
Good support agents don’t intrude when customers are talking and they extend a discussion with subsequent meet-ups to have customers elaborate on their goals before offering the right solution. Similarly, voice assistants are enhancing themselves to react like humans.
In Google I/O 2018, it made its voice assistant book an appointment with a salon. When the receptionist requested the voice assistant to wait for a while, it responded with an “Mm-hmm” which is very close to a normal human reaction reply. Take a look at the embedded video:
A human-like response of Voice Assistant
This way, Google is making the voice assistant more human-like. Similarly, some call centers tried to incorporate sounds like mechanical typing while receiving feedback from customers. The above ways decrease their inconvenience and provide a personalized touch just like a human responding on the other end.
Conclusion
Be it any business, if your CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) scores are not satisfactory, it is time for you to consider changing your existing strategy.
Though it is not possible to completely change your present customer service strategy, it is necessary to move with the time eventually and gradually. It is essential in this quick moving world to know about what is around the bend. Look out for new ways to advertise and see how you can utilize them to profit your own particular business. Among them, implementing a voice assistant along with your current strategy can craft a new exciting way to reach your customers and provide them with the best service experience.
Source
1 – https://www.gartner.com/doc/3021226/market-trends-voice-ui-consumer
2 – https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332014/google-assistant-voice-john-legend
