Winning a modern-day customer is not easy. With millennials wanting everything at the tap of a button, through quick voice calls or using voice assistants like Alexa or Siri, customer experience is the key to ensuring their satisfaction. A seamless customer experience helps the customer feel that they are being cared for, not to mention playing a crucial role in helping an enterprise stand out from the competition.
Most companies rely on traditional IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems as a channel for catering to customer inquiries. While businesses find IVR systems cost-saving and generally sufficient to delegate queries to agents, they tend to negatively affect the customer experience. Here are some data points to prove it:
- 51% of customers abandon a business after poor IVR experience
- The average wait time for phone support is 5 minutes
- 61% of customers believe IVRs offer a poor experience
Is Traditional IVR Cost-Effective?
In that case, why do businesses still stick with traditional IVRs? Are they truly cost-effective? Actually, it’s quite the contrary. Various studies prove that IVRs are cost-draining in the long run because of the multitude of unsatisfied customers. This is primarily due to the design of typical IVR experiences. It forces people to communicate with a voice-based interface in a non-voice manner. The experience worsens further with complex menu trees having multiple options and sub-options.
If you can relate to any of these challenges and it triggers a pain point for your business, the chances are that your customers are not getting their desired experience.
Future of IVRs: Enabling AI-Driven Voice-Bots
But before we jump into talking about what voice-bots are and the benefits that they can provide, let’s quickly see what a typical voice-bot interaction looks like from your customer’s point of view.
While you might have recognized that it’s a voice-bot talking. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s much cooler than simply punching numbers. Just like in the example video, many companies integrate their traditional IVRs with AI-driven voice-bots. When users interact with such voice bots, they can interact in natural language to convey their issue. Using Natural Language Understanding (NLU), the bot engine resolves the query almost instantly or transfers the call to the appropriate human agent.
Voice-Bots Radically Improve the Overall Customer Experience
Here are just six reasons why voice-bots are a must-have for any business in today’s world:
1 | Callers can easily talk to the IVR, exactly as they would with a human agent, instead of punching numbers on the dialing pad.
2 | The customer journey is detached from all the complicated menu trees, making it easy to follow and hassle-free.
3 | The caller receives instant and precise resolution without having to wait to be connected to the right agent.
4 | Voice-bots also reduce the load for your agents, freeing up their time and resources to focus on more important and financially rewarding tasks.
5 | Since voice-bots leverage automation with AI, they can handle increasing call volumes without impacting the customer experience.
6 | Voice-bots are cost-effective and can change traditional IVRs from money-burners to money-savers from the first month of implementation.
Easily Enable AI-Driven Voice-Bots with AudioCodes and Haptik
AudioCodes’ timely collaboration with Haptik enables powerful AI-driven voice-bots for contact center IVR systems. Haptik offers best-in-class voice support with advanced NLU to help businesses interact with end customers using natural language. Haptik’s NLU is not only trained on 3 billion+ conversations but is also rich with industry-specific data and skills to deliver the best accuracy in today’s market. Such bots can also integrate with existing business channels using APIs that seamlessly interact with external systems without disturbing the architecture.
Join us in our journey to completely transform the world of customer service with the power of voice!
Want to give your customers the incredible service levels that they deserve?
About the Author
Guest post by Parousia Khan of Haptik
Parousia Khan is Product Marketing Manager at Haptik, one of the world's largest conversational AI companies, helping customers identify how AI-driven virtual assistants can enhance customer experience through IVR, email and chat.
You can reach her through Email.
