And how virtual assistants set your business up for success
Historically, companies have always asked customers to do business their way. Nowadays, the boot is on the other foot and customers are the ones demanding that businesses make their journey a more pleasant experience.
We've seen the shift in recognition of the value of customer experience and the return on investment that it's brought to companies who've taken notice.
A brief overview to digital employees
According to a CNBC Report of chatbot statistics, AI chatbots (or digital employees) will help businesses save more than $8 billion USD a year by 2022.
Digital employees, digital agents, whatever you want to call them - are no longer new, and their capabilities are definitely expanding, together with cognitive intelligence and automated conversations providers like Ambit are making them feel more human-like every year with the natural conversations.
While these digital employees make life easier for customer and employees, from the business perspective it's helping them expand at a fast rate without increasing cost to serve, generate revenue and increase customer satisfaction.
No longer is it a case of companies as early adopters.
Now it's a case of not getting left behind.
Where we are now
We see a lot of businesses wanting to adapt to the technology and implement a digital employee as customer enquiries increase. The trouble is when the technology doesn't want to do as you want it to do, or maybe it doesn't want to talk to your other integrations. And that often leads to the following situation where businesses struggle on their own.
What this journey looks like implementing the digital employee on your own
Starting point:
AI-powered Q&A automated chat with live handover options within call centres to serve customers is implemented.
The tech is not seamless between platforms:
Disconnected customer experiences with live chat on one channel, automated chat on another and incoherent customer data.
The system starts falling apart:
Frustrating, dead-end conversations that loop, growing number of frustrated customers and staff as enquiry volumes continuously increase.
The tech does not end up working out:
Technical debt, frustrated customers and employees. High expenses, low ROI.
What this journey looks like with a partner-implemented digital employee
Starting point:
AI-powered Q&A automated chat with live handover options within call centres to serve customers is implemented.
Customer satisfaction increases:
Multichannel automated & live chat service. Unified customer data = highly personalised experiences. Digital employee intelligence delivers accurate information & intent detection. Increase in CSAT.
Ease of scaling the business and digital employee learning:
Natural automated conversations with seamless experiences between chat/voice/digital humans that continuously evolve & grow with customers & the business.
The business is profiting and customers are happy:
Cost controlled, fully human augmented sales, marketing, service & support teams, Happy customers as brand advocates. Highly profitable business generation.
Common Stumbling Blocks
Of course, no project is complete without a couple of technical hurdles. This can be for a variety of reasons, but particular for the following:
Pitfalls
- Inexperienced conversation design
Not recognising the value of great conversation design, thinking any company expert can build successful conversations. Lends itself to unsuccessful frustrating dead end conversations and bad customer experiences, does a disservice to your brand loyalty and hurts overall ROI.
- Set and forget
Chatbots are seen as additional channels for support and lead/revenue generation. However to be successful and worth the investment, a strategy needs to be in place. It's not a set and forget situation. They need to be trained and continuously aligned with business strategy and outcomes that evolve and increase with time.
- Lacking a future focused mindset leads to technical debt
Technology and business requirements evolve over time. You might start with a closed platform that enables basic FAQ type service and support that integrates with many channels. However, good tech scales as your business grows. Already businesses are outgrowing their providers - unable to manage the scale of conversation design due to the conversation interface, handle the growing volumes of customer conversations s or consistently provide accurate intent detection that resolves enquiries due to average AI capabilities.
Ideally, businesses should invest in a flexible platform with the ability to surface various forms of conversations from chat, live chat to voice and digital humans. A platform that's built specifically to manage large volumes of conversations efficiently, and that's conversational intelligence score doesn't suffer as usage grows.
It's expensive on many levels to change providers even a few years in.
- Building a chatbot yourself, instead of partnering with a specialist automated chat provider
Frequently leads to a collaboration of the pitfalls mentioned above. A provider like Ambit helps you to avoid these.
See what an Ambit digital employee can do for your business. Book a time to chat with one our team below.
