New paradigm shifts are driving businesses to go beyond just digital customer engagement channels, to AI-enabled conversational commerce.
This is according to David Hoar, account director of digital first engagement at Verint, who was addressing a webinar on adapting to an increasingly conversational and digitally driven world.
He said: “How should organisations adapt to a world that is conversationally and digitally driven when at the same time they are being challenged by new workforce dynamics, ever-expanding engagement channels and exponentially more consumer interactions, as well as limited budgets and resources? This Engagement Capacity Gap is growing, causing a lot of friction and big problems for organisations.”
Hoar said: “Conversational commerce is a strategic imperative that overcomes this gap. According to the 2021 Gartner Strategic Outlook, Conversational AI is top of mind for brands, with over 70% of product leaders planning to invest in conversational AI over the next two years. In three years, Gartner expects up to 80% of contact centre agents tasks to be automated by advanced virtual assistants, and in four years, 30% of work activities involving the use of technology will be conversationally enabled.”
Verint explains that Conversational AI combines cutting-edge natural language processing, machine learning, and robust intent understanding to deliver effortless interactions with your customers and employees.
Hoar outlined how chatbots, conversational AI, and intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) provide instantaneous support and address the engagement capacity gap, improving experiences for both customers and employees. Conversational AI takes away the more mundane and repetitive tasks within the front end customer-facing roles and frees up agents to deal with the more complex matters, he said.
Conversational AI goes beyond offering automated responses, to interacting intelligently with users. For example, Hoar cited a project with Meta to create a Cardi B ‘Truth Teller’ Cardibot for Instagram, using Verint’s natural language processing engine. The bot allowed fans to engage with the star at scale, and ask it questions via DM. The bot delivered over 100 million conversations in under a week and was named best chatbot at the 13 annual Shorty Awards.
With conversational AI, the contact centre can be turned from a cost base to a revenue generating opportunity, he said. He highlighted the case study of the fast growing Volaris airline, which has improved customer experience and driven down operational costs by moving to digital channels – largely WhatsApp – with a chatbot to attend to customer services. “Their numbers have been impressive. About 70 – 80% of inbound customer engagements are now contained within WhatsApp.”
Hoar added: “The amount of digital marketing noise being generated, and the amount of money being spent to ‘capture eyeballs’ online has typically dropped, because brands don’t have the budgets they once did. Now they are looking for smarter ways to engage their audiences. They have to make the most of absolutely every interaction when customers do engage with them, since customers might be having a service conversation with you today, and a sales conversation with you tomorrow.”
Share