What is AI telephony?
AI telephony is using an AI assistant to answer phone calls in the same way a human would, typically for customer support services in a call centre. The AI assistant is trained to answer calls and listen to customers, then give an appropriate response, be it to pass on information or take action of some kind.
AI telephony doesn’t replace customer service agents, since human handling is needed for more intricate queries, but it can be used take on routine or repetitive tasks, or monotonous or mundane tasks humans no longer need to do.
Why use AI telephony, and should you?
Before diving into AI telephony, it’s important to reflect on the types of calls AI could handle for you, rather than consider it will handle them all. If your support teams have questions they hear day in and day out, every day, answering the call using AI telephony can improve the customer’s experience because they get:
- Instant answers to these queries, any time of the day or night
- Up-to-date information that’s consistently accurate
- Freedom to make calls from any country and in any language
While AI telephony handles routine enquiries, customers who have a challenging query, are upset, or would otherwise benefit from speaking to a human agent then get priority access to your teams who, thanks to AI, are less worn-down by mundane queries and able to focus deeply on the task at hand. Using AI IVR call routing alongside AI telephony you can also automatically send calls about certain subjects through to a human agent, so an AI assistant will never pick them up or handle them.
Debating the use of AI telephony
In societies that have a growing problem with digital addiction and social isolation, it’s sensible to question if AI telephony is right for your organisation, but when you use it in the right way, at the right time, AI telephony doesn’t dilute a service, it strengthens it:
- More time to give every caller individual attention
- Ability to focus support on particularly involved queries
- Ability to track customer preferences to personalise their experience
- Room to listen to feedback and work out how services can be improved
- More budget to train human agents to best support your customers
- Space to work on improving empathy and customer service mindset
- Transcription of calls for record-taking and managing disputes
- Accurate data to reduce call volume, average response time, and first contact resolution
- Transcription of calls for quality control, dealing with complaints, and reducing customer churn
- Reduce any negative impact on your organisation because call volume or wait times are too high or human agents are too stressed to show empathy
Any organisation can make use of AI telephony, whether it’s selling mobile phones or providing a medical service. By way of example, let’s consider a sleep clinic.
A lack of sleep can impact a person’s ability to function day to day. It affects their ability to work, relationships, and social life. Long term, it can lead to serious health issues and affect the quality and length of your life, so sleep clinic patients will always need access to qualified and understanding support staff to get the help they need. Even so, certain types of queries can be handled perfectly well by AI telephony:
- Wanting to change an appointment because of a new clash of events
- Asking about where to park at the sleep clinic and the cost of this
- Needing to clarify a procedure, for example returning test study equipment
- Checking how long a sleep study or appointment is likely to take
- Asking for an email address to make contact that way
Giving customers appropriate care
There are lots of times when getting an answer fast or at a time most convenient for you, getting clear information you can store or share, or quickly putting a worry to one side is the most important part of a phone call and that’s where using AI telephony can help both your customers and your teams. For Legal & General insurance, 83% of customers using their AI assistant now prefer it to making a phone call.
Using an AI assistant to handle routine enquiries gives human agents more opportunities to thrive in their work and Clutch found business leaders are typically “excited, optimistic, and motivated” by AI. Using an AI voice might feel less personal at first, but long term, it can better your support services.
What does an AI voice sound like?
If you imagine a robotic Daft Punk voice with uncomfortable pauses and oddly placed inflection, you haven’t heard the latest AI voices that sound just like real people. Where previous incarnations of hearing an AI voice might have given customers the ick, some AI voices now can’t be distinguished from a human one:
Still, there’s no need to pretend your AI assistant is a human. People are now used to automated tools and recent statistics show they’re accepting of them. What matters most is the conversation is natural and enjoyable for customers on the other end of the phone ― take this example we created for the US Department for Veterans Affairs (VA). When a veteran calls to ask if they’re eligible for their pension, an AI assistant gives them:
- An explanation of the pension programme and eligibility criteria with a link to more detailed information
- All the information they need about how they to apply for their pension
- The location of their nearest VA office, based on their zip code, with address and directions sent to the caller’s phone
If you wanted to, you could clone the voice of a person in your organisation to take customer calls and even create a digital avatar. This is perfect for mobile and video, where customers using a smartphone can see an AI agent as well as hear their voice:
How far you take your AI presence is up to you and what’s right for your organisation, but in future, we’re likely to see an increase in companies making smart decisions about how to adopt AI for their organisation to best suit their customers and teams.
AI telephony doesn’t sit alone. One AI assistant with the right collection of advanced features can power your phone lines, website, mobile app, social media channels, messenger platforms, a kiosk, SMS service, and any other channel you use to communicate and engage with your customers.
Typically, you’ll use AI IVR to accurately field calls as they come in and live chat to connect your AI assistant with your human support teams. One of the greatest benefits of this is having all your customer data stored in one place, just like a traditional CRM, which transforms your insights.
Integration with business tools
Using API integration, it’s easy to connect your AI assistant with any marketing, comms, sales, HR, or operational tool you use to go about your business, like HubSpot, Zapier or Trello. In customer service, all these things (and so many more) can be handled by AI over the phone or be easily set up for other digital spaces:
Cutting costs with AI telephony and automation
Launching an AI assistant is easy and affordable for any size business, whether it’s a one-person venture or a large enterprise, and since it can handle every element of AI automation across the business, it instantly saves you money not paying for various pieces of tech.
Real world success
When leisure providers Mytime Active launched their AI assistant, their savings were so great, they were spared the cost of hiring two extra full-time employees to deal with an overwhelming number of customer queries. Considering holiday and sickness pay, pension contributions, induction, training and equipment costs, hiring human agents costs more than a basic salary, and having enough people to cover your demand can get expensive quickly. Even then, you might only be simply breaking even on covering a too-high call volume. AI brings many opportunities (not threats) to customer support agents to be able to operate more efficiently.
Dramatic reduction in outlay
It typically costs £6.26 per call in the UK for human agents to deal with routine and repetitive enquiries. Using AI telephony, that cost per enquiry can come right down to only 20 pence and, crucially, with customers still getting queries fully resolved in real time.
For Watford Council, who take around 11,000 calls every month, that’s a gigantic annual savings of hundreds of thousands of pounds just from switching to AI IVR and AI telephony to route and answer incoming calls. Add a chat-based AI assistant to your website, app, social channels, or any communication platform, and you can give customers immediate answers to their most common queries online too. This saved Barking & Dagenham Council £48,000 in just six months.
When routine queries are handled upfront like this on digital channels, there’s no need for customers to make a call into your support centre and, when they do, you know it’s for a query that needs the skill and knowledge your human agents are specially trained to provide.
Start saving today
You can launch an AI assistant in just 10 minutes using only your website URL (or we can do it for you) to start cutting support costs, reducing call volume, and increasing your deflection rate to let AI take the load.
Watford Council were ready to go with AI telephony set up in just a few weeks of creating an AI assistant and we can do the same for you.
