What is conversational AI?
Conversational AI is a subfield of artificial intelligence where machines (typically chatbots and voice bots) learn to engage in human-like dialogue. Advanced AI assistants use natural language processing (NLP) to recognise and respond intelligently to what your customers want ― instantly, 24 hours a day.
By 2026, it’s predicted “conversational artificial intelligence (AI) deployments within contact centers will reduce agent labor costs by $80 billion,” says Gartner, making “agents more efficient and effective, while also improving the customer experience”.
How to sidestep the challenges of deploying conversational AI
These days, deploying conversational AI consists of more than just plonking a basic chatbot on your website. It’s more like nurturing a whole new customer service ecosystem with your support teams and an AI assistant at its core. With Forrester reporting 63% of customers “leave a company after just one poor experience,” you often have only one chance to get it right, yet there’s a lot of uncertainty about how to go about it:
- New competitors are emerging all the time using AI as their ally, so you might already be feeling behind.
- The more they interact with new technology all around them, the more customer expectations are rising, and they expect you to match the positive experiences they’re having.
- There’s a LOT of noise out there about AI; it’s hard to work out which products or services are worth your time and investment and nobody wants to get it wrong.
- Once you’re up and running, there’s also data security to think about, making sure you’re compliant, learning how to measure results and integrate with other business systems…
Where do you start?
Thankfully, creating an AI assistant is now an easy, straightforward task, but it isn’t a once-and-done job. You’ll need to consistently manage and evolve its capabilities, so it’s always running at peak performance and in line with the most relevant tasks your customers need it to do for them ― right here and right now.
Decide on your strategy
It makes sense to tackle conversational AI deployment in stages, so take some time to figure out what you want to achieve. Without a doubt, you’ll find greater success if you adopt a customer service mindset from the start, putting the person who’s going to use your AI-powered assistance front and centre. Decide how you’re going to make it work for them, then let everyone on your teams know what you’re aiming for.
Firm up your plans
AI is advancing at a phenomenal rate and if you don’t plan out what you intend to do and when, it’s incredibly easy to get distracted from doing the core work you need to do to deploy conversational AI ― there will be multiple shiny new things to play with along the way! Stick to this 5-part plan and set yourself some timelines:
- Confirm your customer service goals using a framework like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
- Get all your teams (preferably, your whole company) on board with them before you launch
- Choose a conversational AI platform to create an AI assistant; one with all the features you need to grow
- Decide who’ll manage your AI assistant going forwards, so it’s always learning and improving (you don’t need any technical skill to do this, or can even choose a managed service)
- Launch on the channels your customers visit most often, whether it’s on your website, your mobile app, or WhatsApp
Track your key results
Whatever you do, you’ll need to start tracking your results from the moment you go live with an AI assistant. If your goal is to improve a metric like First Contact Resolution (FCR), know how you’ve performed on FCR rate to date, so when you launch your AI assistant you can track the improvement it makes over time.
Top tip! Track frequently and consistently, so you can monitor and report on progress.
There’s a lot to absorb in the process, so we’ve pinpointed eight crucial aspects to concentrate on to make sure your AI assistant is a huge success.
8 crucial components to your success
While artificial intelligence has been around for decades, the way we use it now is undeniably ahead of the curve and shifts and improvements are happening seemingly by the day. To help establish the right processes for deployment of conversational AI, navigate any risks, and truly make your mark in customer service automation, here are the eight things to focus on:
1. Trust in momentum not magic
There are lots of reasons why customer service chatbots fail, but the good news is, you can avoid them. Many of the reasons involve focusing on the wrong things or having a skewed expectation of what conversational AI can do for you. AI isn’t magic, even if it looks like it at times. It’s important to go into this knowing your agents and your expert customer knowledge are key to the process. Avoid relying solely on AI or automation to improve customer service and, together with AI, you can make best use of all the opportunities to transform your operations.
2. Get your APIs in order
Having your AI assistant take on all your routine and repetitive queries, so your support agents can focus on more high-value tasks cuts the pressure on your teams, your contact volumes and your costs. Link it up to all your favourite apps and platforms and it can do so much more for you than send out information. Your AI assistant can handle transactions and carry out tasks that help customers and your teams, but you need an API (Application Programming Interface) to do it, so make sure you understand why APIs matter to maximise your strides.
3. Be sure you can scale
It’s exciting to get your AI assistant live and the sooner it starts talking to your customers, the sooner you start to learn more about what they want to transform your insights. With a continuous flow of customer data coming in, you’ll want to develop and perfect your AI assistant to make it as helpful and relevant to them (and your teams) as it can be, so check your conversational AI platform is well-equipped for growth:
Be sure to check the platform you choose has all the features you’ll need in future to scale and grow your AI assistant, even if you don’t need them yet.
4. Choose your supplier carefully
When you’re ready to launch an AI chatbot, it’s tempting to stick with your telecoms provider if they offer a new chatbot service. Truth is, you’ll pay less, get a more efficient AI assistant and be able to integrate it with your phone system if you use a specialist provider instead.
‘No code’ platforms also aren’t the answer if they don’t have everything else you need to manage and scale an AI assistant, like:
Top tip! Do your research before you sign up to pay for a platform ― get a demo and a free trial, check the pricing structure, and know you can leave any time if it turns out not to be right for you.
5. Keep control of your content
When your AI assistant is up and running and talking with your customers, you need a way to approve all of its content and keep training it to offer more value. Responses to customers also have to be accurate, have up-to-date information, and sound like you in terms of the language and tone you use at your organisation. Now LLMs like GPT-4 are being used to transform customer service, you also need to make sure your AI assistant isn’t dragging random information from the internet and can’t be prompted to say things you don’t want it to. It’s vital you know how to bring LLMs into your customer service safely.
7. Support your teams
Using conversational AI opens up a lot of opportunities for your customer service teams to thrive, but it’s important to remember this is new technology they likely haven’t used before in a professional capacity and it completely changes the way they’re used to working. An AI assistant isn’t a replacement for your teams, it’s an addition to the team and it’s modelled on your best workers, so involve them in every stage of its deployment, let everyone know what’s happening and why. Conversational AI works best when your teams and AI assistant work closely together.
Did you know? 35% of contact requests come in when your customer service teams are offline.
8. Remember the AI assistant represents your organisation
One of the most fun parts of launching an AI assistant is styling it and giving it a name. It should be easy on any conversational AI platform to apply your brand colours to the AI assistant like you would for any digital feature, so your customers have a consistent experience, but the name you choose is important too. To name your chatbot for maximum business impact, check the name is short and easy to pronounce, works fine in other languages, and represents your brand personality.
A great example is Stina, the AI assistant for Stena Line ferries. It’s one of the oldest AI assistants you’ll find anywhere and the name’s a winner because it’s easily associated with the company “Stena Line”, short and sweet, playful to pronounce, has oodles of personality, and avoids any controversy since it doesn’t have a defined meaning.
Getting one step ahead of your competitors
Use the right tools to deploy conversational AI and you can avoid any false starts or stops along the way. Launching an AI assistant is now so easy, so affordable, and so transformative for customer service departments, the faster you dive in and develop automated services, the better.
8×8 found 84% of leaders with medium or large contact centres are “currently using the technology for digital channels”, while CallMiner found more than half of all retail organisations say their “processes are mostly automated”.
“In the new book, Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything, author Martin Ford notes that “nearly every technology startup is now, to some degree, investing in AI, and companies large and small in other industries are beginning to deploy the technology.” The pace of innovation will only continue to accelerate as capital continues to pour into AI development.”
~ Gary Grossman for VentureBeat
Build your business case
Now you know where to start and what to focus on when deploying conversational AI, you’re all set to rapidly improve your customer service using an AI assistant. If you need any help with getting buy-in for that, use our cheat sheet, or take advantage of our 30 day free trial to launch and test out an AI assistant today.
