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Businesses have always been looking for ways to automate and streamline their customer service and sales operations. Fortunately, the latest advancements in AI have made it much easier. Conversational AI voice bots and chatbots are already becoming a game-changer for many businesses, helping them automate and enhance their customer service processes and drive better sales conversions. Let’s take a closer look at conversational AI voice bots, in particular, and explore how exactly these solutions are transforming customer service and sales.
What are Conversational AI Voice Bots?
So, what exactly are conversational AI voice bots? Conversational AI voice bots (also referred to as AI voice agents or AI virtual assistants) are AI-powered software systems that can engage in real-time voice conversations with customers. They use Natural Language Processing (NLP), generative AI, and Machine Learning (ML) to accurately understand, interpret, and respond to human speech in a natural, human-like way.
And these solutions are becoming incredibly popular, with more businesses looking to implement conversational AI voice bots in the following years. No wonder the market is booming. In fact, based on the Voicebots Market Report by IndustryARC, the voicebots market size is estimated to reach $98.2 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 18.6% during the forecast period 2022-2027.
But not all conversational AI voice bots offer the same capabilities. While some are only capable of handling inbound calls, other solutions can also initiate outbound calls. Plus, many conversational AI voice bots are multilingual and can interact with customers in different languages.
How Conversational AI Voice Bots are Transforming Customer Service
Support customers 24/7
Similarly to AI chatbots, AI voice bots can support your customers around the clock when your human reps aren’t available, including outside of your business hours and on weekends. A conversational AI voice bot from VoiceSpin is an excellent example. It can answer your inbound calls, answer common questions from your customers or prospects, and provide relevant information about your products or services – all while interacting with callers in a natural way, just like your human agent would.
Lighten the load on your support team
Calabrio’s report recently revealed that 1 in 3 customer service agents say having to handle too many customer calls is the biggest challenge they are facing in the workplace. Conversational AI voice bots can handle your customer calls independently. But let’s be realistic here. Of course, an AI voice bot won’t be able to successfully resolve all your customer service requests successfully. For complex interactions, complaints, and technical issues – human reps are still irreplaceable.
However, when it comes to answering common questions, providing basic information, or helping customers resolve simple issues – implementing a conversational AI voice bot is a great way to reduce the number of inbound calls that need to be handled by your human reps. And that ultimately reduces the load on your support team.
Deliver proactive customer service
In addition to responding to inbound customer calls, you can use conversational AI voice bots to reach out to your customers proactively. And according to Gartner’s research, proactive customer service leads to improvements in some key customer service metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Customer Effort Score (CES).
For example, AI voice agents can call customers to proactively remind them of upcoming appointments, payments, or subscription renewals. Or, you can use an AI voice bot to inform customers about service disruptions or emergency updates, ensuring they stay updated in real time.
Finally, implementing a conversational AI voice bot can help you reduce support-related costs. Based on IBM’s report, businesses using AI-based virtual agents can reduce customer service costs by up to 30%. Just think about it: an AI voice bot can handle dozens or even hundreds of customer calls simultaneously, while a human agent can only handle one call at a time. If your business typically handles high inbound call volumes, it means that you don’t need to hire and allocate more human reps, reducing the costs of hiring and training new agents.
How Conversational AI Voice Bots Can Help You Drive Sales Growth
Automate lead qualification
Customer service scenarios aside, conversational AI voice bots can also be effectively used in sales environments. AI voice bots can actually help you automate the entire lead qualification process. They can provide relevant information about your products or services, ask your prospects a series of pre-qualification questions, help you filter out unqualified leads, and capture prospects’ details. That means your sales reps won’t have to waste time qualifying inbound and outbound leads manually and can spend more time interacting with the most promising prospects.
Provide personalized product recommendations
Conversational AI voice bots don’t just answer common questions and qualify leads. When integrated with your CRM system, AI voice bots can instantly pull and analyze the available customer data and offer customers highly personalized product recommendations based on their preferences and past purchases. That can help you improve engagement, increase sales conversions, and increase the average order value.
Streamline appointment scheduling
Integrations of conversational AI voice bots with back-end systems like CRMs, calendar software, and e-commerce platforms enable these solutions to perform specific actions in these systems. And appointment scheduling is one of the most common use cases for AI voice bots, particularly in industries like real estate, healthcare, and financial services, to name just a few. When integrated with your calendar software, an AI voice bot can check your team’s availability in real time, suggest open time slots, and book appointments/ meetings/ demo calls with your sales agents automatically, saving a bunch of time for your team.
Get Started with a Conversational AI Voice Bot
Though conversational AI voice bots are still an emerging technology, it’s developing and improving at a rapid pace thanks to advancements in AI and NLP. If you’ve been looking for ways to automate your customer service and sales operations – implementing a conversational AI voice bot might be the best solution. With the right platform that leverages the latest LLMs (Large Language Models) and integrates with your back-end systems – and the right strategy that puts an AI voice bot to work alongside your human agents – you can truly enhance your customer service and sales strategies.
