Voicebots, The Customer Service Of The Millennial Era

It’s 3 o’clock in the morning, we’re at an airport thousands of kilometers from home and we’ve lost the transfer flight. We call our airline’s customer service phone and we talk to an agent who already knows our problem, responds with efficiency and empathy, gives us different personalized alternatives, and resolves our stressful situation in the most efficient way. A more or less common experience nowadays, if it were not for the one who offered us the best possible treatment at an untimely hour, it is not a pool of agents operating 24 hours at an unsustainable cost, but a bot perfectly programmed to solve foreseeable situations, however complex they may be, with no concurrency limit and one hundredth of the cost. It is January 1^st, 2025. Welcome to the era of the ‘bots’.

Technological innovation to differentiate in the millennial era

The companies of the competitive sector of the ‘customer experience’ are in a constant search for solutions and innovative technologies that allow them to differentiate themselves and distance themselves from the competition. The sector innovates in the pursuit of a double objective: on the one hand, and above all, offer the best experience to its customers (according to Convergys, users who prefer automated self-service have reached 55% in the last five years) and secondly, to optimize the resources of the customer service centers as much as possible (the customer service bots reduce the support tickets by 90%).

Within the large number of innovations that the sector has incorporated during the last two decades around the millennial revolution (the ubiquity and immediacy of the internet and mobile devices) one of the most promising, relevant and effective is the robotization of the attention in the form of chatbots or voicebots.

This advanced technology is already applied in the resolution of all kinds of doubts in the customer service centers, and in 2025 this will be a common reality. According to Forbes, today 72% of executives, 42% of consumers and 53% of millennials only use virtual assistants and, according to Gartner, by 2020 85% of interactions with customers will be managed with bots and virtual assistants will be the key factor for companies to differentiate themselves from the competition.

Voicebots: much more than an IVR system

Virtual agents are automated systems that address the needs of the client, without the intervention of a human being. The interactions of virtual agents can take place through multiple channels. While chatbots can converse with users through social networks, email or specific messaging or chat applications, voicebots go a step further, since they are based on IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems that require specific technologies to speech recognition, natural language processing, speech synthesis or artificial conversational intelligence. These technologies are what convert a simple IVR into a voicebot capable of solving the queries posed by customers in a simple telephone call in an efficient way.

Practical cases of voicebots use today

Although far from the fantasy raised at the beginning of the article, in masvoz we have worked on ‘tailor-made’ voicebots projects to solve current and practical cases such as those summarized below.

The first case is that of a known low cost airline. If a customer wants to check the status of their flight and call the customer service number, a voice response will ask him or her about the reason for the call. The system recognizes your request by voice and responds specifically to your question. In addition, if the user needs to resolve another last-minute question, the customer service button also responds to that question by offering different options. And all without any human interaction. On the other hand, thanks to the integration of the voicebot with the CRM of the airline, the system is able to recognize the flight reservation code or the customer’s telephone number (if it is registered on the airline’s website), and give you more personalized information about your flight. In this case, thanks to the implementation of voicebots, 60% of the calls that enter the system do not need the intervention of an agent.

The second case is that of a catering company, which has 35 restaurants and six hotels in different Spanish cities. In masvoz we have developed an automatic reservation system combining three speech technologies: Text to Speech (TTS), which allows short-text speech, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which allows understanding what the user says, and Speech to Text (STT), which allows you to literally transcribe what the user says. The combination of these three technologies has created a dynamic information channel to specify the day and time of the reservation. How? The system guides, by means of its questions, the client who calls to reserve a table: from the choice of language to the number of diners, the time preference and the registration of the name and telephone number associated with the reservation. Masvoz has designed a voicebot adapted to the needs of this company, also making integration with its reservation system to check the availability of the restaurant and that users can make their reservation quickly and easily. Thanks to the system 100% of the received calls are attended, and reservations have been increased by 15%.

Improve ROI without detriment to the customer experience

The companies that use voicebots optimize their resources and save costs thanks to voice and telephony technologies applied to calls that allow automating all kinds of processes in customer service. Although the customer service bots are not going to completely replace the agents, according to McKinsey, it is expected that global human interaction in this field will be reduced to 30% in the next two years. The tendency is to have a combination of voicebots and highly qualified human agents and focus on answering calls that require added value.

This optimization of resources, in addition, not only does not reduce quality in the attention, but also takes it one step further thanks to the availability 24/7/365 and the infinite concurrence of the automatic systems. A well-configured voicebot allows the caller to obtain the information they need in a very short time and without waiting for an agent to be available to assist them. If an agent finally answers the call, the agent receives the information that the bot has obtained, which allows him to speed up the management and reduce the agent’s occupation time. Thanks to the voicebots, the customer service centers of companies can offer more effective, customized and satisfying experiences to users.

Artificial intelligence and the future of bots

It may seem that artificial intelligence is a cinematic fantasy of the distant and dystopian future of Blade Runner. But the speed of innovation in the field of robots that learn by themselves is exponential, and they are already being tested today successfully in many sectors.

In May 2017, the Alphago software created by a British laboratory beat the best Go player in the world. The Go is a millennial game considered the most complex and intuitive ever invented and no Go expert gave a penny for the robot. However, Alphago beat Ke Jie without disheveled, by 4 games to 1, and in Beta phase.

In autonomous driving, Tesla and other large companies are working on the development of car models. The Tesla Autopilot 2.0 will be, in the words of Elon Musk, “at least 100% to 200%” safer than human drivers in two years, since advances in artificial intelligence will allow vehicles to dominate “all driving modes “by the end of 2019.

Artificial intelligence is reaching the customer service bots to reinvent the sector. The question is, simply, when. Ridley Scott, with Blade Runner, aimed at 2019.