The best enterprises don’t only run on data—they run on conversations. Today, the most successful businesses are the ones that have the best and most effective conversations with their customers, partners and employees. And these conversations are happening everywhere.
Did you know the average Brit has 27 person-to-person (P2P) conversations every day, lasting 10 minutes each?1 There are 65 billion conversations on WhatsApp alone. Across the pond, 50% of American adults say that text conversations are just as meaningful as phone calls. And 78% wish they could have a text conversation with a business.2 Those are some meaningful numbers. When you add up all these conversations happening across organisations every day, the numbers are massive, especially the ones about your brand.
Every hour, there are more than 100 million conversations about brands.3 And it only takes one bad conversation with a customer going viral to reach thousands of existing and potential new customers. In fact, bad customer service impacts customer retention more than good customer service. Studies show that 82% of consumers will stop doing business with you. About 80% will tell other people about these bad experiences.4
Conversations have shifted, and so has business.
With the strong work-from-home reality, most people are using collaboration tools, including spending most of their day on video calls. As an example, in 2020, Zoom surpassed 350 million daily participants and had more than 450,000 business customers. Further, the annual meeting minutes on Zoom is over 3.3 trillion.5 There’s no larger opportunity to dramatically impact your business than with all the outward-facing conversations happening across the enterprise—customer service, sales and marketing.
Given the massive engagement between customers and a brand, creating a positive, and personal experience is essential. Here, AI and automation can have the biggest impact. It’s this sweet spot where business is done. Where customer engagement happens. And where the bulk of sales revenue is created.
Contact centres are becoming value drivers.
Conversations are a goldmine of information. And when it comes to customer-to-enterprise conversations, the contact centre reigns supreme. Contact centres field millions of calls each year, recording and analysing many (if not most) for quality purposes and to extract customer insights. However, up until now, the value they’ve been able to realise has been limited. That has changed significantly with the advent of new conversational tools and analytics that utilise artificial intelligence and automation.
The emergence of AI-powered self-service and agent assistance solutions are transforming contact centres from cost centres into value drivers. A leading example of this is the X Platform, a next-generation conversational AI and automation solution by Uniphore, the leader in conversational automation. Uniphore’s X-Platform integrates seamlessly with enterprise CX applications to unlock deeper insights and optimise operation efficiencies using:
Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is technology that enables humans and computers to communicate clearly and effectively through speech or text. Conversational AI works by recognising a user’s speech or text patterns, predicting their intent and responding with an adaptive, automated script. In the contact centre space, conversational AI responds to customer requests, dilemmas and situations as a human agent would. It can also augment live agent interactions by transcribing and analysing customer input, auto-populating form fields and feeding agents relevant data in real-time.
Emotion AI tools use artificial intelligence to “read” emotions based on audio and visual cues. In customer interactions, emotion AI understands stress, anger, happiness and joy and can offer a deeper level of understanding. It can strengthen customer relationships, engagement and brand loyalty. With emotion AI, contact centres can predict customer reactions and improve outcomes, including higher sales conversion and First Call Resolution (FCR) rates and better customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS).
Knowledge AI combines advanced conversational AI technologies with cognitive search capabilities to make sourcing relevant knowledge system information faster and easier. In the contact centre, knowledge AI eliminates common points of friction in self-service and elevates conversations between customers and agents. By ingesting structured and unstructured data in the form of knowledge bases, website pages, documents and more, knowledge AI transforms intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) and human agents into subject matter experts with the exact information they need at the exact moment they need it.
Contact centre automation is the practice of applying robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence to help contact centres connect with customers, empower employees, automate processes and drive continuous improvement through continuous intelligence. Contact centre automation can be either assisted (supporting a live agent) or unassisted (operating independently of a live agent). The benefits to contact centres are enormous: shorter call times, improved intent recognition and response accuracy, streamlined after-call work and consistent call summaries, just to name a few.
You can now capture richer insights than ever.
The science behind conversational AI is getting better each day. Just recently, Uniphore announced its acquisition of UK-based Red Box, the leading open enterprise platform for capturing voice, screen and metadata from conversations. That’s big news for businesses looking to gain total sovereignty over their data (rather than accessing it piecemeal through various vendor gatekeepers). With complete access and control of their captured data via open APIs, organisations will now be able to leverage the full value of 100% of their voice recordings to help make timely and strategic business decisions in real-time as well as ensuring regulatory compliance.
Red Box CEO Richard Stevenson recently explained what this means in a recent podcast with Uniphore CEO and Co-Founder, Umesh Sachdev. “We’re now capturing 20 million conversations a week,” Stevenson said. “If you use the technology that Uniphore has to analyse those, you really do understand the customer in depth. If you understand the customer in depth clearly, you can provide servicing, you can look at sales opportunities, you can improve retention.”
You can listen to the full podcast here.
From building engagement to generating sales, conversations are any organisation’s most important asset. The value obtained from these interactions impacts every aspect of business—especially customer loyalty. By leveraging conversational AI and automation within an open data solution, contact centres can get the insights, speed and scalability they need to drive maximum value from 100% of their customer conversations.
SOURCES:
1 – New Survey Reveals Average Brit Has 27 Conversations Every Day
2 – U.S. Texting Statistics
3 – Berger, Jonah. (2016). Contagious: Why Things Catch On. Simon & Schuster.
4 – The Customer Experience Imperative: How To Justify The Investment
5 – Zoom 2020