Are Voicebots and Chatbots the Key to Modern Customer Service?

Dolores Moret Ibanez at Sabio explores voice and chatbots and why they are the future of customer service – particularly in the digital transformation of a company and in the accompanying customer experience it can offer its customers.

The Customer-Centric age has led many companies to place an ever-greater focus on their customers and to make them a top priority. The creation of specialised Customer Care or Customer Experience departments to improve interactions with customers has proven essential in this respect.

Customer service has been further reinforced via technology introduced as part of companies’ digital transformation, ensuring excellent service throughout the purchase process and in case of any other needs.

The creation of voice-based and chat-based tools (Voicebots and Chatbots) has allowed companies to put in a place a 24/7 customer service system that meets the required quality standards and can help with customer queries and problems as well as with with sales.

Bots were first invented in the 1960s but advances in automatic natural language processing (NLP) and automation have seen Chatbots and Voicebots develop the capacity to hold real, human-sounding conversations.

What are Chatbots and Voicebots?

A conversational Chatbot or Voicebot is a computer programme developed using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) that is capable of holding a conversation.

Thanks to machine-learning technology, Bots can understand people’s intentions and emotions and provide a fast and empathetic response to any query, all the while learning from interactions and improving and humanising processes.

Chatbots and Voicebots can communicate by phone or via digital channels, such as websites, apps, instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp, social media, and more.

Advantages of introducing a Bot

One advantage of introducing a Bot is increased customer service efficiency. A well-developed Chatbot or Voicebot is able to adapt to the user and to the task in question, helping the agent to respond quickly by offering a 24/7 service with the ability to maintain multiple conversations at the same time.

Furthermore, the Bot is constantly improving thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. This allows it to automatically adapt to detect emotions in the caller’s voice or sound events with ever-greater precision.

Installing a Chatbot or Voicebot can also help businesses save money. These solutions reduce call times and can resolve simple queries and problems that do not require human intervention. This allows agents to focus on other tasks that require their experience, allowing the Contact Centre to operate more efficiently.

Voicebots and Chatbots: the Future of Customer Service Interaction?

According to the Annual Contact Centre Customer Service Index conducted by Sabio, more than half (57%) of customers would be happy to be assisted by an automatic voice system when calling a contact centre.

Dolores Moret Ibanez

In certain sectors such as banking, self-service via digital channels is customers’ second most preferred option.

Many companies are now installing Voicebots on their telephone channels so that they can quickly and accurately respond to customer requests. These systems subsequently connect the customer with an agent to help with their problem if they so desire.

About Sabio

Sabio Group is a global digital customer experience (CX) transformation specialist with major operations in the UK (England and Scotland), Spain, France, Netherlands, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa and India. Through its own technology, and that of world-class technology leaders such as Amazon Connect, Avaya, Genesys, Google Cloud, Salesforce, Twilio and Verint, Sabio helps organisations optimise their customer journeys by making better decisions across their multiple contact channels.

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Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.