As the pace of digital transformation continues to accelerate, the world is betting big on artificial intelligence (AI) to be a game-changer that could shape the future of work and life. Business investments into AI technology topped US$67 billion in 2020. Swiss investment banking firm UBS expects AI revenue to hit US$90 billion by 2025. All these come as no surprise. Research from Accenture showed that AI helped reduce up to 20% of low-end, repetitive tasks—the equivalent of one full working day.

The benefits of AI and automation are becoming increasingly apparent to companies around the globe. Voice AI brings the most promise in optimising operations and elevating the customer experience for contact centres. Why? Because people still prefer voice channels when it comes to resolving urgent or essential issues. Voice AI can help streamline call centre processes in many ways, and here are five of them.

1.    Absorb Seasonal or Unforeseen Overflow

Industries such as retail, travel, and hospitality have peak seasons throughout the calendar year. These are the seasons that call centre agents come to dread as they’re often inundated with more calls than they can handle. Of course, hiring more manpower to meet the demand is costly and training them takes time, making it a less-than-ideal solution to a problem that comes and goes.

On the other hand, Voice AI are easy to deploy and can be scaled instantaneously according to demand. Customer experience teams can even customise them to automate repetitive tasks during peak periods, such as making outbound telemarketing calls or serving time-sensitive information about sales and promotions to customers. Voice AI can also help take the pressure off your human agents by helping field, address, and assign calls according to need and urgency.

2.    Send Reminders or Verify Information

Today, traditional methods of customer service have become unsustainable in the face of rapid digitisation. As a matter of fact, companies are struggling to cope with the huge spike in customer call volume as anxious customers want speed and flexibility in their digital interactions with their service providers. High-volume but low-value tasks such as sending payment reminders or verifying delivery addresses can significantly impact the overall call centre’s efficiency and productivity.

In these cases, call centres can use Voice AI in place of human agents to maximise profits, efficiency and scalability for the business. Voice AI is a great solution because these calls can be automated and done simultaneously, helping you cover more ground in less time. This frees up your agents to take on more complex tasks that bots can’t do.

3.    Facilitate Self-Service for Simple Concerns

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is an automated service for consumers that are looking for 24/7 self-service help for their simple concerns. While it is commonly used by call centres, consumers are generally dissatisfied and frustrated by IVR systems because of its long recorded messages and complicated menu options.

This is where Voice AI can step in to handle routine helpdesk requests in a more interactive, empathetic, and intelligent manner without losing the human touch. An essential part of ‘humanising’ the Voice AI experience is enabling it to understand & support more languages. Our voice assistants understand and speak more than 15 languages including; Bahasa, Mandarin, Thai, Hindi, Tamil, Filipino, Vietnamese, and English with regional accents. They can also automatically switch between multiple languages for better customer engagement, so that the customer will always be able to communicate their needs and feel right at home.

4.    Provide Customer Support with Relevant Information

Aside from fielding queries, Voice AI assistants can be your agents’ trustworthy sidekick by bringing up important customer history and other contextual information in real-time during calls.

Voice assistants can also provide resources from your in-house knowledge base to help human agents address customer concerns more holistically. By having the correct information at their fingertips, human agents provide better service to customers. Instead of being distracted by missing data, human agents can focus on the customer experience and respond empathetically to callers. A streamlined process can also enable agents to achieve one-touch resolution, which is a win for both you and your customers.

Another helpful Voice AI capability is tone analysis, which picks up nuances in speech that can signal certain emotions or communication styles. Voice bots can use tone analysis data to nudge human agents in the right direction, say, alert agents to a frustrated caller or suggest that the agent adjust their tone of voice or language to communicate more effectively.

5.    Measure Customer Satisfaction

Customer service calls sometimes end with a user satisfaction survey through an IVR system. Callers often opt-out of this activity because it takes up their time and feels impersonal. However, failing to get feedback while your customer is already engaged is a missed opportunity. Customers are likely to share feedback when they are already on a call.

This is another ideal scenario for using Voice AI, where the voice bot continues the conversation and asks basic customer satisfaction questions. With it, companies can gather data towards their net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT) rating, or even gain insight into areas of improvement.

Automating this process with Voice AI can potentially gather more data and have them analysed faster. Insights can also potentially be richer with tone and sentiment analysis powered by AI.

Empowering Human Agents to Do Better

Whatever industry you’re in, Voice AI can be a valuable tool in helping your customer service agents become more effective and efficient. From automating simple tasks to redirecting calls to providing rich, contextual information, Voice AI can boost productivity and enhance the customer experience in multiple ways. AI technology will only get better and smarter with time, and companies that adopt Voice AI sooner rather than later will have more to gain.