Customer experience is a crucial factor in building consumer trust. It can also make or break your business. This is doubly true for industries such as customer service, where frontline employees directly handle customer issues and requests. As a matter of fact, poor customer service has consistently ranked as the second most common reason for consumers to lose trust in a brand, right behind a faulty product.

This should not come as much of a surprise. We’ve all been there – frustrated by long wait times, unmet expectations, perhaps even an unfriendly customer service representative while troubleshooting a problem. These are indeed among the top reasons that can negatively impact customer service and the quality of the customer experience (CX) in the long run. Fortunately, waiting time, quality of CX and reliability of services are areas that can be improved with Voice AI.

Today, technologies like AI can even detect a customer’s tone, making it the perfect tool to improve upon existing customer service infrastructures, and with the right synergy between Voice AI and human agents, brands and businesses alike can reach and activate more customers, delivering greater value to the business.

Voice AI improves responsiveness to complaints

The idea that we should improve customer service with bots may seem counterintuitive. After all, we are all familiar with the frustration of not being able to speak to a human agent during an emergency. 

Such frustrations are often the fault of less intuitive Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, which is something entirely different from Voice AI. These systems are often burdened with unclear menu selections and lengthy wait times. Today, in times of manpower shortages, this consumer pain point has been especially pronounced.

Compared to IVR, Voice AI is set to make this process smoother and more responsive. While IVR is designed as a menu selection for callers to navigate, AI is designed to resolve customer issues in a single interaction. Voice AI can even understand what customers are saying and detect their tone with voice recognition and Natural Language Understanding (NLU).

Voice AI is also compatible with existing IT infrastructures and legacy systems, which will allow businesses to plug and play the solution with their existing call centre and CRM software.

Further, AI Rudder offers an open API that makes for fast and seamless integration of Voice AI into existing IT and legacy systems. Say goodbye to long and frustrating customer service calls and hello to spontaneous, responsive communication!

Voice AI can be scaled up to deliver reliable and timely support

Getting a responsive answer from a human customer service agent does not necessarily translate to a smoother experience. It can be equally frustrating if the agent lacks the knowledge needed to solve the issue at hand. In fact, this is a big pain point when it comes to customer service.

As a business grows, products and services may diversify and increase in volume. In such instances, Voice AI is perfectly positioned to help solve the issue of customer service knowledge management. Being digital and thus always connected to data, Voice AI can access your knowledge base much faster than any human.

Once information is acquired, it can then provide customers with the relevant information in a timely and reliable fashion. A Voice AI provider like AI Rudder is also able to help businesses offer personalisation at scale, contacting customers at their preferred time, on their preferred channel of communication and in the voice attributes they respond best to.

Voice AI can offer customers personalised service

The power of AI has created plenty of concerns that it will replace humans’ jobs. While such a concern is legitimate, Voice AI can help to significantly reduce costs while providing tools and abilities that are useful to your business. It also helps to create more meaningful opportunities for your human employees.

Furthermore, Voice AI can tailor responses according to the customer profile. As the conversation is happening, Voice AI will collect and recall important customer data such as a customer’s purchase history, what they might have complained about in the past, as well as other character and behaviour attributes to note. All of these will enable Voice AI to answer questions with minimum wait time, resulting in a much faster and more pleasant customer experience.

Voice AI allows employees to focus on more complex work

The data recorded and collected with Voice AI can be analysed and stored in real-time. For instance, Voice AI can handle a high volume of repetitive frequently asked questions, reducing the customer service team’s workload while ensuring reliable support in a timely manner. Product or service failures can also be quickly identified and analysed before it spirals into a potential PR nightmare. Further, Voice AI analytics can provide powerful insights that can help businesses refine and optimise their products and go-to-market strategies.

By handing over routine issues and allowing AI to make systematic improvements, human agents can personally assist customers with unusual and challenging problems that require the human touch.

The customer service team, with lesser repetitive tasks, can be freed up to focus on more complex work or deliver creative ways of customer service and recovery that cannot be performed by AI. Considering the high cost of customer centres, Voice AI will help customer service agents function more efficiently and effectively.

The best way to build consumer trust with Voice AI, then, is to create synergy with your business’ customer service operations. Voice AI should not be seen as a solution to everything, but rather an addition to empowering customer service agents and other employees. All in all, Voice AI and human employees can serve your customers and inspire long-lasting consumer trust in your brand.

Tapping into the strengths of Voice AI

Consumer trust is a critical aspect of the longevity of your business. Without trust, it’s very easy for businesses to lose out customers to competitors. While technologies like AI have the potential to help improve and boost consumer trust levels, businesses need to take a deeper look into the convergence of voice and AI to deliver even greater business value and elevate their customer experience to the next level.