Having a human conversation with a machine has quietly moved from the realm of science fiction into reality. Today, Voice AIs (artificial intelligence) can engage people in conversation, ask and answer questions, and create an interface between people and computers using two-way natural language interactions.

Call centres, virtual assistants and chatbots applications make up Voice AI’s most common use-cases, although machine learning and AI has evolved to the point where Voice AI can be put to use in practically every vertical industry imaginable.

From generating leads to post-sale customer support, Voice AI helps companies automate almost every interaction with one’s customers, efficiently handling complex requests while still engaging with a personal touch. This combination of versatility and ease of use allows early adopters of Voice AI to reap a wide range of benefits. And if you are thinking about implementing conversational AI into your workforce, here are some of the long term benefits you can expect to see.

Increased business efficiency

Call centre agents are only human and there is a limit to what they can do. Inefficiencies can creep up over time in instances such as basic calls taking up over a third of all calls leading to longer waiting time for customers, unforeseen human errors and sick leaves, and the stress coping with the sheer volume of customer calls during peak seasons can affect your calling capacity, resulting in your campaign falling short of objectives.

Businesses leveraging Voice AI, on the other hand, can scale up calling capacity more sustainably and quicker than their human-only counterparts. Voice AI can make thousands of concurrent calls without fail, doing the work of an entire floor of human agents without increasing costs or planning for seasonal demand.

By passing on high-volume repetitive tasks to Voice AI, it can lighten the customer service representative’s load considerably and increase your overall business efficiency. Voice AI can take on a large volume of tasks, resolve the majority of calls without human intervention and automatically pass on high-value and more complex requests to human agents to handle.

Further, Voice AI-driven automated campaigns can be scheduled in advance, saving time and effort for call centre managers and planners. And as Voice AI works tirelessly 24 hours, seven days a week, with no sick days or leaves, businesses can pursue their marketing objectives without any compromises in consistency and efficiency over time.

Improved profitability

Payments or debt collection can be challenging for human agents in the long run; they may endure an emotional toll from dealing with reluctant or difficult customers, triggering high agent turnover.

Voice AI, on the other hand, can tackle payments collections dispassionately but efficiently – automating payment reminders and collection calls without compromising the call centre’s customer-centric approach, thus simplifying the overall payments collection process.

By efficiently handling higher volumes of calls, Voice AI can help increase collection rates, and even gather data that can help decision-makers improve and optimise their collection strategies.

Reduced overhead costs

The high costs of running contact centres can be prohibitive for companies with little margin for error: equipment costs, workspace leases, and labour costs can account for up to 80% of the company’s overhead.

Voice AI quickly eliminates most of the high costs associated with human agents. The expenditures associated with staffing, human resources, training and management, and office leases can all be repurposed for other areas of the business, while Voice AI takes over the functions previously performed by call centre agents.

The resulting savings can be quite significant: AI Rudder estimates that their proprietary Voice AI technology can cut up to 50% of labour costs in the call centres they operate in.

Voice-AI-powered contact centres can also scale up and down according to demand, without the need for additional expenditures. Businesses can contract or expand capacity as needed, ensuring business continuity and delivering customer satisfaction even as call volume peaks and ebbs.

Optimised customer interactions

Even at their best, human call centre agents often fall short in providing consistent customer service. Customers may have to call in during operating hours; stay on hold for the next available agent, or fail to communicate with the customer service agent because of language barriers.

Voice AI, on the other hand, offer customers more accessibility. Businesses can customise Voice AIs’ tone and voice to suit their brand; 24-7 operations ensure non-stop availability, so customers can call in at their own convenience, and in their preferred spoken language.

By giving customers more control over their journey, Voice AIs can improve the quality of their interactions, which improves customer satisfaction in turn.

More efficient data gathering

Customer insights can be difficult and expensive to extract using traditional methods like focus groups and surveys. Data from human call centre agents can also be especially tricky to gather and analyse. Further, how can managers make sense of hours and hours of voice calls, when today’s competitive business environment requires insight in real-time?

Unlike human agents, Voice AI can collect and parse caller data even as the call is happening – recording call duration, customer feedback, customer status, even the customer’s mood; or bucket customers into different “stages” of intent. The platform can then analyse the data, extracting actionable insights that can help organisations find new revenue opportunities, detect hidden issues, and make better management decisions.

The data can be downloaded in a convenient API format for easy data retrieval over multiple platforms; or presented and visualised on a dashboard as needed in real-time.

Lower risk and better quality assurance

Call centre managers have their hands full monitoring an alphabet-soup of quality assurance metrics – including (but not limited to) Average Speed of Answering (ASA), Average Handle Time (AHT) and Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSATs), among others. Few call centres can manage consistently high QA metrics, and as staff turnover takes a toll, new staff must be retrained to keep up.

Automating calls with Voice AI simplifies the quality assurance process – by eliminating the human error factor, Voice AI can maintain consistently high metrics.

The platform automatically records and transcribes conversations for data processing, checking for conformity with standard operating procedures and detecting the presence of abusive or otherwise non-standard language. In most use cases, AI Rudder’s Voice AI’s can help businesses achieve a tenfold increase in work performance and efficiency.

Interested in reaping your own business benefits?

In the next few years, more businesses (including your competitors) will take on conversational AI solutions, helping the market reach revenues of US$15 billion in 2024, accelerating to a 30.2% CAGR between 2019 and 2024.

The positive impact of deploying Voice AI can hardly be understated – with benefits you won’t want to miss. You’ll free up your human employee to handle more high-value work, leaving the heavy lifting to Voice AI that works 24 hours a day without rest.