Artificial Intelligence, UX Design

Should You Indulge in Conversational UX for Your Startup?

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Owing to the pandemic, the inability to have one-on-one conversations with customers led businesses to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-based customer engagement platforms for seamless customer experience. Players across industries are increasingly using smart bots to transform customer engagement. 

According to Markets and Markets, the global conversational AI market is expected to be worth $18.4 billion by 2026 from $6.8 billion in 2021, growing at a CAGR of 21.8 percent between 2021 and 2026. The market is constantly growing and evolving and is currently dominated by Big Data and Natural Language Processing (NLP). 

“AI-based chatbots allow for the monitoring of and automation of personalized customer experiences at scale and have proved to be pivotal in the optimization of communication across industries.”

In this article, we will look at conversational AI’s significance for startups.

What is conversational AI?

Conversational AI includes voice, chat, and other methods that mimic human conversations. Essentially, conversational AI enables two-way communication between humans and devices.

Conversational AI is already present around us in the form of virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri. We’ve been telling them to play our favorite song, book a movie ticket and schedule something on our calendar.

Despite the complications in implementing AI, ML, and NLP technologies that power virtual assistants and chatbots, the technology is becoming more popular and accessible.

Insider Intelligence predicts that by 2024, consumer retail spending via chatbots will increase to $142 billion- up from $2.8 billion in 2019.

Whether based on voice or text, conversational AI is rapidly becoming a part of small and cutting-edge businesses looking to create a standout experience for their customers, among other applications.

Why is Conversational AI Gaining Ground

1. Better Customer Experience (CX)

Conversational AI is a great way to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Customers today wish to engage with businesses during hours convenient to them through channels they want to leverage.

Round-the-clock availability and accessibility of customer support and helpdesk can significantly influence customer retention and lifetime customer value. 

“A chatbot can offer a multilingual and profoundly personalized experience for startups in global locations.”

Several reports show that customers are happy to spend more to purchase from businesses that deliver a great CX. By helping customers place orders, resolve queries and receive support without manual intervention, conversational AI can enhance the speed and efficiency of service, adding to an exceptional CX.

2. Higher Conversions

The inherent artificial intelligence in chatbots helps businesses optimize conversions, upsells, cross-sells and prospecting by bringing in fresh insight from collected data. Conversational AI can also help in lead generation by collecting prospective buyers’ names and email addresses before answering their queries.

For e-commerce businesses, achieving higher conversions with chatbots might mean recommending relevant products to buyers, following up on unfinished purchases or offering discounts on items in customers’ shopping carts.

Such applications can be a possibility across hospitality, healthcare, banking & finance, events, tourism, and travel.

3. Higher Employee Efficiency

When virtual assistants and chatbots handle your customers’ repetitive and basic queries, support agents can focus on requests that are a bit more complicated and need a human touch. Chatbots can also be designed to suggest customers get in touch with a human rep on arriving at a situation that the bot is not designed to handle.

Service reps have fewer monotonous tasks and more time and energy to cater to customer needs.

For industries such as event planning and tourism, when businesses experience a spike in traffic, chatbots can help offload the volume of calls and enhance efficiency.

Chatbots can lead to better employee satisfaction and productivity by freeing up valuable resources for agents.

4. Quicker and More Human Customer Support

AI and ML backing your customer support means you get to build a relationship with each customer and learn their journey with your business before attempting to resolve their issues. The availability of background information on customers allows reps to serve them quicker- anticipating their needs at times.

If chatbots allow reps to do anything, it’s humanizing the support process. Conversational AI enables ongoing conversations instead of disparate tickets and requests. With the underlying intelligence, agents can use the information to build a rapport with each customer, enhancing the quality of relationships.

91% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands who recognize & remember them and recommend relevant products and offers.

5. An Enriched Omnichannel Experience

Omnichannel presence allows businesses to create several touchpoints with customers across platforms yet offer a unified experience. The goal is to make it convenient for customers to reach you anytime and anywhere using their platform of choice.

From live chat to video chat to email support to text messaging, conversational AI can help you leverage an entire spectrum of avenues to open up your business to your customers. The specific application of an omnichannel experience would depend on the nature of the business.

But it’s for sure: conversational AI can make a holistic support experience for businesses.

Popular Conversational AI use cases

From simple customer support to conversational interfaces and complex banking operations, you can find the use cases of conversational Artificial Intelligence in numerous departments and industries.

Here are some top industry use cases. They all aim to improve customer service and customer interaction while enhancing user experience.

1. Data Collection

Conversational AI isn’t just about customer interaction. It can actually help your business collect and analyze data that you can use to make important decisions, providing you a competitive edge.

You can even use this data to understand customers and help your staff identify cracks in your current processes.

For example, let’s say a customer sounds more unsettled when they reach out about a particular issue or after they’re offered certain information. In that case, conversational AI can gather customer sentiment data, helping you to diagnose your pain points.

Sounds like exactly what you’re looking for?

This is why we at KiwiTech make Conversational AI accessible to startups. Learn more about our implementation process and consultation by speaking to one of our Artificial Intelligence consultants today.

2. Retail

Conversational AI is being increasingly used in retail and e-commerce. Here are some of its applications:

Customer conversations can be recorded digitally. This eliminates the need to record every word said during an interaction or contact center conversation. Your businesses can gain further insight into your products and services by just analyzing the search queries they’re being asked.

Product recommendations are another use case retailers can use a conversational AI solution to make product recommendations based on customer interaction.

3. Healthcare

Here are some healthcare conversational AI use cases:

For diagnosis and medical scheduling, conversational AI tools can diagnose health conditions online by asking questions to patients and in scheduling their appointments by offering them information about their next visit.

Whereas, for data collection, pharmaceutical companies can use conversational AI to compile patient or customer feedback via focus groups or surveys. This is done without the need for an interviewer, saving time and money in hiring human data collectors.

4. Internet of Things (IoT) Devices

Conversational AI-enabled devices that use speech recognition to interact with users are becoming quite the helper in modern homes.

These devices incorporate voice assistant technologies like Amazon Echo and Google Home, as well as mobile apps or smart device assistants like Google Assistant, Apple Siri, or Cortana.

Some of the conversational AI applications in this industry include:

  • Controlling home appliances via Google Home or Amazon Alexa.
  • Monitoring any device that can dial phone numbers or send messages to the user.
  • Apps and devices like Amazon Alexa let you order food or groceries. While they’re at it, they also learn about your preferences, so the AI bot can suggest products or services that may interest you.

Challenges of Conversational Artificial Intelligence

While conversational AI improves business strategy, finances and operations, it doesn’t come without challenges.

A flawed rollout of a chatbot or virtual assistant can compromise brand trust and reputation. We’ve all been on the receiving end of chatbots that didn’t respond the ideal way and left us more frustrated than before.

Once a customer tries your conversational AI experience, it will either leave them satisfied or aggravated- sadly, there is no in-between. 

There is also a challenge in choosing the right conversational solution for your business. At this point, it’d be essential to analyze your audience’s demographics and understand their channels of choice to communicate with your company before implementing a solution.

KiwiTech helps resolve AI challenges for startups

By helping startups build reliable relationships. By communicating with customers in their familiar environment, your company allows them to feel that they are heard, supported, and appreciated. Such clients will, in turn, appreciate the flexibility of the system and its ability to help them to achieve the desired result, whether it is a conversation with a chatbot or a virtual agent who joined in the conversation right in time.

We are constantly improving interactive applications and solutions. we are working on the perfection of their use cases and paradigms, which ultimately will lead to increased productivity for startups and a more personalized and accessible experience for end customers.

Since a conversational AI solution doesn’t come mistake-proof, we encourage you to rely on experts. 

At KiwiTech, we have helped several startups get the right conversational UI implementation for their business. Speak to one of our AI consultants today.


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