Imagine your customers receive quick, relevant, tailored, and up-to-date responses across several channels. They send an email and then continue their conversation with the chatbot on your website. It doesn't matter that they've changed channel. Conversational artificial intelligence can offer all of this.
This technology is transforming telecommunications and making customer interactions more natural and streamlined. This technology allows you to automate processes and improve the quality of your customer service. Want to know more? Keep reading.
The Advantages of Conversational AI for Telecoms
The telecommunications sector is distinctive. Given the strong competition, it's still important to pay particular attention to the quality of customer service. To do this, integrating conversational AI for telecoms can be cost-effective, good for the customer experience, and improve staff productivity. Let's see how.
Reduced Waiting Time
This is many customer's pet peeve: 56% of consumers believe long wait times are the most common cause of bad customer experience (according to a Replicant study).
Conversational AI can manage a large number of incoming calls simultaneously, routing, and providing automated responses, which can drastically reduce wait times for callers. Implementing conversational AI also reduces response time: A voicebot or a callbot takes less than 3 seconds to understand and respond to a vocal query.
Improved Agent Productivity
Did you know operational productivity can be improved thanks to implementing conversational AI in a call center? Implementing a callbot can reduce customer service times by 29% (Siècle Digital Study [in French]).
Automated Common Customer Queries and FAQs
An intelligent conversational agent can automate responses for frequent and straightforward customer queries. 80% of customer queries are considered to fall into this category. For example, your customer might often encounter difficulties accessing their account, renewing a subscription, or paying their bills. Conversational AI could interact with your customers, ask them questions, and guide them through the issue to find a solution to their problem without any need for intervention from a human customer support agent.
This benefits human agents, who can focus on more complex customer queries.
Reduced Operating Costs
Automated customer service processes with conversational AI can reduce:
handling times (for example, the average handle time for calls)
costs directly associated with handling customer queries, with a part of the 100% delegated to an AI and not to human agents
You can eliminate specific direct interactions between a customer and an agent or reduce the time taken by these interactions. This time gained will reduce your operating costs. For example, answering a query on social media costs 1 dollar instead of 6 when handled over the phone by a human agent.
Improved Customer Experience
The 24/7 availability of an intelligent callbot in your telecom company’s call center is the biggest advantage, especially when compared to standard telephony. You can offer uninterrupted customer service and heighten customer satisfaction.
Are you worried your customers will be reticent about speaking to an artificial intelligence? Don't worry! 69% of customers worldwide are open to using AI to improve their customer service, up from 60% in 2021 (Salesforce).
Use Cases for Conversational AI in Telecoms
Let's look at some concrete examples of how conversational AI can maximize its potential advantages.
Troubleshooting and Support
Your customer contacts you via your website's chat function to complain about their landline not working. Conversational AI answers.
Managing Bills and Payments
Your customer calls you because they want to go from annual to monthly billing and settle their entire bill. Your conversational AI manages everything with a fast and secure payment process.
Customer Support and Call Transfers
Your customer wants to speak with a human agent to fix a technical problem. They've already looked for information online and can't find an answer. Your virtual agent manages authentication, ensuring customer security and confidentiality before redirecting the call to customer service as demanded. The human agent can then help the customer, who's already been verified.
Managing Appointments
Your customer wants to confirm that they've arrived at their appointment, but all your human agents are busy. Conversational AI can respond to the caller and confirm that they've arrived.
Managing Accounts
Your customer is unable to log in to their account and would like to be sent a new password. The conversational AI agent can email them a link to reset their password.
Upsell and Cross-sell
A potential customer would like to sign up. Conversational AI can take them through the verification and account creation process, offering complementary subscriptions such as a phone line before directing them to a human advisor who can finalize the process.
How to Implement Conversational AI in Customer Service
Conversational AI agents can complete many automated tasks instead of human customer service agents. Voicebots, chatbots, and call bots all guarantee improved productivity, profitability, and customer satisfaction. However, you still need to integrate these tools into your current ecosystem. Here's how to do it, step by step.
1. Identify Your Contact Points
Here are the questions that you’ll need to ask to define your company’s needs for installing a conversational AI agent:
What are the questions most commonly asked by your customers? Which communication channels do they use?
What services are most likely to answer our callers’ questions?
Which communication channels are most in need of automation?
For which use cases are we losing the most time? Or money?
On which channels will our customers see the value-added of artificial intelligence?
2. Identify Cases Where AI is Applicable
Define the use cases where you could implement a conversational AI and it would be:
Beneficial to the growth of your telecoms company.
Compatible with the current customer service ecosystem.
Appreciated by your customers.
As we’ve already mentioned in this article, you could decide to automate tasks in cases like:
Customer authentication.
Routing to other services.
Scheduling appointments.
After-call or after-order feedback requests to continually improve your customer service.
3. Training the AI
Once you've asked the right questions, it's time to train your conversational AI in real conditions to answer your customer requests in the best way possible. If your human customer service agents speak to your customers in a certain way, it would be odd, maybe even detrimental to your brand image, for your conversational AI to speak to them differently. With the help of callbot or voicebot professionals, you can train your AI to answer as closely as possible to what a human agent would have done.
4. Testing and Deploying Your Conversational AI
Finally, test your AI in real conditions:
Does the AI work as planned?
Is the customer experience still good, or even improved?
Is customer feedback still good? If not, why?
Now, you can launch your virtual agent!
5. Evaluating Results
Continually monitor your AI to predict potential problems and to optimize performance, particularly by measuring KPIs like:
First call resolution rate (FCR)
Average handling time (AHT)
Abandonment Rate
Conversational artificial intelligence is transforming the telecoms sector by improving interactions between companies and their customers. With callbots, chatbots or voicebots, companies can offer uninterrupted customer service, reducing costs and improving the productivity of human customer service agents. Conversational AI can help with troubleshooting, managing payments, and authenticating customers. By investing in these smart tools, telecom companies can improve customer satisfaction and maintain a real competitive advantage.