The future workforce: how conversational AI is changing the game

By Biplab Chakraborty, Co-Founder & COO, Mihup

The appeal and potential benefits of AI have captivated public imagination in the last couple of decades. However, unlike movies where AI is seen as an evil scheming android out to capture the world, AI-driven machines are transforming processes in almost every aspect of life in the real world.

In the wake of the pandemic, AI tools have exemplified their potential. Virtual communication has become the norm now, and bots are rapidly expanding their footprint across areas such as customer engagement. Instead of the fear that AI will snatch away jobs, the technology is actually helping businesses expand, hire more humans and deliver better services to customers.

We live in an age where the speed of response has a direct impact on revenue generation and when people call or connect for a chat with customer care, they don’t like being put in the queue. They want to instantly connect to representatives who promptly understand and resolve their concerns. This is where bots act as the enablers as they can easily take care of the standardized and routine questions which usually make up for the bulk of queries for any business – for instance, how to renew the subscription of a service or questions related to product details and features.

Another transformational ability of conversational AI is that it doesn’t just speak to callers in a human-like voice, but also transforms the quality of responses during voice, chat or email conversations by analysing conversation data at the backend. Conventionally, human quality analysts are employed by contact centres to listen-in to conversations and analyse chat scripts to spot discrepancies in script adherence, identify violations if any and also evaluate agents on various parameters related to conversation quality and potential areas of improvement. However, the limitation to human ability results in no more than 2% to 3% of all conversations being analysed. The random picking of conversations for analysis fails to give an accurate assessment of the agent skills, customers’ concerns as well as adherence, as nearly 97% of the conversations never get reviewed.

This is where conversational AI platforms have changed the game drastically. Being a software, AI won’t get swamped by the number of calls or become disinterested after hours of analysing data on the same parameters. Thus, it ensures quality analysis of 100% of conversations across voice, chat, email or social media conversations for the brands. They get a holistic understanding of the customer’s voice, and are able to modify, improve or expand their services and product offerings accordingly. It is this nearly limitless ability of conversational AI in various scenarios that is driving the adoption of the technology in various industries such as:

Telecom – AI is being used in customer service by telecom service providers especially in resolving technical and billing related queries.

Travel and aviation – Chatbots and conversational AI are assisting customers with bookings, cancellation, rescheduling as well in processing refunds etc., across the travel and hospitality sector.

E-commerce – AI is highly active on e-commerce platforms and helps customers through purchase process by showing them products similar to what they are looking for, apart from recommending options in other categories that a customer typically buys.

Healthcare – AI chatbots proved their worth during the pandemic outbreak by responding to public queries related to general health questions on various diseases, hygiene, pandemic symptoms and accessing medical facilities.

Nowadays, voice AI systems can perform the above mentioned as well as various other roles and responsibilities. In terms of linguistics, Indian conversational AI brands are now offering unmatched vernacular conversational support in languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and others, and capability to comprehend conversations based on the natural language processing principles. Such advanced conversational AI deployment allows organizations to understand customer sentiment, intent and empowers them with the ability to better engage and serve the customer needs. The day is not far when we will see conversational AI becoming integrated with almost everything around us and creating a hands-free world of business operations.