To date, voicebots have garnered a bad reputation. They’re known for being inaccurate, clunky, and frustrating to operate. Thanks to the low-quality, underperforming voice technology of the last twenty years, customer confidence in automated phone support is low.
However, the underlying technology powering these interactions has greatly improved over time. 2023 is the year voicebots will enter the mainstream of customer service.
Voicebots are just chatbots with a critical step added in at the front and back end of the operation chain: voice understanding and text-to-speech functionality. The underlying natural language processing technology is the same for both voicebots and chatbots. The frustration often comes from the ability, or lack thereof, of voicebots to understand human commands. However, in recent years, we have seen voice understanding technology make significant strides. This has come with the popularity of virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa.
The technological foundations of voice technology would make a fascinating article in their own right. However, this piece will focus on why 2023 will be the year of the voicebot. It will explore how to build a successful voicebot, where voicebots can be deployed, and their successful use cases, before looking to the future and what voicebots might be used for in coming years.
Building successful voicebots
When building a successful voicebot for business, it needs:
- To be adequately trained and prepared for customer deployment
- Strong foundational coding
- To reflect a brand’s tone of voice and values
- Accurate speech recognition
- To know when to hand to a human agent
Training voice technology on as much data as you can get your hands on is vital. The more data a conversational AI model has to learn from, the better its responses will be. Furthermore, once deployed, conversational AI needs attention. AI trainers should be on hand to update ‘outside of the box’ requests so that the voicebot is better prepared next time. The more time a conversational AI spends responding to customers, the less human intervention will be needed. It’s important not to view voicebots as an ‘install and walk away’ kind of technology.
The need for strong foundational coding comes from the critical processes involved in voicebots’ input processing. All requests must pass through a series of programmes – from automatic speech recognition to natural language processing, through to request contextualisation and text-to-speech – and all need to be watertight. That’s why selecting a voicebot provider with a proven track record across these disciplines is so important.
Many customers view voice technology with suspicion as a wholesale replacement for human agents, but that could not be further from the truth. Voicebots allow human agents to deal with the high value-added requests they’re trained for and delegate the simple requests that often take up a large majority of workers’ time. The best voicebots are the ones that can sense when their knowledge cache is depleted and can swiftly hand over to a human agent.
Trust can only be built one way – and that is through proving reliability. For customers, that doesn’t mean just retaining a similar level of customer service but elevating the current offering. Building a personalised service above and beyond that which currently exists. For employees, that means witnessing how voicebots can lessen their workload and become powerful virtual colleagues that empower employees to better distribute their time and energy to those who need it.
Benefits and use cases
Now for the good part! We’ve talked about how to get the most out of your voicebot and hopefully dispelled some long-held prejudices against voicebots along the way. But what can voice technology do for businesses?
The obvious has already been mentioned – reduce contact rates, lower operational costs, and improve customer response times. A win for both business and customer alike. However, voicebots can do so much more than deal with simple requests.
Language barriers are eradicated by voicebots, with voicebots able to converse fluently in whatever languages are programmed beforehand. Furthermore, voice technology has 24/7 availability, don’t need to rest, sleep or take a break of any kind, and are infinitely available, reducing workloads significantly for human workers. They bring accessibility to people from all over the world at all hours of the day.
They have more niche capabilities for specific industries too. Take financial services; a banking voice bot can assist a caller with questions about interest rates, opening times and their recent transactions, while if required, can transfer money, change payment dates or block their card. In the education and healthcare industries, too, we have barely scratched the surface of their capabilities.
Looking to the future
The vital thing to remember with voicebots is that the technology will only improve as time goes on. While voicebots have had a negative perception previously, that does not mean that they won’t be entirely transformational for businesses in future. Moreover, the exponential rate at which conversational AI advances shows little sign of slowing down. One of the many benefits of conversational AI is its ability to learn through experience. Embedded conversational AI will learn from every mistake and personalise every subsequent action.
Voicebots have the potential to simplify multiple customer interactions beyond just customer helplines. Voicebots can and will comfort older people with a more personalised service whilst taking on more complex tasks as they learn and improve. The use cases for voicebots are already numerous and ever-growing, but the most important thing to remember is that their potential is limitless.