How Voice AI Can Revolutionize India's Customer Service Industry Voice AI can comprehend the context and semantics of customer queries and capture customer voice tone, speed of conversation, and emotions

Accelerating digital adoption trends have created a steady demand for automation and AI, reshaping how organizations conduct business and interact with customers. We are witnessing a voice-led revolution that will change how we interact and do business. According to a report by Deloitte, about 30 per cent of all sales will be led by voice by 2030.

Voice AI is a technology that automates repetitive contact center conversations using powerful AI capabilities and leverages Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) algorithms to enable dialogue based on human interactions to give logical and prompt responses. Simply, voice AI follows a pattern that involves encoding and decoding information between two people during a conversation. The digital voice agents provide personalized responses to customers in multi-turn conversations and resolve queries without wait time.

Voice AI is growing in relevance as a customer experience (CX) tool

Because of its versatile capabilities, voice AI has helped restaurants, hospitality chains, and finance-related businesses with heavy-weight processes such as banking and insurance save up to 50 per cent of costs within contact-center operations while maintaining a better customer retention rate.

The BFSI sector is a prominent area that can significantly leverage this technology. Data shows that BFSI companies can achieve up to a 30 per cent call containment rate and save up to 28 per cent of their contact center expenses. Rising call volumes, customers choosing direct voice interactions with agents over IVR options, and an increase in the average processing time per customer are some of the issues banks have to navigate. Digital voice agents have been trained to handle queries on industry-specific product lines and can handle up to 100,000 customer calls each day! By incorporating voice AI, banks can reduce their operating expenses by 60 per cent and resolve 90 per cent of all consumer inquiries.

Similarly, the hospitality sector has seen faster resolution and turnaround times using Voice AI. Hotel aggregators have been able to save up to $200,000 in annual costs using this technology. According to data, popular hotel aggregators deal with over 1,000 outbound calls every day on queries, and while there are alternative support channels such as email and chat, the majority of consumer inquiries are phone calls, taxing contact centers. By intelligently automating the calls, Voice AI can help hotel aggregators contain their overall customer calls by 40 per cent.

Why companies must look beyond legacy IVRs and chatbots

Most customers prefer talking to contact center agents to address concerns and emergency situations, but they first need to traverse IVR systems that subject them to prolonged processes of sifting through long menus with confusing options. Chatbots are also restricted to performing pre-programmed functions and cannot provide customers with detailed insights on queries.

To ensure quicker turnaround times and easy to use services, companies and contact centers are leveraging voice AI, which is intuitive, and also allows contact centers to provide 24/7 service without burdening human agents. Voice AI is based on a gamut of conversational AI technologies such as Spoken Language Understanding (SLU), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Text To Speech (TTS). These engines are trained and modeled on human speech patterns, to be able to receive requests, interpret, and provide solutions that are much faster and more reliable.

Voice AI gives customers the power of self-service. By eliminating unwanted facets of IVRs, such as wait times, accidental commands, and unexpected call cuts, the technology enables them to address their concerns in an engaging, significantly less time-consuming way.

Value creation with voice AI

Speech is a natural human communication form. In the customer experience business, plenty of technologies are built for text-based interactions and do not necessarily work well with voice conversations. Many voice-first technology platforms are outperforming legacy technologies on crucial elements of user experience.

A quick voice command or a function that can help customers find what they are looking for wins in today's CX-centric era. Therefore, voice-first technology platforms are vital in closing the gaps in brand and customer interactions. By switching to voice-controlled interfaces, millions of those who lack computers or digital literacy skills can utilize the voice channel to find what they want in their choice of language. Voice AI extends customer service to millions of customers without barriers as extensive language support drives personalized brand-customer communication.

Voice AI can comprehend the context and semantics of customer queries and capture customer voice tone, speed of conversation, and emotions. Effectively solving millions of customer query calls that bombard contact centers during peak seasons, without compromising the quality of customer experience. Additionally, Voice AI allows for intelligent AI and human partnership by solving tier 1 issues so agents can focus on resolving complex queries. Digital Voice Agents enable contact centers to receive all inbound calls and perform multiple outbound calls concurrently. This way, companies can save money and maintain a competitive edge, especially during economic downturns. As Voice AI technology matures, it will revolutionize the customer service industry and become critical to a company's overall business performance.