Conversational AI Explained: What It Is and How It Works

[Leo_Thomas]

To provide problem-solving support for customers, some organizations use technologies, such as chatbots or intelligent virtual agents (IVAs), to enhance customer experience and interface. These customers support technologies are, themselves, a form of artificial intelligence designed to mimic a human conversational experience.

Customer service and contact centers operate quite differently today than they did a few years ago. Consumers used to be assisted by interactive voice response (IVR) systems that were rudimentary and quite annoying to use. Now, businesses are solving customer support challenges with a broad range of virtual intelligent agents that are custom IVAs that provide a genuinely more intelligent and dynamic solution.

As per GMI Research, the Conversational AI Market is forecast to reach USD 38.8 billion in 2030

TYPES AND USE CASES OF CONVERSATIONAL AI


Conversational AI, like all technological improvements, is both large and diverse in its applications. While the ecosystem continues to operate in a fast-forming fashion, the following outlines some of the more commonly seen verticals in conversational AI that businesses are adopting today.

Conversational AI Systems


The primary AI systems that solve end-user problems focus on having the right conversations. They tend to improve problem-solving via contact center representatives through the use of NLP and LLM technologies to increase conversational call containment.

Intelligent Virtual Agent


Also known as IVAs, these systems are utilized by businesses and organizations to address the most popular queries of customers. They tend to use NLP to comprehend customer queries and are trained to provide a limited range of simplistic responses to solve basic queries in customer service.

Voice assistants


Voice assistants are the relevant software programs which use voice recognition to carry out simple tasks like setting an alarm or checking the weather. Examples include Alexa, Siri, and several other programs.

These voice assistants are able to assist their masters because they transcribe voice messages into text and analyze them to identify the user's needs. Though these may appear to be simple programs, they have the ability to carry out very complex tasks like any other advanced AI systems. They utilize natural language processing and voice recognition techniques to analyze the queries and respond.

Benefits of Conversational AI


The introduction of Conversational AI into a business usually brings a paradigm shift. There are many alternatives in the market, but it is no secret that Conversational AI has many advantages to any business that wants to enhance productivity and customer satisfaction.

Improved Efficiency and Productivity


The use of Conversational AI in any business enables that business to enhance the speed of problem resolution. Customers are able to get the resolutions to their questions without having to wait and are always satisfied. Efficiency in the business is also enhanced since there is an optimized workflow.

Businesses have always been using AI systems to enhance productivity. Conversational AI empowers businesses to achieve their core objectives without succumbing to the burden of simple repetitive queries that do not require human effort to resolve.

More productive allocation of your skilled customer representatives can commence as they will be enabled to engage in high value conversations.

Scalability


One of the key benefits of conversational AI is that you can rapidly scale. More growth in your business means more customer interactions and at times, you may not be able to anticipate or prepare for it.

Hiring and training new resources is generally a lengthy and expensive process as it comes with a lot of human errors, mostly in the training phase of any new contact center campaign. This is the time where conversational AI helps organizations meet demand and handle as many interactions as needed with no lag in response time and no errors in accuracy.