AI Voice Bots: How to Redefine Customer Support

Interactive Voice Response systems or IVR are no longer the main automation tool of support teams. Meet AI voice bots: smart technology based on Natural Language Processing (NLP). IVR systems use a rule-based logic, and while they can understand some speech, they are quite limited in what they can do. Mostly, they redirect customers to human support members or FAQ pages best suited for the category of their issue.

An AI voice bot, however, can actually understand and help resolve a lot of queries, redirecting the most difficult questions to humans. It is a great way to automate customer support. Let’s take a look at these tools and see what advantages and disadvantages they have.

The Modern Call for AI Voice Bots

Nowadays, customers are not very patient. They want their questions answered right away, and that often means during the night. They also expect personalized help, and they will not be happy with a link to your FAQ. AI can help with all these issues. It is available around the clock, and advanced AI takes into account the user’s history of interacting with your company. Moreover, AI voice bots offer actual solutions to the users’ problems or direct them to a human for a particularly tricky case. 

However, customers are not the only ones enjoying the good things AI can bring. Customer support also prefers working with bots. It is not very fulfilling to constantly respond to one and the same question by copy-pasting the answer. It is much better to have some help from AI and tackle only the issues that truly require human intervention. By acquiring an AI voice bot, you are helping both your clients and employees, which naturally translates to benefits to you as a business owner.

Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for human intelligence; it is a tool to amplify human creativity and ingenuity.

Fei-Fei Li, scientist

The Advantages

• You can easily teach your bot to be multilingual. 
• It is possible to employ AI voice chatbots across different channels. Naturally, they can use the phone, but you can also add popular messengers like WhatsApp. 
• AI handles an overwhelming number of requests better than human teams. Such a bot can respond to multiple people at once straight away, right after they contact you. That is a major benefit of this technology.
• Data collection is a crucial ability of AI voice bots. They can discover and record a lot of information about a customer, including their behavior, preferences, and even pain points. 
• Aside from collecting data, AI also retrieves it. For example, it can “look up” the order history of a client. This information is very helpful in responding to user questions. 
• Finally, AI takes action. These days, an AI voice bot that is sufficiently advanced can resolve a problem a customer has — for instance, process a refund or schedule an appointment. 
• AI learns. It takes time and resources, of course, but it is a very good investment. You can even add an integration with your Customer Relationship Management system to your voice bot. With time, your AI will be better at dealing with your clients. 
• AI bots still have the option of directing a conversation toward a human. There will be some requests and queries that a bot cannot deal with. Or, perhaps, it cannot resolve them yet and will learn to deal with them later. For that, human support members can be employed. Freed from repetitive and simple requests, they will be able to use their time most effectively, solving unique and complicated issues.

All these advantages mean that AI voice bots are very desirable.

The Disadvantages

• AI is an investment. It is not cheap to create voice bots, and they often require customization, regular optimization, and training. However, in the long run, AI voice bots help save money. Smaller support teams and less training, as well as fewer pieces of equipment and other infrastructure, mean reduced costs.
• AI is generally very good at compliance, but it needs to be trained to maintain it. It also requires proper encryption. Make sure that your AI is in compliance with all your local and international regulations. 
• It is well-known among those who use ChatGPT that AI makes mistakes. That includes voice bots. The solution is to train and supervise your bot, but even a trained AI can still offer an answer that is wrong and even potentially dangerous. 
• AI that can take action might choose the wrong thing to do. For instance, it can provide a refund when it really should not. The solution, again, is training and supervision. If you feel like your voice bot has not gotten enough training, it may be best not to allow it to take action.
• AI does not truly understand emotion the way humans do. It is bad at grasping sarcasm and does not always fully understand context. Fortunately, you can solve that problem with redirection to human support members.
• Some clients do not like the idea of talking with bots. They want a human to handle their case. It may be best to instruct your AI to allow that. That might mean wasting the time of a support member on an issue that AI could have solved. But it still results in better customer support, which is the eventual goal.

The disadvantages of AI voice bots are mostly resolved with some attention to what an AI needs to function well.

How Are Support Roles Changing Due to AI Voice Bots?

• Humans no longer deal with an avalanche of questions that can be answered automatically using templates. Now, they are more likely to work with a smaller number of issues that truly cannot be handled by AI. That can be because there is no known answer to a problem, which AI could have provided. Alternatively, the situation can require the emotional intelligence of a human, for instance, in the case of highly emotional clients.
• Additionally, human support members have more time for building rapport with users. They can dedicate more time to each case that does reach them. It is a good opportunity to make the interaction as positive as possible.
• Humans also oversee what AI does and often help in training it. Support members tend to check voice bot transcripts and provide feedback on its actions. 
• In connection to that, human support members now have to acquire new skills in dealing with AI voice bots. They are also often busy with updating knowledge bases and other information a voice bot uses. This is not always a new activity, but it is very important now for voice bots.

In Conclusion 

Voice bots are not new, but with AI, we are moving away from IVR and toward a smarter option. An AI voice bot is an investment! But it is likely to pay off by making their jobs easier for your support team and improving customer experience. As long as your bot gets enough training — something that your employees will learn to help with — it is bound to automate a lot about customer support.