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Conversational AI is driving disruption and Valenta Conversational AI Innovation

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Conversational AI is Driving Disruption and Innovation

Four common conversational AI business use cases

Conversational AI is a revolutionary technology that lets people interface with machines using ingrained skills (the ability to communicate conversationally). Conversation is an interface everyone already knows how to use, and this is a dramatic shift in the way we interact with technology. The sophistication goes beyond the interface, however, as conversational AI represents the ability to do more than augment single tasks. In successful implementations, conversational AI radically changes how humans solve complex problems, making previously inaccessible technology available to the masses with no learning curve. Conversational AI is also more than just verbal communication with machines. It encompasses many channels, from rich web chat, to voice, to SMS, to email.

Conversational AI can help businesses dynamically scale customer engagement processes through automation, leading to even better customer and employee experiences. These solutions can reduce the costs associated with serving customers and clients and maximize task processing efficiency. Every department in a 21st century business can benefit from Conversational AI, especially where there is heavy customer interaction. This may explain why almost three-quarters of organizations say that conversational assistants are a key business enabler and a focal point of customer engagement strategy. A slightly higher number of organizations have realized measurable benefits from voice and chat assistants. (Press, 2019).

Implementing innovative and disruptive conversational AI solutions can have a great many benefits. However, they won’t come without risks or challenges. Two criteria are essential to succeeding with conversational AI: an open technology platform and experienced implementers who focus on user experience to drive business outcomes. OneReach.ai addresses the first of those challenges, providing a platform for designing and orchestrating conversational AI solutions across multiple channels. Valenta brings the second aspect to the table as an outcome oriented consultant, integrator, and managed service provider. Both companies are active in the conversational AI space, which is increasingly affecting more aspects of business and human/machine communications. Valenta and OneReach.ai have worked together for several years, creating solutions for our mutual clients. Here, we’ll share some of our expertise and perspective in this piece.

Disruption and Innovation

While there are seemingly infinite business processes this technology can disrupt, augment, and innovate; here are four top use cases seen by our customers and partners.

1. Customer Service and Customer Communications

Customer service solutions are ripe for this kind of automation because they take place across a range of channels, both text and voice based. Personalization will always be a core goal of customer service departments. Automated solutions can help and are augmented by using previous conversation history, purchase history, and known information about someone to tailor an interaction to their needs. When interactions with customers are personalized and automated at scale, it leads to greater conversion rates and eases the burden on human account managers-allowing them to enhance their services for a large number of clients and automate their own processes and workflows.

For simple tasks, customer service bots can handle full customer conversations without the need for any human assistance, achieving automation rates of up to 80% (Deloitte, 2019). This leads to savings through staff reduction or, more commonly, it eliminates the need to grow staff to keep up with increasing customer demands.

To provide the best experience for customers, we recommend tooling specific to your customer service organization with mechanisms to escalate and involve human agents as-needed. This allows bots to address routine tasks on their own and involve human agents when creativity or human interaction is a requirement. A feature offered by OneReach.ai, they call it human-in-the-loop.

Creating a useful automated customer experience can be tricky, so we recommend working with a partner with a deep understanding of user experience. Valenta frequently partners with OneReach.ai-the leading conversational AI Platform according to Gartner-to help our customers create and evolve truly remarkable user experiences. In Gartner’s recent Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms report (published March, 2022)OneReach.ai has the highest scoring platform for addressing customer service use cases. Our partnership of vendor and integrator is extremely beneficial for customers. OneReach.ai excels at building as the best conversational AI platforms in the industry and Valenta focuses on design and integration of customer-specific and bespoke implementations-adding additional value by focusing on mid-sized enterprises that are not served by the large consulting firms who have conversational AI project skills.

Here are some examples of customer service bots that have been built on the OneReach.ai platform:

 

Below are some helpful articles from Valenta on “What is Conversational AI” and “What to look for in a digital transformation consultant and service provider”:

 

2. Human Resources and Employee Communications

HR solutions automate a wide variety of employee-focused informational and transactional conversations. The dozens of routine processes and conversations taking place during employee on-boarding and off-boarding illustrate how HR functions are excellent candidates for conversational AI and automation.

These onboarding and offboarding interactions tend to be the same every time and are often rules-based and repetitive. Repetitive conversations like these are some of the easiest to automate. In a world that is constantly evolving with remote and hybrid working situations, many people are working at hours when the HR department may be offline. Having automated bots to address employee concerns across disparate time zones, and at employees’ convenience is a great solution that benefits employees and companies alike.

These solutions use conversational AI to create experiences for the workforce that go beyond what humans are capable of delivering on our own. Intelligent bots leveraging NLUcan fundamentally transform workplace interactions. Think of the ability to resolve inquiries, automate administrative tasks, prompt the right behaviors, and deliver data and insights to improve in-the-moment decision making. Rich web chat is also an excellent choice for making these types of interactions quick and easy.

Here is an example an HR bot that was built on the OneReach.ai platform:

 

Here is an interesting article from Valenta highlighting efficiencies, reduced costs and better data collection gained with conversational AI:

 

3. Voice Bot and Call Center

Financial benefits aside, conversational AI can provide much needed relief for organizations that integrate it successfully. Bots can work 24/7and can easily handle a majority of low-hanging-fruit issues. This means human agents will shift to handling more interesting customer queries, increasing both agent and customer satisfaction. The improved satisfaction of agents leads to less turnover, and the increase in customer satisfaction leads to greater loyalty (Hall, 2020).

Some studies have found that conversational AI empowered call centers have up to 70% of the work managed by AI enabled bots. In the coming decades this figure will jump to 90% or more. This is a positive trend for business and customers alike. In the future, only the highest value work will be overseen by human agents. By leveraging conversational AI, customer service agents will be able to address customers faster, armed with all the relevant information. A company that deploys modern call center technology can make better decisions faster and spot customer and business trends quickly. Having AI-empowered call centers and virtual call centers during the pandemic was a game changer for forward-thinking companies. They were still able to conduct business by having smart call centers, and by transitioning to virtual call centers where workers took calls wherever they were.

Even when conversational AI doesn’t handle the entirety of an interaction, it still provides incredible value by automating up-front authentication and query routing/due diligence. These menial tasks can mean millions in savings for large fortune 500 companies and millions of minutes saved for queuing customers (Press, 2019).

OneReach.ai handles over 35 million voice minutes per month and has been recognized by Gartner as the best scoring platform for voice use cases, in addition to winning a Gold Medal in Innovation in AI (Edison Awards, 2020)and Top AI Platform in Telecom (CogX). The OneReach.ai platform provides native voice capabilities, end-to-end control and insights over the voice stack. Having this technology is necessary to succeeding with conversational AI, but so is the strategy behind building solutions.

Good UX-led design is critical to the success of any conversational AI project. Implementation challenges always arise and competent consultants, designers, and integrators of projects are of equal value to the technology. Implementations need to be custom designed to fit the tech stack of the customer and fit the needs of the end user. API deployments require careful thought, planning, and skill. Traditional IVR deployments typically provide experiences that people loathe (think, “press 8 for me to repeat these options”)and leave users feeling trapped. A good design consultant and integrator will select the right tool from the tool box for various workflows and processes to help focus on the user experience in addition to efficiency and cost savings for the customer.

Further reading from Valenta:

 

Here are some examples of voice bots that have been built on the OneReach.ai platform:

 

4. Orchestration of Multiple Enterprise Bots

As companies rush to implement this much buzzed about technology, they typically end up with a smattering of chatbots that operate on their own closed systems. Hasty solutions create subpar user experiences and end up creating extra work in the long run. This common misstep likely has something to do with a misconception of how advanced technologies work together in an optimized environment. Outcome-oriented consultation at the start of a project can help with this. Setting up a Center of Excellence either with internal personnel, external resources, or a mix can also be of value (staffing CoEs is a Valenta specialty).

Orchestration of multiple bots is increasingly necessary as companies struggle with random acts of automation disorganized and unable to integrate due to different vendors with closed systems. Today there is an aggressive spike in companies facing the problems that inevitably come with having launched bots that were created through a fragmented, uncoordinated approach. Whether you’ve launched disconnected bots to serve employees or to serve customers, you’re swimming in the dark if you’re operating without a strategy that ties your conversational technologies and implementations together to work in coordinated ways.

“Creating an architecture for hyper automation is a matter of creating an infrastructure-not so much the individual elements that exist within an infrastructure. It’s the roads, electricity, and waterways that you put in place to support houses and buildings and communities. That’s the problem a lot of organizations have with these efforts. They’re failing to see how vast it is.”- Robb Wilson, founder OneReach.ai.

The intelligent orchestration of bots is something that the OneReach.ai team has spent years researching, testing, and building. Their founder, Robb Wilson is writing a book to equip problem solvers and leaders with a strategy for building an intelligent, coordinated ecosystem of impactful automation-a network of skills shared between intelligent digital workers. You can sign up for updates on the book release on their website.

This type of good design and thoughtful strategy is critical as is the ability to deliver effective integration. There is a need to integrate end to end and take into account all the aspects of a company’s tech stack, likely involving multiple vendor solutions. Working with a solution and a services provider who really understands what hyper automation can realistically deliver and will help your team bring it all together successfully.

Conversational AI, robotic process automation, and intelligent automation are not going anywhere, they are going everywhere. Brining all these engines under the same hood is what enterprise orchestration is all about.

Further perspective from Valenta:

 

Here are some examples of how OneReach.ai customers have used this functionality with their employee facing bots:

Disruption, Innovation & Making it happen

A former conversational AI leader at Deloitte put it this way, ?there are no conversational AI experts yet. Even those at the cutting edge of the field are still looking through a keyhole trying to discern what the whole house looks like”(Tyson, 2021). Scarce resources mean it is difficult to find and to hire experienced conversational AI specialists. Companies may either have to fail fast and break things to learn what works for them or make investments in partnerships with consulting firms that can deploy solutions with them.

Conversational AI is a promising technology that is being rapidly adopted in nearly every industry. Customer service, HR, contact centers, and the orchestration of multiple bots are among the first business processes that will be entirely disrupted by the technology and it’s clear why. As with any new technology and digital transformation strategies there will be challenges, however despite these challenges, the strategic opportunities and tangible benefits firms are beginning to enjoy is evidence that the massive boost in performance absolutely justifies the costs. With the right tools and right expertise, conversational AI can make a huge impact on operational efficiency and create a rich user experience that will help drive loyalty. OneReach.ai and Valenta have seen this first hand, and because of our work together our customers are enjoying the benefits of well-designed solutions.

About the Authors

  • PAUL MCGANN- INTERNATIONAL SVP, ONEREACH.AI
    An International CEO with a successful track record of delivering expansive change and increased shareholder value through driving organic growth as well as M&A. His ability to lead innovation, disruptive technology, and delivery of strategic transformational business plans has resulted in an exemplary career. His experience spans multiple sectors and geographic regions -International Logistics, B2B& B2C Data Marketing, Martech BPO, Fintech, Online Recruitment Platform and E-commerce retail sales with PE invested companies, independently owned, start-ups and global organizations, within the UK, Europe and Asia. An energetic and passionate leader with excellent communication skills, the ability to engage with and inspire key stakeholders both internally and externally, bringing astute commercial and sound operational skills whilst focusing on maximizing the customer experience and value.
    OneReach.ai Accelerate far beyond basic chatbots by creating an ecosystem of intelligent digital workers (IDWs). Conversational Studio G2 (CSG2)is a no-code conversational AI platform that lets organizations create and deploy conversational applications far faster, without limiting flexibility. Using the OneReach.ai platform, organizations can design IDWs that can answer calls, automate voice conversations, and carry out communications across messaging channels like SMS, email, Facebook Messenger, Slack, WhatsApp, and others; IDWs can be trained to retrieve or update information in databases and create notifications that are triggered by events. Building with CSG2, IDWs can be used to automate any process within an organization and are easy to iterate on at-will.

 

  • HOWARD BAROUXIS, MANAGING DIRECTOR, VALENTA
    Howard focuses on leveraging technology and growing business for his clients and partners. Throughout his career, he has worked at companies on the leading edge of their industries. Howard has more than 30 years of business development and leadership expertise and over 25 years of technology experience. Howard has excelled in numerous leadership and business development roles over the past 30 years and has had responsibilities in the United States, North America, and the Americas. Prior to Valenta Howard has been involved in companies including Siemens, Technicolor, Thales, Thomson, and several start-up companies including ATEME and Broadpeak. He has assisted countless customers in adopting new technologies and workflows required by the marketplace. As a Managing Director at Valenta, Howard helps Valenta clients examine their business processes to identify opportunities for optimization, cost reduction, and increased profitability. Process consulting, digital transformation and staff augmentation are all areas where Howard drives positive outcomes for Valenta customers.
    Valenta are specialists in process optimization, digital transformation, outsourced staffing and training. Our process consulting and digital transformation services are designed to enhance your business efficiencies and provide a competitive advantage. We work with you to understand your needs, identify and implement the right mix of technologies customized for your business, resulting in innovative, simplified and efficient business processes.

 

If you would like to speak with us on this topic or any other, please reach out to us here:
https://valenta.io/contact-us/

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