Transforming customer experience with conversational AI and language neutralization

In a globalized world, businesses are foraying into new locations and engaging with new cultures and demographics. It is important for them to provide multilingual, context-aware, and efficient customer service. This is where the power of conversational AI and language neutralization comes into play, which enables enterprises to transform the way they interact with their customers, creating seamless, personalized, and language-agnostic experiences.

Over the past few years, we have witnessed exceptional levels of accuracy, with low levels of latency, for technologies like automated speech recognition (ASR), text to speech, language translation as well as overwhelming success with generative AI technology. This has been possible due to the increased availability and affordability of high-performance AI computing and better and more powerful transformer-based models, which have improved cost-effectiveness. Several implementations of the above technologies helped customer services with business continuity during the challenging times of the pandemic, and the volume of conversations handled by such technologies increased by almost 250% according to a Gartner study. 

Some of the key business benefits of these solutions include:

Empowering contact center representatives: Due to the vast size of knowledge repositories and increased complexity of customer issues, contact center representatives face innumerable hurdles in finding the most optimal resolution as per defined service levels, while maintaining customer satisfaction. When handling multiple calls in succession, a relatively inexperienced agent might struggle to grasp the full extent of the customer context. This is where a combination of ASR and LLMs can come in and share some of the cognitive load of the agents. These solutions armed with capabilities like semantic search, summarization can guide the agents in real time, providing more context on the customer problem, analyzing the intent of the customer, and providing alternative solutions. They can offer pinpointed insights on the cultural sensitivities and proper protocols, analyze tonality, and recommend actions accordingly. These solutions can search and analyze thousands of historical databases and past call transcripts and assimilate the right information in the right format to the agents, to help them facilitate faster and appropriate responses. These technologies thus reduce the training costs for agents significantly. Contact centers can perform well in KPI’s like first-call resolution, wait times and backlog, agent productivity, average resolution duration, more cross / up-sell, lead conversion across the sales funnel. It can provide a center-wide view of agent performance, identify areas for improvement, and suggests the course of action to minimize customer churn.

Enter new geographies by breaking language barriers: Language neutralization capabilities enable businesses to communicate with customers in their preferred languages and reduce misunderstandings and ambiguity thus aiding them to enter newer geographies. Due to the smooth real-time translation capability, the caller and the agent can converse in different languages and not even realize it. By enhancing the multilingual capabilities, businesses can also hire employees from various linguistic backgrounds, expanding their reach and fostering inclusivity. 

Hyper-personalization: Leveraging real-time conversational analytics, highly personalized and contextualized services can be provided, which lead to higher engagements across the customer engagement value chain. The solutions can be in different modes like IVR, a self-service chat interface, or voice bot. An ensemble of conversational AI agents can go beyond narrow tasks and provide an exceptional customer experience overall for wide range of issues and touchpoints, thus acting as a versatile platform for all customer needs and be a trusted custodian of the brand. 

Cost structure optimization: Conversational AI and language neutralization services can offer cognitive automation for 24/7 availability and improve response times during peak loads without needing additional agents. These AI solutions can now handle far more complex requests as well, in addition to basic requests, thus leading to increased call volumes processed through them. This further improves cost-effectiveness. For example, a leading financial services company was inundated with over 30,000 payment-related queries annually from vendors. Despite being extremely basic requests for information, the as-is process was leading to high response time and poor customer experience. Finally, a chatbot took care of nearly 40%-50% queries with automation, which brought the average handling time down to one second per query, reduced ticket volumes and also improved the overall customer satisfaction. 

Employee experience: Apart from the external-facing touchpoints, enterprises are also exploring opportunities to bring these capabilities to provide a seamless experience to employees. These include helping onboard new employees, resolving employee queries for payroll, tax, and other policies, aide in training and enablement and others.

As per a report, the conversational AI market is projected to grow 20% year-on-year to $32 billion by 2030. However, instead of taking a plunge to follow the hype, businesses should adopt conversational AI with a customer-centric mindset and to amplify the potential of human agents. As is applicable with any advanced AI, businesses should also incorporate good governance practices, adhering to a set of responsible AI principles of fairness, inclusivity, reliability and safety, privacy, and security, as well as transparency.

The article has been written by Balakrishna D. R. (Bali), Executive Vice President – Global Head, AI and Automation and ECS, Infosys