Conversational AI: A Front-Runner Technology During the Pandemic

The outbreak of a pandemic has jeopardized the working system across the globe. The contact centre employees can no longer go to the office to attend calls. The technology hub is emerging with new solutions to rearrange the puzzle using conversational artificial intelligence. Many companies have taken the opportunity to put advanced technology like conversational AI to use in order to compensate for the customer's service communication during the pandemic.

The pandemic has brought a lot of changes to companies working system and style. Organizations are adopting new ways like intelligence virtual assistant (IVA), virtual agent and other AI-infused technology to replace the workflow of customer care and live agents.

Adaption of AI offerings for Covid-19 reforms

Nuance technology to determine age: The bundle consists of the company's existing live chat, voice-to-messaging, virtual assistant, biometric authentication and fraud prevention offerings. Telefonica, a Spanish telecom carrier used the nuance technology to develop a program that uses voice biometric to determine if the caller is above the age of 65. Once confirmed, the system avails the caller to be prioritized at the call queue and get the best available agents to converse.

Conversational AI brings new topics: Verint, a cloud-based customer service provider adopted the call flow related to Covid-19. Following this, a pharmaceutical company using Verint for its internal IT helpdesk support system since 2017 used the data in the spreadsheet to introduce 25 new topics in natural language support.

Collision of conversational intelligence and human insight: ERC, an international business process outsourcing company has introduced Eva, a virtual agent designed to reduce misdirects and misdials to aid collection agents in directing customers and accomplishing tasks. The new update of conversational intelligence with a mixture of human insight in the company with good language understanding has made machine learning to assist more people in instances and show empathy. Generally, people are petrified of robocalls as it is computed. But this new system of interacting with customers has made a change in the tech-human society.

Usage of AI at contact centres

AI-based virtual assistant for banking: Banco Galicia, an Argentina based bank and an Avaya contact centre customer pulled down its shutter once the pandemic hit. But the bank still managed to handle 2.7 million clients and overwhelming calls into its 'care officers.' The bank was already using digital technologies to handle the inflow and needs of clients. To overcome the pandemic and handle the 'employees not at office' situation, the bank introduced an AI-based virtual assistant named Gala to its working system. Gala is now assisting 90% of the self-service queries.

Addresses the unemployment case: A state's government unemployment agency has tapped virtual agent technology available from Cisco based on Google's Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI) technology to alleviate its 40 million unemployment cases in a short period. Currently, the virtual agent is handling 2 lakh automated interaction a day through phone and web. It is general veracity that state governments are a little behind when it comes to adopting AI technology, but the Covid situation has pushed them to look for quick solutions in the developing field.

Automated chat info to customer agents: Tot, a telecommunication company functioning in Thailand has introduced text-to-speech and automated speech recognition with the help of Genesys's cloud platform and CCAI integration to manage extra call volume and deliver content to the customers faster. It also saves one to two minutes per call by sending the chat history to the agents when a customer's call reaches them.

Consolidating customer details to a single platform: Property and Casualty Insurance Provider, the insurance company that uses RingCentral's Engage Digital platform created a self-service bot to gather and improve digital interactions. The company was already planning to consolidate and digitalize different platforms for social, email, phone, and chat to a single-window at the beginning of the year to giver better service. The pandemic has shoved the company to do its long laggard process.

When people blame the pandemic for endangering economical base by staggering the routine work system, it has also made companies thing out of the box. The non-technological companies are trying to come up with new solutions in alliance with technology to put things back in place. This emergence of quick solution-seeking thought through conversational AI could take the normal platform to an unpredicted height in a short span.