Voicebots in retail: A new world of customer experience
It began with consumers moving from physical stores to online shopping a few years ago; in today’s attention economy, the consumer is spoilt for choices. They now prefer voice assistants and voicebots for routine shopping tasks. Convenience is increasingly influencing the way consumers shop and make decisions. Another top driver for consumers to prefer voice assistants over websites and apps is the ability to multi-task and do things hands-free, and quickly.
Modern retail thrives on ease of use and customer-friendliness.
Conversational AI over voice is redefining how retail businesses engage with their customers. By leveraging AI-powered voicebots, retailers can drive inquiries, transactions, interactions, and requests quickly, cost-effectively, and efficiently. What’s more – they do this with little to no human assistance.
Conversational voice AI presents shoppers with the ability to virtually experience shopping at a store and being guided by knowledgeable sales assistants. From the comfort of their homes, shoppers can tell what they’re looking for, make price inquiries and product features, and even get personalized recommendations based on their past shopping behavior and history!
Unlike interacting with purely text-based chatbots, which can often feel like conversing with a machine, interacting with voicebots can feel more human-like, similar to conversing with a friend, making the experience personalized and engaging. Voicebots provide quick responses and significantly reduce the checkout time.
Why is Voice automation fast becoming a key retail customer support channel?
Conversational AI voicebots do not replace human agents. Rather, they elevate the role of a retail agent to an advisory one. Agents get to focus on solving sensitive and complex issues that require their expertise.
- Advances in AI technology that improve the voice experience, including speech recognition, sentiment detection, and more.
- A hands-free, interactive, and frictionless customer experience similar to interacting with a friendly and helpful store assistant.
- COVID-19 fuelling increased demand for contactless shopping
As we move towards a voice-first world, and people relying even more on their smartphone’s voice assistants, it is important for brands to embrace this paradigm shift, or risk being left out!
The growing preference for Self-service
By 2023, 50% of retailers that have linked self-service technology strategy to digital transformation will see a 35% increase in net margin, 10% increase in customer loyalty, and 5% decrease in staff turnover (IDC)
Improved contact center experience and efficiency
Over 50% of the queries in your call center on a given day refer to inquiries relating to availability, store information, coupons, ingredients, and other simple topics. However, your agents spend the same amount on these as they do on adverse event queries.
Retail contact centers have begun to ‘recognize’ the value of ‘use-cases’ for the responses that they deliver using conversational AI.
For all its challenges, complexities, and technicalities, voice AI is really all about automating large-scale conversations to save costs, deliver meaningful customer experiences and generate higher sales revenue.
Efficiency
With voicebots replying to consumers, the entire wait game is eliminated, offering a much more personalized experience that makes them feel valued. If there is an issue that the bot can’t handle, it passes it on to a human agent at the right time.
Efficiency is the supreme quality in this industry, so it is not surprising that retail call centers want to do away with outdated IVR systems and let the power of AI run most of the show. Generally, an IVR system provides a list of items with scripted responses and predetermined outcomes.
The cost and ROI
A company that decides to outsource to an offshore call center can probably save big by implementing an AI-based voice assistant to handle all the low-level queries, instead of outsourcing. All the money that’s saved can be invested in high-quality training for staff to deal with more complex and more valuable issues. Today, voice AI is enabling many global customer-facing businesses to witness more than a 30% increase in operational efficiency, and save up to 80% on support costs.
Voice AI in the customer experience space can mean a lot of savings in terms of time and money. It drastically reduces the average call handling time and operational costs, while increasing satisfaction and engagement rates.
Put humans to more meaningful use
Answering redundant questions like store timings or product availability can be taken care of by virtual assistants, while human agents can focus more on delivering real value. Human representatives can be assigned to handle critical tasks like actionable customer service or responding to sensitive customer inquiries.
