As a C-level leader, you naturally seek ways to drive growth for your business. That typically comes down to improving margins, increasing revenues, cutting costs, or a combination of these. However, reaching both growth and efficiency targets proves to be an elusive goal for consumer companies in today’s competitive environment.
One often-overlooked place to achieve both objectives is your contact center. While often viewed as a cost center, it is the lifeblood of your business, where captive customers are proactively contacting your business about your products and services. If this is the case, why do leaders seek to deflect so many customer conversations with outdated automation or broken self service tools?
Indeed, optimizing this “cost center” through technology can help the executive team advance their corporate initiatives. For example, by accelerating contact center automation with the latest generation of voice AI agents capable of engaging in human-like conversations, your organization can meet—or exceed—your corporate KPIs. With this technology, you can gain operational efficiencies that improve spending. Improve your customer customer experience—boosting loyalty, brand reputation, and customer lifetime value. Most importantly, you can keep up with growing revenue and customer demands by scaling your contact center capacity to serve a greater number of customers more rapidly and cost-effectively, leveraging your existing resources.
So, what’s so unique about this latest generation of self service voice AI, and why should your executive team pay attention?
Today’s Voice AI vs. Legacy Conversational AI
Technically, conversational AI technology has been around for a while. Businesses have used it for decades in attempts to reduce contact center costs and create better customer experiences. They’ve tried interactive voice response (IVR) or the so-called intelligent virtual assistants. None of these tactics have succeeded because these older solutions followed a rigid system.
A big problem was the rigidity of these systems. Specialized conversation AI designers were required to hard-code complex workflows that attempted to cover all the possible directions a customer conversation could take, including the verbiage. But the moment a customer asked a question using different phrasing or veered off topic, this technology would fail—forcing the caller to restart the conversation with a human agent all over again.
Fortunately, with the rise of Generative AI and its pairing with conversation intelligence, you can ask the new AI voice agents any type of question in any shape or form, and they can answer. These agents can make decisions because they use reasoning based on conversation data and past calling experience to select the best path forward. They can learn without being preconfigured merely to follow rules. You can give them an objective, and they will perform autonomously. With proper monitoring and oversight, AI can quickly be coached or trained, just like you’d do with human agents, to correct their mistakes. Best of all, you can build voice AI agents in mere days and fully customize their personality to match your brand to automate as much as 60% of incoming calls while dramatically improving the customer experience.
How the new conversational AI helps business leaders
Your senior leadership has different priorities than the contact centers. However, a proper utilization of conversational voice AI can also help them reach their goals.
- CEOs care about revenue growth: Happy customers tend to be more loyal, buy more products and services, and recommend your brand. Particularly in this day and age, where social media can make or break a company, investing in better customer experiences is key. Companies with high customer satisfaction scores that subsequently improve brand value are thus more attractive to investors, according to Interbrand, which found that 76 percent of the investment community agrees that building a strong brand is second in importance to improve analysts’ price/equity (P/E) ratios and valuations of businesses.
The fact that voice AI is available 24/7 to customers and can handle even complex inquiries through natural, human-like conversations should positively reflect in your NPS score, CSAT, and–as a result–improve your bottom line.
- CFOs care about revenue growth and margins: VoiceAI agents enable you to grow your customer base while providing excellent support with your existing contact center headcount. Seasonal businesses in industries such as medical insurance and travel can increase revenue while keeping operating costs constant.
- COOs care about operational efficiency and employee productivity: Because voice AI can automate up to 100% of certain call flow, it reduces stress and eliminates burnout of human agents. Human agents can focus on more meaningful engagements that actually drive value, leading to greater employee satisfaction and minimizing the ever-present contact center problem of higher worker turnover. And COOs can get full insight into every call driver, to both AI and human agents, to understand how customers are feeling and potential areas of improvement across the business.
- CTOs and CPOs care about product/service innovation: Voice AI can process more customer interactions in shorter timeframes. When paired with leading conversation intelligence platforms, it provides unparalleled insights into how to improve current products and services. Even more importantly, it can help generate tangible areas of actionable insight for new solutions or offerings based on direct, real-time customer call drivers.
From Cost to Value with VoiceAI Agents
Choosing the right conversational AI voice technology reduces costs, increases efficiency, enhances customer loyalty, and drives revenue growth—turning your contact center from a traditional cost center strategic driver of profits.
Specifically, Observe.AI’s VoiceAI Agents, built using our conversation intelligence platform, support your contact center’s operational and growth mandates today while helping to scale your automation efforts. In this way, we future-proof current investments in your contact center while helping you deliver more strategic value to your organization’s overall business mission.
Among other benefits, conversational voice AI technology supports your ongoing efforts to:
- Cuts costs, boosts profitability–Automates routine calls, reducing costs while improving efficiency.
- 24/7 resolution of customers’ issues–Always available to handle questions, inquiries, and challenges, even outside business hours.
- Reduces customer churn–VoiceAI agents automatically detect emotional tone of customer conversations and deliver appropriate, proactive solutions.
- Enhances loyalty–Delivers seamless, human-like interactions that improve customer satisfaction and strengthen your brand.
- Frees up human agents for high-value tasks–Your staff can focus on complex issues and relationship-building rather than rote chores.
Unlock the full value of your contact center and help your organization reach its growth goals with Observe.AI’s VoiceAI Agents.
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