How AI voice technology can improve customer service

To say that the Covid-19 pandemic changed the face of digital communication is nothing short of an understatement.

With remote working measures hastily implemented across the world, workforces evaporated from the office almost overnight.

Meetings went from boardrooms and around tables into cyberspace. Shopping carts went completely virtual at online grocery stores. Dinner and drinks with friends turned into communal watch parties or video calls. Food delivery services exploded in popularity as staying in became the new eating out. The growth in digital communication has been exponential and many businesses are struggling to keep up.

Companies all over the economy were swiftly finding out that traditional methods of customer service were becoming unsustainable in the face of rapid digitisation.

This is only compounded by the fact that the customer service experience today is far below expectations. In a survey conducted by Forrester Consulting for customer and employee experience software as a service (SaaS) platform CINNOX across Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, only 16 per cent of the surveyed customers indicated satisfaction with the service they received.

Long waiting time and customer experience

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Customer satisfaction can make or break the customer experience, also known as CX.

A separate Zendesk survey indicates that all it takes for a customer to switch to a competitor brand is one bad experience with customer service. That said, the importance of good customer service cannot be understated.

But customer service will continue to languish so long as companies continue to subscribe to the outmoded "call-centre" model that is highly labour-intensive and involves a huge number of contract staff.

As these contract employees are typically let go in the off-season, new staff has to be hired and trained again with the cycle of demand. Hiring and training staff, and ensuring compliance all take colossal amounts of time and money - and the process must be repeated multiple times over.

Furthermore, with limited manpower and the surge in digital communication, the current model also forces customers to wait for long periods before finally connecting with a service representative. This is a major obstacle to delivering good customer experience.

To overcome these challenges, a growing number of forward-thinking companies and organisations are looking to technology such as voice AI to sidestep a number of issues typically associated with the outdated model of customer service and to ease the bottlenecks.

But what is voice AI in the first place?

What is voice AI technology?

The truth is, voice AI has been around for some time.

Simply put, voice AI is voice recognition software that is capable of receiving verbal commands and responding to said commands - and, as the "intelligence" part of AI implies, supported by machine learning in order to more accurately recognise the requests and return the most relevant results.

Virtual assistants like Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant are just a few of the many integrations of voice AI in daily life.

But another crucial application of voice AI that is swiftly gaining traction is the use of neural networks to generate voices - particularly in the replication of human voices - and replacing traditional customer service representatives with AI assistants.

"For a while, common process automation offered by software providers have helped to alleviate customer and employee pain points to a certain extent," says Mr Wu Kun, co-founder of voice AI solutions provider AI Rudder.

"However, these software's workflows are preset and still heavily dependent on human labour to complete the task."

Cost-effective, scalable and customisable

Conversational technology offers the possibility of automated interactions that are more valuable, simple, intuitive and personalised for the customer, continues Mr Wu.

"We are seeing the next generation of call centre tools leveraging AI in voice recognition, generation, as well as natural language understanding and processing."

With more than 20 years of experience in the AI industry between them, Mr Wu and his co-founder Mr Ren Teng have found themselves riding the crest of a wave of explosive growth in voice AI worldwide. Founded just three years ago, their Singapore-based company now has over 200 clients worldwide, in verticals ranging from finance to technology.

"As companies take a hard look at their budgeting and manpower planning, one thing certain is that the increased demand for customer service won't and can't be met with increased labour. There is an impending need for businesses to rethink their digital strategy and learn to leverage technologies like voice AI to supercharge customer experiences efficiently," says Mr Wu.

Proprietary software in more than 15 languages

Since its technology is developed in-house, the company's proprietary software can be customised to suit a client's specific needs. For instance, it is capable of automating inbound customer service solutions like technical support and warranty claims, and can also do so for outbound customer engagement operations like telemarketing, Know Your Customer processes and customer notifications.

This customisability also extends linguistically. AI Rudder has the capability to develop assistants with fluency in multiple languages. This is why it is seeing a growing clientele base across Asia, Latin America, Europe, and other key markets.

AI Rudder also helps keep costs low and maximises scalability by adopting a pay-as-you-go model. Clients pay only for every call that is answered by its voice AI assistant, making it a highly cost-effective solution.

Take for example the case study of Indonesia-based digital credit company JULO. With millions of tech-savvy consumers across the country, it was struggling to cope with a surge in customer enquiries until it found a solution in voice AI.

The voice AI service offered by AI Rudder was able to help JULO handle about 5,000 daily call logs in real-time - even multiple call logs simultaneously. Customers' waiting time is greatly reduced while human agents are freed up to undertake more meaningful and complex work.

Voice AI assistants also helped the company detect anomalies such as abusive language and non-compliance with laws and regulations in the customer call logs.

Of the 5,000 daily recordings processed, about 50 are brought to the attention of the quality assurance manager for further investigation and analysis. This has vastly improved the efficiency of JULO's quality assurance department by more than 100 times while improving the overall job satisfaction of human agents.

Another Indonesian company, one of the largest multi-financiers in the archipelago, has also been experiencing high call volumes since the start of pandemic. With its customer service representatives unable to commute to the workplace due to lockdowns and travel restrictions, the company's ability to service its active customer base of more than four million was impacted.

By using the voice AI service of AI Rudder, the company has automated its loan collection and payment reminder calls. This has helped to alleviate the workload of call centre agents by more than 50 per cent.

The AI voice assistants were also able to make calls to customers simultaneously while collecting data for better CX optimisation. Human customer service representatives were able to focus on more complex tasks, as well as reach out to more prospective customers than before.

Mr Wu expects more businesses to turn to voice AI in the next few years as the technology matures even further.

"The positive impact of deploying voice AI can hardly be understated - with benefits businesses won't want to miss. The future of the customer service industry will become much more enjoyable and of higher prestige as human representatives attend only to complex cases as professional advisers while voice AI systems deal with the vast majority of customer calls 24 hours a day without rest," he adds.