Conversations still drive engagement

We’ve long known the power of conversation — especially positive conversation. As humans, we crave attention, and conversations are one of the primary attention vehicles. This is true throughout all aspects of our lives. A conversation helps us learn new things, gives us knowledge and the necessary confidence to take decisions.

The art of conversation is the very essence of our being, in the business world, conversations is also the key to customer engagement, for winning new as well as retaining existing customers.

But let’s face it, over the last 10 to 15 years there has been a seismic shift in how we all communicate and now, our go to mode is messaging – it is easier, faster, less intrusive and more outcome driven than, say, a telephone call.

Does it mean real conversations are dead?

I don’t think so. I would argue most of us have simply adapted our conversational style to the new reality. Let me use written words rather than my voice to engage with my colleagues, partners and customers.

However, in a rush to adopt new technology for engagement, businesses have set up off-the-shelf chatbots and digital assistants as their primary customer facing tools that bring more frustration than benefit. End users complain about chatbot fatigue all the time. Those basic chatbots are constructed using rules that encourage canned, linear-driven interactions. They don’t personalize responses. They are not designed keeping the customer’s point of view. In most cases they are not able to understand the customer’s intent, and therefore provide bad experience.

Conversational AI solution, on the other hand, can engage in human like interactions, can learn from previous conversations and data, and takes into account the current context to understand the customer’s intent. It uses NLU (Natural Language Understanding), machine learning and sentiment analyzer to provide accurate response to the customer. It integrates with back-end systems to provide information to users. When you take systems like your ERP, support ticketing, or banking system and ingest them with AI, you can then have direct transactional conversations with customers – without needing a person on the business side. It therefore opens the door to all kinds of messaging and engagement opportunities.

So where to start?

To help companies get started, we look for the high activity use cases in a company where there is an opportunity to automate. For example, some companies want to get rid of their call centers or don’t want to invest in expensive call center technology and instead provide an on-demand version of themselves where the customer can serve themselves.

The call center is only one example of where conversational interfaces are delivering improved customer experiences. We have developed use case templates for education (e.g. learning management & monitoring, coaching, notifications, reminders etc.), healthcare (e.g., medication monitoring, appointment setting and notifications, and health tracking), travel, DTC (direct to consumer) solutions, and more. Opportunities are unlimited.