By Yaniv Masjedi, Chief Marketing Officer at Nextiva
As businesses work to improve customer care operations with AI, they’re trying to help customers feel comfortable with the process. But comfort alone doesn’t drive the kind of long-term value organizations need. These tools do better when they achieve a higher psychological threshold: Customers don’t just accept them as an option, they adopt these tools as part of a routine.
New research looks at what it takes to make this happen. It finds that different types of AI face different barriers. At Nextiva, we were particularly interested in the findings about voice agents -- AI receptionists that speak with customers as a human agent would.
Customization for ‘Aspirations’
For some AI tools, such as the kind people are starting to use in banking, a sense of reliability is the biggest factor determining whether customers become adopters. That's not the case for voice assistants.
Instead, the biggest factor is meeting the customers’ “aspirations,” which include “specific preferences and individual needs,” according to the study published recently in the International Journal of Market Research. This indicates that while customers may be ready to make AI receptionists part of their routine, they only do so for certain, limited tasks.
The solution is customization across user journeys. Businesses should tailor these AI customer experience tools to serve as many purposes as possible, and work to ensure that all those tasks are frictionless. When people are happy to interact with a voice agent for some tasks but not others, it’s a sign that the voice agent’s CX quality is inconsistent across different functions.
Nextiva has kept this in mind as we’ve built our AI receptionist, XBert. Restaurants can use it to not only take reservations, but also update them, answer menu questions, tell customers where to park, and more. Health and medical firms can use XBert to schedule appointments, manage after-hours calls and route patients to the right practitioner.
Businesses in each industry, from fitness to retail to home services, can customize XBert to help cover more customer preferences and needs. They can also track adoption rates for all these different tasks, recognize where weaknesses are, and fine tune the delivery for functions that are lagging in adoption.
Relational Interactions
The other big factor involves the extent to which the AI feels like a “social partner.” The research found that people care more about “relational interactions” with voice agents than they do with many other AI tools, from finance apps to recommendation systems to service robots.
These kinds of interactions “include variables related to affection, affinity, sentimental bonds, and other affective evaluations which foster feelings of personal connection with the AI,” authors Kathleen Desveaud and Ransome Bawack wrote.
To heighten these interactions, ensure your voice agent is trained to understand the ways people speak, and to respond in the most human-like ways. But that's just the beginning. Building emotionally rich interactions with customers is, ultimately, a unique process for each individual.
Unification Breeds Adoption
Achieving all this requires operational flexibility. Your agentic voice tool should respond to each customer in ways that work best for that person. It should tweak outputs in real time as it gathers more information about the customer.
To do so, it needs a single record of all the customer’s previous interactions. It needs to know how the customer has responded to prompts in the past, what their customer journey pain points have been, and more.
This is yet another reason that a unified customer experience strategy is essential. A UCXM (unified customer experience management) platform saves, gathers, and analyzes customer interactions across every channel. It synthesizes them into a single record, drawing lessons that guide its agents -- both AI and human.
So, for example, when an AI answering service operates with the power of UCXM, it customizes each step. It also anticipates the right responses and tailored workflows based on other customers with similar aspirations. In short, it puts the power of big data to best use, enhancing communication systems.
The platform can also capture qualitative and quantitative insights and measure customers’ responses to the technology. Organizations should constantly use this information to course-correct, minimize risks, and win over more stakeholders.
Even in this high-tech era, phone calls still drive the most revenue. The businesses winning the largest share in each industry are those using new tools to optimize CX in all parts of their cloud communication platforms. Customers enjoy the process so much that they make those experiences part of a new routine. That's adoption. And the difference shows up in the bottom line.