In today’s competitive business landscape, organizations seek solutions to reduce costs while maximizing operational efficiency. With AI coming into the picture, this hunt for solutions has become easier. AI-driven solutions help to automate routine or low-complexity tasks, improving employee productivity and efficiency.
Conversational AI is one such AI-driven solution that is redefining the business landscape. In fact, Forrester survey reports, “The conversation automation market is on the rise, in the next 12 months, 64% of organzations are expected to expand their investment, reaching $377 billion by 2032.” This indicates a significant shift toward conversational AI.
In this blog, we are going to discuss how leveraging conversational AI reduces operational costs while maximizing efficiency.
How Conversational AI Reduces Business Costs?
1. Customer Support Automation: Reducing Labor Costs
Customer support has always been a cost-intensive function due to the need for a large team of agents to handle increasing support tickets. This increases the business’s labor cost.
- Conversational AI solutions automate 80% of repetitive queries, thereby reducing labor costs. Gartner predicts that “ Conversational AI will reduce contact center agent labor costs by $80 billion in 2026.”
- AI chatbots can handle multiple queries at the same time, reducing the response time and improving efficiency and customer satisfaction.
- Implementation of these conversational AI solutions reduces the hiring, training, and infrastructure costs associated with maintaining large support teams.
2. Enhancing Employee Productivity and Reducing Overhead Costs
Conversational AI is not confined to customer interactions, it also helps the support agents by helping them automate repetitive tasks.
- AI chatbots address repetitive customer queries, including HR policies, password changes, order status, and so on, helping support agents to focus on complex tasks.
- In the case of complex tasks, AI chatbots smoothly hand off the ticket to the live agent without any wasted time, leading to reduced resolution times.
Minimizing the time employees spend on repetitive tasks allows agents to concentrate on high-value activities, enhancing their efficiency and reducing administrative expenses.
3. Lowering Training and Onboarding Costs
In customer support, hiring and training support agents can be tedious tasks that come with a cost. But with conversational AI solutions at our rescue, this picture can be changed completely.
- In the case of onboarding, these solutions will provide AI-driven training models that help agents get trained.
- Reduces the reliance on senior staff by providing a self-service knowledge base that will help them to find answers to their questions.
This reduces the time of other agents in training and customer onboarding, lowering the risk of larger resolution times and additionally reducing the training and onboarding costs.
4. Minimizing Churn Rates and Support Costs
A lack of good customer service results in high churn rates, which subsequently increases customer retention costs. However, with conversational AI solutions, this problem has been solved to an extent.
- Providing the first response to the customer gives an impression to the customer that their query resolution has been initiated, thus making a good customer experience.
- AI chatbots track the user’s history and provide personalized responses to the user, providing them with an exceptional customer service experience.
- Conversational AI solutions proactively address customer queries, which reduces escalation costs.
This all leads to increased customer retention and reduced costs.
Why SearchUnify’s Virtual Assistant (SUVA) Can Be The Right Solution for Your Business?
SearchUnify offers Agentic AI-powered SUVA, which provides next-gen conversations that are autonomous, proactive, and personalized. Let’s see its key features that drive the support costs:
- Personalized and Contextual Responses: SUVA leverages technologies like natural language processing, large language models, and machine learning to deliver contextual and personalized responses to users, improving their customer experience. It also maintains the context of conversations throughout the interaction.
- Seamless hand-offs to Agents: In case of complex queries, it seamlessly handoffs the ticket to a live agent with the right expertise along with the conversation history so that the agent can pick it up from where it left off. This streamlines the support tickets, reducing the agent workload and improving the operational efficiency.
- Multilingual and Multichannel Support: Its multilingual capabilities help businesses reach a broader audience, while multichannel support ensures a seamless user experience.
- Direct case creation: SUVA facilitates direct case creation from the chats on behalf of the user which adds to a positive customer experience. This reduces the self-service effort of the customer to log in to the support portal and fill out the form.
- Detailed Analytics: It provides detailed analytics to the business that helps them to identify common customer issues, optimize chatbot performance, improve knowledge management, predict support trends, and so on, to stay ahead of the competitive curve.
Final Thoughts
Undoubtedly, conversational AI is a cost-cutting technology that is redefining the support landscape. By leveraging conversational AI solutions like SUVA, businesses can be set on a trajectory of success.
So, why wait?
Let’s set you up for success with SearchUnify’s Virtual Assistant (SUVA)!
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Can conversational AI solutions be customized for different industries?
Yes, they can be customized for different industries based on their needs and requirements.
2. Can AI chatbots replace human agents completely?
AI chatbots improve the efficiency of support agents and help them focus on complex queries.
3. Are conversational AI solutions expensive?
With advancements in cloud computing and AI-as-a-service models, these systems have become affordable. Multiple platforms are offering tiered pricing methods as well to make it affordable for smaller businesses.
4. Is the implementation of conversational AI solutions complicated?
Modern-day conversational AI solutions have made this easier with low-code or no-code AI assistants and seamless integrations. Instead of months, deploying AI chatbots takes days or a week.
5. Is conversational AI confined to customer support only?
No, it can be used in IT, HR, sales, and so on for password resets, trouble shooting, employee onboarding, HR poilicies, training, lead qualification, lead nurture and so on.