How conversational AI can improve satisfaction for both customers and employees?

At this point, the ability of conversational AI to improve the customer experience is self-evident. Organisations that have embraced conversational AI chatbots and voicebots have seen improved customer service and a rapid return on investment. However, an often-overlooked benefit of the conversational AI journey is its potential for employees. In this article, we’ll look at why conversational AI makes employees' lives easier whilst also delivering an improved customer experience.

The current landscape

In recent months, several news stories have featured ‘quiet quitting’ as employees reassess their relationships with their work lives. Meanwhile, as global labour shortages abound, businesses have to invest more in retaining employees with new incentives and improved benefits. All the while, the need for businesses to offer the highest quality customer service remains ever-present.

Currently, much of customer service employees’ time is spent dealing with basic and easily actionable queries, processing refunds, retrieving account information, and responding to customer requests. This status quo doesn’t serve anyone’s best interests - customers spend more time waiting to speak to an operator, and when they eventually get through, those operators are overworked.

Often, companies are forced into making an either-or decision; improving customer service can mean putting pressure on employees, whilst improving the employee experience can mean diverting funds away from customer service improvements. It’s a Catch-22. Or so it would appear…

Killing two birds with one AI-shaped stone

However, businesses can simultaneously support their customers and employees with the right technology, and one of the most important technologies to help achieve this is conversational AI. Automating simple requests increases customer resolution rates, and employees spend less time dealing with simple tasks. As a result, both customers and employees feel more satisfied. If employees can deal with complex requests – the sort of requests they were trained for – their energy is more efficiently spent where it is most needed. More importantly, they are more stimulated, and their job satisfaction increases.

In this way, businesses can invest in their customers and employees in one fell swoop. During times of tightened purse strings, a dual-function investment is a coveted commodity not to be ignored.

Conversational AI goes beyond customer-facing chatbots

So far, we’ve been using ‘conversational AI’ to mean any chatbot or virtual agent, and the chatbots most of us will encounter are, unsurprisingly, customer-facing ones. However, there are different breeds of chatbots. Internal chatbots, for instance, directly improve the employee experience without direct customer consideration. For example, one of the largest banks in Norway, DNB, has had an internal virtual agent designed to answer employee questions for several years. The bot helps to speed up internal queries, freeing up vital resources by streamlining processes and resulting in a 250% reduction in avg. call handling time for customer service agents.

The scope for conversational AI to aid internal and external processes is limitless. As the AI spends more time embedded in an organisation, it learns and thus improves its responsivity. Conversational AI is the ideal employee and the ideal colleague wrapped into one bundle. Importantly, it can also scale to grow with an organisation, with new virtual agents added as the company expands, and each bot can have its own specific role to aid different business functions. Whether it's helping a small business to improve its internal processes or enabling employees at a large organisation to find the information they need quickly and efficiently, there is a role for AI-powered virtual agents in businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Don’t fear the future

The discussion around automation squeezing employees out of the job market is not going away, but automation is an opportunity, not a threat. Fundamentally, conversational AI is built on understanding customers, and employees are still in the best position to know what service customers are looking for.

For conversational AI to be successful, it needs maintenance and human adjustment. To this end, we will see new AI trainer and AI maintenance positions appear as businesses seek to expand their AI offerings. Furthermore, with a more significant percentage of customer service interactions dealt with by conversational AI, internal resources are freed up to hire other staff in more valuable roles. Automation won’t wipe jobs away; it’ll shift the job market to include new and exciting opportunities.

The debates around future automation are often framed as if automation is an option for businesses rather than a necessity. This leads us to another important point - automation isn’t going away, it’s going to proliferate. The questions around automation are no longer a matter of if but a matter of when. Organisations that don’t invest in automation will be at a considerable disadvantage as technology continues to develop.

Conversational AI is ready

The reason why conversational AI benefits employees and customers is that it represents the best of technological innovation. It is streamlining, updating, and overhauling outdated systems. Conversational AI is the future of customer service, and automation is the future for businesses of all shapes and sizes.