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Don’t Buy Voice AI Unless It Does These 5 Things

With AI now mature enough to deliver true value to the business, contact centers are looking at how to maximize their resources while improving customer experience. Voice AI is the closest thing to the human agent experience, while also working faster, being more accurate, and costing less. It’s set to revolutionize the contact center with the same sweeping impact that we saw with the advent of IVRs. But, it’ll go far beyond what IVRs can deliver.

In the scurry to adopt AI, it’s important to know not all voice AI is equal. The best voice AI will not only make your contact center more efficient and reduce your costs, but it’ll also increase customer satisfaction and can be implemented without much effort. When evaluating voice AI technology for contact centers, make sure you choose a vendor that meets these five criteria.

Responds at a humanlike speed

This is the most important requirement because brands are competing on customer experience, and one small trip up here can cost revenue, retention, and most importantly, trust. Implementing voice AI that can automatically answer calls and resolve low-level issues sounds great for KPIs, but only succeeds if it feels like a great experience to the customer. And to achieve that, it can’t feel like they’re talking to an automated system.

Voice AI technology must be able to interact and respond with the speed and cadence of human speech. It only takes a few seconds of lag time to frustrate customers.

To prevent this, look for voice AI that responds back in less than one second.

Understands context and multiple intents

Humans have different ways of saying the same thing and string together many ideas in one sentence. As a result, voice AI has to be able to understand context, changes in context, and multiple intents in order to converse in a way that feels natural to customers. The capacity for this goes deep into the engineering behind conversational AI. Without this capability, voice AI is just a glorified IVR that relies on keywords and has limited abilities to respond to customers.

Ask vendors to explain how their AI works and get proof by testing it out before you buy.

Integrates easily into your cloud contact center platform and other key systems

Conversational AI is meant to sit alongside your contact center solution and other systems. Out-of-the-box integrations with your key systems will save your IT department from having to do custom API work, maintenance, and updates.

Get a clear understanding of what integrations are available, how the integrations work, and how much time and effort is needed to implement them before you buy.

Isn’t reliant on specific AI or ML models

This sounds a bit technical, but voice AI solutions that are built on specific AI or machine learning (ML) models lock you into the capabilities of those technologies. Your voice AI will only be as accurate as those models and progress as fast as they develop. Look for a solution that’s built on a flexible architecture, uses industry-leading AI models and transcription providers, and takes advantage of the latest AI enhancements. This will result in voice AI that applies the best approach to processing what customers are saying, resulting in higher accuracy and more natural sounding conversations.

Dig into the technology that the AI is built with to make sure the vendor leverages multiple models and technologies to give you the best capabilities of each.

Elastically scales with customer demand

Contact centers continue to grapple with unpredictable surges and spikes in call volume, despite more sophisticated ways of forecasting and scheduling. There needs to be a better solution to staffing contact centers with enough capacity, and there is.

A voice AI solution should be able to offer elastic capacity, automatically scaling to answer any number of calls immediately. This elasticity eliminates the need for meticulous forecasting and scheduling and alleviates the worry that you won’t have enough agents available to meet sudden surges in call volumes. You should be able to essentially “turn on” your voice AI solution and have peace of mind that it’s responding to all customers 24/7.

Confirm with the vendor that their AI can handle an infinite number of calls at the same time and will automatically scale as call volume increases and decreases.

If the voice AI solution you are evaluating cannot do all of these things and prove that it can do them well for businesses of your size and industry, then don’t buy it. Otherwise, you’ll end up creating a poor customer experience, have difficulties getting the AI implemented, and get stuck with AI that lags behind competitors.

Now that you’re ready to find a voice AI solution that truly improves both your operations and customer experience, meet Replicant Voice. See how Replicant is a leader in delivering all of these capabilities.

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