What Is a Conversational AI Platform

The demand for conversational AI platforms is only growing – its market size is expected to rise from 4.8 billion dollars in 2020 to 13.9 billion in 2025, thanks to greater customer engagement with messengers and virtual assistants, along with the increased implementation of advanced AI capabilities.

To gain a competitive advantage over your competitors or keep your business afloat, you will soon need to consider whether the time has come for your company to implement such a platform, in order to automate and easily handle some of the business processes.

However, to make an informed decision, you need to learn more about the additional value that an AI conversational platform may bring to your business, as well as to the final beneficiaries – your customers.

What is Conversational AI?

Conversational AI is a set of technologies that makes it possible for computers to simulate human interaction, generating meaningful and spontaneous responses to users.

It allows your customers to communicate with your brand using various AI-powered chatbots, virtual assistants, and messaging apps, in a highly personalized manner, without losing the human-like, natural feel of the conversation.

For this to happen, AI needs to be able to make a real-time analysis of the ongoing conversation. Besides that, it has to deeply integrate with all the data resources on your business and your customers, so that it can turn its insights into actionable information.

Furthermore, AI understands the context of interaction, as well as the sentiment behind it, so that it can make the interaction personalized and tailored to the needs, interests, and intent of the consumer. While traditional chatbots are nothing more than algorithms with a predefined set of answers, conversational AI now relies on NLP (natural language processing), so it truly listens to your consumers, comprehends the meaning of what they’re talking about, and produces spontaneous and adequate feedback.

A platform for conversational AI engages with your users where they are –whether it’s Facebook, SMS, Slack, or Alexa. The system keeps improving with time, as conversational AI learns from its interactions with users, and the way it communicates becomes more personalized and sophisticated with each interaction.

The point of using conversational AI is to give your customers exactly what they need without having to include human customer support reps.

Apart from automating interactions with the customers, in a human-like, personalized, adequate, and accurate manner, conversational AI has yet another superpower- it can do it perfectly well when serving a large number of people simultaneously.

Why is AI Good for You?

If you’re still having doubts about whether a conversational AI platform could bring your business to a whole new level, here are a few very good reasons to try it out.

Conversational AI platforms are all about keeping your customers satisfied and delivering such an experience that they would never think about switching to your competitor.

1. Works Around the Clock

With the rise of various technology solutions, the expectations of your customers have changed significantly.

If your customers are using your products or your services, they want your customer support representatives available 24/7. If you’re running an e-shop, and your website visitor needs information, they want it to come instantly so that they can make a purchase, or they’ll just move on.

Conversational AI can be there to meet the most of such customers’ demands, before or after your official working hours.

2. Reduces Waiting

We all take our time seriously. Being put on hold or having to repeat the problem we’re facing over and over again are huge time-wasters, and among the customer service deal-breakers and reasons we stop being loyal to the brands we favored.

By using a conversational AI platform, you can completely reduce waiting times without having to hire additional service reps. Conversational AI will respond immediately, and transfer the query to a human co-worker only if the issue is too complex for them to handle, including all the relevant data so that repetition is avoided.

With both your human service reps happy and relieved, and your customers satisfied with how smoothly their problems are solved, your business can only flourish.

3. Omni-channel

Your customers use a variety of channels to communicate with their friends, families, and colleagues and often choose to move their conversation from one channel to another. Communicating in the same manner with their favorite brands or the companies they are doing business with would seem completely natural.

With conversational AI around, your customers will have the possibility to start their interaction with your company using Facebook, continue it on Viber if that suits them better, and then switch to Alexa if they see that as the most appropriate option.

Meeting their needs properly, right?

4. Hyper-personalized

We’ve mentioned already that the interaction with conversational AI is personalized, but haven’t stressed the matter enough.

To make it as simple as possible – while it communicates with your customers, AI has access to huge amounts of data on them – all their previous touchpoints with your brand content, purchases, and customer service interactions.

A human customer support rep would need more time to find all this data, and even more to grasp the meaning and generate the most appropriate action.

This doesn’t make your human reps any less valuable, as there are certain things AI will hardly be able to simulate.

Implementing a conversational AI platform to improve your customer service could be just the solution you need to keep your business growing.