Voice AI is anticipated to have the most remarkable future growth: says Deepak Visweswaraiah, Vice President, Platform Engineering, and Site Managing Director, Pegasystems, India
- How has Voice AI technology evolved over time?
The concept of using voice technology to enhance customer service has been around for some time in one way or another, although it’s only in very recent times that this technology has been fully embraced. As the role of the contact center continues to shift in a rapidly dynamic business environment, the industry is witnessing a broader boost to adopt voice and speech recognition to modernize internal processes to support agents and provide customer service that is convenient, quick, and accessible. AI is further ushering the development of this technology over time, and this is only likely to grow and become more embedded within the modern user experience. Companies are aggressively investing in the deployment of voice technology and expanding their current business toolbox. A global report by Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of organizations with voice-of-the-customer programs will supplement traditional surveys by analyzing voice and text interactions with customers. This shows how voice technology is anticipated to have the most remarkable future growth in value addition to businesses.
- Why should Conversational AI be incorporated into customer engagements?
Today’s agents face a more complex environment than ever before. As businesses move more rapidly toward digital-first models, agents continue to step up as knowledge workers to solve the toughest customer issues. With nearly 80% of customers now saying they will leave a brand if they receive poor service (up almost 10% in a single year), the stakes are higher than ever before. However, by adopting the right AI-powered customer service strategy, one can simplify experiences for agents and customers alike – while also delivering on the brand’s promise.
Conversational AI is opening a new world of possibilities in transforming customer experience over the last few years. According to IDC, the Conversational AI tools and technologies market grew significantly during 2020 globally, and it forecasts the overall market to approach $7.9 billion in revenue in 2025. These digital technologies, including contextual self-service, intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs), and interactive voice response (IVR) systems, can remedy many service frustrations, while also enabling them to focus on high-value work and deliver highly personalized service.
Today, conversational AI is a valuable resource and more scalable than ever, empowering organizations in going above and beyond their competitors. Conversational AI is now improving live agent interactions, in addition to self-service. Major innovations in unified AI and automation are transforming the world of previously analog voice and legacy web chat tools. Going forward, this will only continue to grow to extend business-customer interactions in new directions. Self-service tools have gained popularity because they empower customers to quickly solve problems without the need for an agent.
- How does Pega Voice AI model achieve operational excellence?
The nature of work within contact centers has dramatically changed – and there’s likely no going back. With Voice and Messaging AI, contact centers can achieve new levels of productivity that weren’t previously possible. Pega Voice AI and Messaging AI work seamlessly, rather than simply automating repetitive work, guide service agents to carry out the right conversations and better understand each customer’s specific needs. This shifts the paradigm of customer service to a new level where contact center agents can focus on higher-value work. Not only does this result in shorter interactions with reduced manual effort and accelerated resolutions, but it also fosters better employee engagement, opens new career opportunities, and makes for happier customers.
The technology solution uses a combination of real-time intelligence, natural language processing (NLP), speech-to-text analytics, and intelligent automation that empower agents with high-productivity actions like listening to live conversations and automatically prompting the next steps for the agent based on contextual knowledge. It helps agents achieve peak performance and significantly reduces agent training time.
Overall, our Voice AI solutions provide hands-free experience as real-time guidance to agents, often without the need for manual data entry. It ensures simplified service by automating processes and unifying data and systems across the enterprise. It reduces tedious, error-prone work for faster service resolution to deliver proactive, pre-emptive experiences.
- What does the future hold for Voice AI?
As users become increasingly comfortable with digital interactions in real-time, voice assistance and Conversational AI are becoming increasingly popular in most markets and thus growing at a tremendous rate. It is becoming sophisticated and gaining traction among all sizes and sectors. At Pega, we foresee Voice AI cultivating and fostering types of relationships that redefine the new era of customer experience, maximize business innovation and help create a strategic business advantage in the upcoming year.
However, the technology is still in the early stages of AI and has incredible potential to reap rich benefits for organizations. The CIOs and CTOs are responsible for leveraging Voice AI ethically, but businesses must also educate their customers on how to effectively utilize the technology.
- What are some of the trends that Pega sees beyond Voice AI?
To absorb the ever-changing needs of the market, Indian enterprises are looking to digitize their business processes completely. Through this, we foresee heavy investment in the adoption of low code-no code platforms. Gartner’s global report predicts that by 2024, 65% of application development activity will be through low code. LCNC platforms have the potential to tackle business complexity highly driven by automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Additionally, there is an entirely new category of autonomous service emerging in technology. A new generation of proactive experiences will emerge when AI-powered decisioning unlocks the last mile of end-to-end automation. Intelligent automation will continue to reign and empower organizations to make complicated decisions and continuously introduce innovations to ensure digital infrastructure in a hybrid setup.
