Conversational Artificial Intelligence (or Conversational AI), is simply put, software or program that allows computers to simulate conversations, whether it’s textual conversations or audio and even audio-visual conversations.
As one of the most recent breakthroughs in business and tech, there are many ways businesses can use conversational AI to automate customer engagements and conversations in various platforms from the respective business’s website, app, social media profiles, and other platforms.
Here, we will especially discuss how businesses can implement UnificationEngine ®-powered SmartContactTM conversational AI on their website to achieve various purposes. Without further ado, let us begin.
Conversational AI Best Practices
We will begin this guide by discussing the most important principles and best practices on how businesses should implement conversational AI and make it part of their marketing strategy.
Below are the eight best practices to consider in allowing successful implementation of conversational AI:
“Identify where on your website the AI will make the biggest conversational impact in your business. This might be your product listing page, checkout page, or others. “
Understand your target audience: their needs, behaviours, and the areas where the conversational AI can help them the most.
Develop complete experiences based on your target audience’s needs and preferences.
The core of conversational AI is content and context. Content is the exchanged information, while context is about understanding (and predicting) the user’s needs to enable conversational applications.
Designing conversations is essentially about designing communication, and is different compared to traditional software development.
Personalization and automation are important aspects of conversations, and incorporating the right level of automation is very important.
Set user expectations accordingly. It’s typically better, to be honest and let the users know that they are conversing with an A.I.
Be transparent about privacy. Let them know what information you are recording, how you are going to use the information, and especially how you will protect that information.
Conversational AI Implementation on Websites
Below we will discuss some use cases of conversational AI implementations across several industries:
Retail and E-Commerce
Retail businesses and especially eCommerce businesses are arguably the sector that has crafted the art of using conversational AI and chatbots. Amazon, for example, has expertly used conversational AI to collect the audience’s feedback to improve ratings and conversion rates. Chatbots handled product and service feedback on Amazon.
There are also various retail businesses today that have successfully implemented conversational AI to assist customers, handle feedback, getting simple answers, and so on.
Finance
The finance sector has also seen some excellent implementations of conversational AI. Chatbots are often integrated with phones and various online services to better engage with customers. Conversational AI can handle simple requests like handling customers’ requests for balances. Obviously the chatbot can also route the user to an agent when the issue is not properly resolved.
Hospitality, restaurants, bars
A lot of restaurants and hotels have included conversational AI on the website especially to handle bookings and confirmations. This is an implementation that can be done 100% by the chatbot without any assistance from human customer service. So, a conversational AI in this industry is very effective in reducing the cost of hiring customer support representatives.
Some venues have also combined chatbots with other channels, for example, the customers can confirm payments over the phone after making their bookings exclusively with conversational AI.
Health and Medical
The healthcare sector has greatly benefited from the implementation of conversational AI. There are many different implementations of conversational AI in this industry, from setting up appointments, including automatically setting up patient reminders by phone. Doctors can use the technology to collect data and information from the patient, while patients can also use the chatbot to set up a prescription pickup schedule.
Areas To Implement Conversational AI
Customer Service
The most popular and the most common implementation of conversational AI is as a customer support chatbot. Chatbots can be used effectively to reply to simple (and in some cases, complex) questions.
To improve its effectiveness, there’s also the possibility that the conversational AI can hand over the control to a human representative. For example, the chatbot can ask a set of preliminary questions and then pass the audience to a human. The conversational AI—with its machine learning capability—, can use data from past interactions and ‘learns’ from its past mistakes to improve the quality of its answers in the future.
Booking
Conversational AI chatbots are really good at executing repetitive tasks, so it’s really good at replacing concierge jobs. This can include executing airline transactions, making hotel bookings, or simply scheduling meetings for them.
Sales Agent
Conversational AI bots can also be used to sell products, especially for products where people don’t need to spend a considerable amount of time in comparing it with other products. Conversational AI bots are also useful in cross-selling purposes. The Chatbot can provide the information about a product to the prospect, and if necessary can hand over the closing process to a human.
Personal Assistant
One of the most intensive conversational AI applications is to implement it as a personal (and so, personalized) assistant. The conversational AI should be capable of recognizing open conversations and also understanding the context. So, this conversational AI can contextualize the application to a certain case or scenario.
A very advanced application that requires advanced machine learning or even deep learning technology to realize it.
Data Aggregation
Conversational AI bots can be used as a data aggregation tool, where the AI can collect new bits of information whenever they interact with customers. Conversational AI here can reach different customers through various different channels and collect data to teach itself through machine learning and other applications.
End Words
Conversational AI is one of the most blooming technologies at the moment, and the technology has enabled many websites to automate activities related to engaging and conversing with website visitors. Conversational AI can improve productivity while at the same time improve user experience (UX) and satisfaction.