Your Contact Person Will Be an AI in 2023
- By CDOTrends editors
- November 28, 2022
The latest research by voice artificial intelligence start-up AI Rudder revealed that half (47%) of contact centers in Asia-Pacific were now looking at adopting voice AI solutions in the next 12 months. They saw it as a business strategy to improve customer and employee satisfaction.
The report, titled The Future of Customer Experience with Voice AI, was based on a survey comprising more than 500 customer experience (CX) leaders in Asia on the state of the contact center industry.
According to the report, nearly half (46%) have prioritized improving CX in the next 24 months. More than half (59%) are now considering the improvement of customer self-service as a critical component of their CX strategy. Organizations are finding ways to respond more quickly through channels that do not require support from a human agent.
Among the organizations surveyed, 77% have either started or re-calibrated their digital transformation priorities in the last two years. Over half (53%) are deploying a combination of AI and self-service applications, including voice AI assistants.
Organizations anticipate that these investments will reduce the load on agents and improve employee retention (41%), leading to increased customer satisfaction (40%).
“When brands view their channels in silos, it is nearly impossible to personalize the experience for the customer,” said Kun Wu, co-founder and managing director of AI Rudder.
“The challenge now for organizations is to achieve personalization at scale without compromising the quality of customer experience. For this reason, voice AI is becoming a critical avenue for businesses to manage high volumes of customer requests while ensuring their services are seamless and intuitive,” Wu added.
The local dialect conundrum
A survey conducted by AI Rudder at the Singapore Fintech Festival earlier this month found that 3 out of 4 (75%) Singaporeans have experienced difficulties in understanding or being understood by a voice assistant. A large majority (89%) said they would be more comfortable using voice assistants if they could understand and respond in Singlish (a type of English spoken in Singapore that borrows from Chinese and Malay). 90% of respondents said they would be interested in incorporating these into their daily lives if they could converse in a local accent.
As such, AI Rudder has launched its new Singlish bot, trained for over 3,000 hours using speech data from the National Speech Corpus (NSC). It includes humanized features to process semantics, linguistic utterances, and speech disfluencies. Currently, the platform supports more than 20 languages, dialects, and accents, including English, Chinese, Hindi, Tamil, Bahasa Melayu, Bahasa, Tagalog, and Taglish.
Image credit: iStockphoto/chepkoelena