By Lianne Dehaye, Senior Director, TDCX AI

Behind every great customer experience is an agent who gets exactly what the customer needs. In a time where customers are more discerning and have higher expectations, companies increasingly have to equip their customer care employees to maintain resolution rates as well as foster positive relationships.

Enter Conversational AI. It refers to the technology that enables machines such as chatbots or virtual assistants to understand, process, and converse with people. Powered by natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), Conversational AI models train on high volumes of text and speech to comprehend human language, while learning from previous interactions to improve responses over time. It makes a great ally to agent productivity by generating humanlike responses for agents to save time, reduce errors, and focus on more strategic work of cultivating connections.

How we pursue better customer relationships with Conversational AI 

1. Drive seamless conversations
Customers today interact with brands on multiple channels. For example, the Customer complains of a wrong delivery via chat → Agent replies and offers a discount on the right item via email → Customer checks their email for the discount code and makes the purchase → Customer receives updates on the shipment via text messages. It is vital for brands to continue a conversation across channels without interruption and Conversational AI makes this possible. The AI can retain customers’ information throughout the journey and personalize their future interactions. Conversational AI is also useful for teams who manage multiple time zones. With chatbots and virtual agents, customers can get round-the-clock support that is more fluid and humanlike. If the issue is too complex, these AI tools can route it for human intervention without loss of context.

2. Manage sentiments effectively 
Empathy is core to customer experience and the first step for agents is to understand and share the sentiments of a customer. Within this goal, Conversational AI plays an important role across various platforms such as Quality Assurance (QA) and agent assist systems. Our QA platform, PeopleQX features sentiment analysis that decodes sentiments in written words and transcriptions with Natural Language Processing (NLP). This gives QA analysts an overview to cross-examine conversations and pinpoint areas for improvement so that agents can get sharper in catching emotional cues. Meanwhile, in agent assist tools, the AI can quickly draft appropriate responses that engage the customer’s feelings according to the situation. 

3. Ensure accuracy of communications
Consistent communication plays a key role in building trust. Conversational AI knowledge bases can potentially prevent customers from receiving inaccurate or non-compliant information: 

• Shared content helps agents answer frequently asked questions without errors 
• Agents can help their team members by training the AI with new content if they encounter new customer issues.
• Agents in training can use AI to draft potential scenario questions, which gives them more confidence when faced with the situation in real-time. 

Having said that, consistent information is a result of good data quality. We achieve data quality by leveraging Generative AI technology with human expertise to train the AI model to detect risks such as unethical speech, bias, and outdated or wrong information. To ensure these repositories are fully optimized, we employ advanced data visualization and labeling techniques as well as retrain the AI model with new updates. 

It is no secret that your frontliners play a huge role in customer happiness and Conversational AI is increasingly seen as essential to empower them to enhance connections. We have trained and developed talents through the evolving world of customer experience and together with our knowledge of implementing AI, we look forward to taking your customer care agents to the next level. 

Get in touch to discover how Conversational AI can work for you.