Conversational AI refers to a form of technology that creates speech-based assistants and enables greater engagement and interaction with customers at scale across platforms. It has the potential to unlock concealed value within an organization at large. Leveraging Conversational AI allows businesses to reinvent and reignite the customer experience with enhanced engagement and personalized services, and deliver improved customer satisfaction.

In the today's highly competitive business environment, many companies and websites utilize conversational AI solutions to serve effective, personalized services to their customers. With increasing customer expectations, it has become significant for businesses to available 24/7 with instant and personalized services in the appropriate language. This is where Conversational AI takes center stage, delivering human like conversations over any channel, in any language.

Conversational AI to Kindle Customer Experience 

Companies these days are realizing the significance of the customer experience, and so they are turning to greater customer-centric initiatives to find how they can interact, engage and serve customers. Having customer service representatives available to customers is still vital to facilitate communication for information dissemination or troubleshooting. But this process is very time-consuming and makes customers wait long to respond to their queries. Thus, deploying smart, tech-enabled bots can lessen time between responses and address at least basic, routine queries and answer questions without requiring human intervention.

The augmenting reliance on conversational AI platforms is also indicating why chatbots and voice bots are becoming an integral part of several companies' customer relationship management strategies. Despite having humans and technology in place, most companies still face customer care challenges. In this regard, considering AI as a remedial tool, IBM commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact ™ (TEI) study to examine the value of an investment in IBM Watson Assistant. Forrester interviewed and surveyed four, long-time Watson Assistant clients on the benefits, costs, risks and flexibility they experienced using the chatbot technology for various aspects of the customer experience.

In the study, the research firm found three typical use cases where organizations applied Watson Assistant successfully. Those include customer self-service, providing AI-powered automated assistance to customers through web, mobile and/or voice channels; employee self-service, bringing those capabilities in-house to support employees 24/7 by answering their HR/IT questions more quickly and minimize time away from their priority work; and agent assist, enabling human agents to better handle customer inquiries by helping them find answers to complex questions.

Moving ahead, it is predicted that 40 percent of users in 2020 will primarily interact with new applications that support conversational UIs with AI, and by 2022, 20 percent of all customer service will be handled by conversational agents.

Moreover, companies that deploy conversational AI into their systems garner a competitive edge over their peers that are unable to facilitate the quick and seamless customer experience. AI-enabled chatbots and virtual agents can also assist both employees and their customers. These virtual assistants that serve customers directly via applications, devices, or channels allow human agents to get the answer they need without any difficulty.