Intelligence: Do you want it artificial or relational? Both, my chief!
The customer is no longer just a King; they are a true Despot... They want EVERYTHING and demand to be constantly surprised, fulfilled, considered, delighted, and pampered. To meet all these demands, humans alone are not enough.
Thus, customer relations have turned to AI (Artificial Intelligence) and gained speed, efficiency, and productivity. However, the consumer reminds us that they also have a small heart that beats, and while AI satisfies their need for immediacy, it does not fulfill their relational need... So, back to the human touch to sprinkle a bit of emotion over everything. In short, to satisfy the 3.0 consumer, there is no other choice but to combine artificial intelligence with relational intelligence. But then, how do you find the ideal balance?
Machines to respond all the time and on all subjects
With the recent events related to the global Covid-19 health crisis and the growing place of online commerce, customer relationship cycles are accelerating. The challenge is therefore to communicate quickly and efficiently to satisfy a maximum number of clients and prospects in record time. To avoid overloading Customer Service Departments (CSRs), it has become imperative to relieve agents by automating responses to the most common requests. This is where voicebots come into play: conversational agents capable of conversing with a human being. Thanks to AI, they can understand, analyze, and interpret requests expressed in natural language to provide, immediately, 24/7, an answer to the question asked. As a result, consumers generally make their purchases in the evening and on weekends. The 'bots' align client needs with brand availability. Thanks to them, customer relations never sleep!
Humans to infuse emotion and imagination
What exactly is this 'Relational Intelligence,' this precious asset that robots cannot yet seize? It is a set of qualities or skills that enable us to build and maintain constructive, harmonious, and lasting relationships. They rely on emotional intelligence on one hand, and on social intelligence on the other. They allow us to detect and consider the need(s) of a third party and interact with that party to satisfy their need(s). These interactions generate trust, emotion, loyalty, and allegiance... values that a bot could never bring about, that an algorithm could never replace. This is indeed the winning duo of a 'seamless' Customer Service: a machine that responds 24/7 doing its best to personalize exchanges; combined with a human present during their hours, but who knows, understands, and surprises their client!
Boost your customer relationship with ViaSpeech
This desire to combine artificial intelligence with relational intelligence in the service of customer relations has been demonstrated by ViaDialog through the development of ViaSpeech.
ViaSpeech now offers a range of voicebot and callbot products for automating the customer journey in natural language through tools that can be directly integrated into your voice servers. Want to know more? Our teams are available to support you at every stage of your projects!
Article update: December 1, 2021
