How conversational AI will revolutionise service for customers and employees

Why now?

In many companies, telephone service remains the most cost-intensive channel for customer contact. Long waiting times, high personnel costs and untapped automation potential lead to efficiency losses – both for customers and employees. However, significant improvements can be achieved in this area through the use of modern conversational AI. The latest and most exciting development is the integration of generative AI and AI agents. This technology is revolutionising the market by enabling the creation of smarter and more flexible bots that can be developed more quickly and easily.

What is conversational AI?

The term conversational AI encompasses technologies that understand, process and respond to natural language in text or speech form. These include chatbots, voicebots and digital assistants. The goal is to enable intelligent, context-aware dialogues between humans and machines that are automated, scalable and personalised.

What can conversational AI do?

Lower costs

Traditional remote customer service (telephone, chat, etc.) accounts for up to 70 percent of total customer service costs in many companies. However, these costs can be significantly reduced through the use of conversational AI.

• Conversations with call centre agents can be made 30 to 50 percent more cost-effective through intelligent pre-qualification and self-service offerings.
• 20 to 40 percent shorter call times thanks to AI-supported assistance systems.
• Standard enquiries, such as order status, returns or appointment scheduling, can be automated by up to 80 percent.
• Up to 80 percent savings in documentation and follow-up work.

More service for employees, customers and companies

Cost savings are not everything: Conversational AI can also create added value for employees, customers and company management:

• Live transcripts and automatic logs improve data quality, for example in CRM, and create the basis for further evaluations.
• The identification and authentication of customers and their concerns ensures transparency with regard to the frequency of enquiries, the potential for automation and anomalies in the processes. This enables intelligent forwarding to the appropriate person.
• The context-based provision of knowledge from third-party systems such as CRM, ERP systems or knowledge databases accelerates the onboarding of new employees and the dissemination of new information among experienced colleagues.
• Suggested responses and next best actions can not only shorten the duration of conversations, but also support upselling and cross-selling with tailor-made offers at exactly the right time.
• The automatic creation of support tickets reduces the workload for employees and makes work more predictable. The fully automated receipt and processing of bookings, cancellations and orders, as well as the automated summarisation and logging of conversations, reduce waiting times for customers and at the same time relieve employees of standard tasks. Real-time translation for multilingual customer communication supports companies in a globalised world.

Make or buy? – The right strategy for conversational AI

When introducing conversational AI, many companies are faced with the question: Develop in-house (‘make’) or rely on existing platforms (‘buy’)?

Our clear recommendation is buy & configure. Why? Because modern conversational AI platforms are now so powerful, flexible and easy to integrate that they can be adapted to individual processes and use cases without reinventing the wheel.

Advantages of the buy & configure strategy:

• Shorter time to market: Instead of months of in-house development, the first use cases can go live in just a few weeks.
• Scalability and security: Established platforms offer enterprise standards in terms of performance, data protection and compliance.
• Strong integration capabilities: Whether CRM, ERP, ITSM or telephony, chat and WhatsApp – leading platforms can be seamlessly integrated into existing system landscapes and communication channels.
• Future-proof: Regular updates, new AI features and support from experienced providers.

Proven platforms:

• Kore.ai, Cognigy.AI and IBM are the leading platforms, with Cognigy, a German company, at the forefront.
• Google, as a well-known player, also offers solutions.
• Parloa scores highly in the market thanks to a new strong partnership with Microsoft.

These tools can also be used to implement complex, company-specific requirements. We would be happy to help you select the right solution for your project and identify the best use cases for your business.