What Are the Benefits of Conversational AI?

It wasn’t that long ago that artificial intelligence (AI) was viewed as science fiction. Today, most people interact with an AI without even realizing it—through apps, predictive software, analytics tools, and more. In fact, AI is becoming so commonplace that it’s often invisible.

But beyond these common examples is another type of AI helping to deliver personalized communications between people and technologies known as Conversational AI.

Let’s explore what Conversational AI is, how it is used by businesses to interact with customers, and its benefits.

What Is Conversational AI?

Conversational AI combines artificial intelligence with natural-language processing (NLU and NLG) and Machine Learning technologies to engage contacts in two-way, human-like conversations at scale to drive business outcomes. In other words, it can autonomously craft and deliver messages to a contact, understand and interpret the messages coming back from the contact, respond appropriately, and learn over time.

These AI-driven conversations can be delivered across multiple channels including website chat, email, SMS, voice, and social messaging.

What Are Some Examples of Conversational AI?

Conversational AI is a fairly broad category. So, let’s drill down into a few examples:

• Virtual Personal Assistants: This category includes Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Apple’s Siri; voice-activated assistants which carry out a specific task on behalf of the user. While these are fairly sophisticated technologies, they do not engage users in two-way conversations but rather take orders. It’s likely that virtual personal assistants will become more prevalent in the near future and may help eCommerce businesses to assist customers while shopping online.
• Chatbots: Categorizing chatbots as Conversational AI is a bit tricky since there are different levels of sophistication when it comes to website chat. At the most basic level, chatbots are rules-based technologies used to redirect website users or answer FAQs with limited or no natural-language understanding. However, more sophisticated website chat powered by an AI Assistant rather than a “bot,” does incorporate natural-language processing and machine learning.
• Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs): Also known as AI Assistants, these Virtual Assistants are the next generation of Conversational AI solutions helping organizations scale human interactions that attract, acquire, and grow customers. By autonomously engaging contacts with personalized communications across multiple channels (e.g. website chat, email, SMS) and throughout the customer journey, AI Assistants help accelerate revenue across the customer lifecycle.

Conversational AI is here and is making practical contributions to our personal and professional lives. While Conversational AI is out of its infancy, it’s still maturing and likely to take great strides in its development in the near future.

How Do Businesses Use Conversational AI?

More and more businesses are adopting Conversational AI to augment their revenue-generating teams. Here’s a quick look at how different customer-facing teams use Conversational AI:

• Marketing: Marketing teams love Conversational AI because it helps build pipeline and maximize campaign ROI. AI Assistants conduct outreach on leads that may not necessarily have indicated they’re ready to buy and wouldn’t be a great use of Sales’ time. By touching these leads earlier in their buying cycle, Marketing can often shake deals loose that otherwise may have been missed. For example, many Marketers use AI Assistants to follow up with a virtual event or webinar attendees to see if any leads are interested in speaking to Sales. This elevates sales-ready leads even if they haven’t MQLed; thus, accelerating opportunities.
• Sales: For sales follow-up to be effective, it needs to be prompt, persistent, and personalized. This can be tough to scale for teams wrestling with high lead volumes and forces Salespeople to cherry-pick which leads to pursue. Thanks to near-unlimited scalability, Conversational AI helps Sales teams by automating routine conversations with leads to discover opportunities.
• Customer Success: Conversational AI helps Customer Success teams by proactively and autonomously delivering personalized messages to customers. This includes sharing reminders to schedule important meetings, driving customer health, collecting customer feedback, expanding product usage, and driving interest in upsell or cross-sell opportunities.
• Payments: Chasing down late payments takes a lot of time and energy. Conversational AI solutions, such as an AI Assistant, help by persistently reaching out to accounts with polite reminders about delinquent accounts.

What Are the Benefits of Conversational AI?

Conversational AI is revolutionizing the way we do business. Benefits of adopting a Conversational AI solution include:

• Scalability: Innovative technologies allow teams to scale more efficiently than relying on headcount alone. Consider Conversational AI if your teams need help scaling personalized interactions with leads, customers, and contacts.
• A personalized touch: Conversational AI autonomously engages contacts in human-like, two-way conversations in ways that traditional mass blast email campaigns or simple bots simply can’t.
• Built-in best practices: People make mistakes. It’s only human. Thankfully, Conversational AI solutions, like an AI Assistant, can be built to always follow best practices.
• Increased visibility: Depending on your chosen solution, Conversational AI solutions, like an Intelligent Virtual Assistant, track communications and share important alerts with your team members.
• Routine task automation: Offload repetitive tasks, such as updating contact information in your CRM, onto your AI solution.
• Revenue acceleration: Conversational AI drives top-line growth and accelerates revenue opportunities for your customer-facing teams.

Interested in learning more about what AI can do for your business? Check out our on-demand webinar: The AI Revolution Is Coming to Every Stage of Your Buyer’s Journey.