Conversational AI is revolutionising how businesses interact with customers. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), conversational AI enables machines to engage in human-like conversations, making interactions with technology more intuitive, efficient, and personalised. 

One of the key benefits of conversational AI is its ability to provide automated customer service. Chatbots and virtual assistants can handle routine and repetitive customer inquiries, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex issues. This not only increases efficiency but also reduces response times, leading to improved customer satisfaction.

Conversational  AI for Contact Centres

Conversational intelligence, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), is a cutting-edge technology that enables contact centres to analyse and understand human conversations in real time. Let’s take a closer look at how conversational intelligence is used globally in contact centres:

• Multilingual support: Conversational intelligence has the ability to process and understand multiple languages, making it invaluable in contact centres that serve diverse customer bases across different regions. This enables contact centres to communicate with customers in their preferred language, leading to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Cultural sensitivity: Conversational intelligence takes into consideration cultural nuances and customs, allowing contact centres to provide culturally sensitive responses during customer interactions. This ensures that customers from different cultural backgrounds are treated with respect and receive personalised and relevant support.
• Data-driven insights: Conversational intelligence enables contact centres to gather and analyse valuable customer data from conversations. This data can be used to identify customer trends, preferences, and pain points, informing strategic decision-making and driving business growth globally.
• Consistency in service quality: Conversational intelligence ensures consistency in service quality across different contact centre locations. By providing standardised responses and recommendations based on predefined rules and guidelines, conversational intelligence helps maintain a consistent customer experience, regardless of the contact centre location.
• Time zone flexibility: Conversational intelligence allows contact centres to provide 24/7 support across different time zones. This ensures that customers can receive assistance at any time, regardless of their geographical location, leading to enhanced customer convenience and satisfaction.
• Remote and distributed workforce: Conversational intelligence allows contact centres to leverage remote and distributed workforces. Agents can access AI-powered tools and insights from anywhere, making it possible to provide seamless customer support regardless of the physical location of the agents.
• Automation and self-service options: Conversational intelligence powers chatbots, virtual assistants, and other automated systems in contact centres, providing self-service options to customers. This reduces the workload of human agents and enables customers to find quick solutions independently, leading to improved operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Conversational Intelligence in Indian Contact Centres

The speech analytics market in India is categorised into segments based on components, deployment modes, organisation sizes, applications, end-user industries, companies, and regions. In terms of deployment modes, the market can be divided into on-premise and cloud solutions. The cloud segment is anticipated to be the dominant segment, owing to the associated benefits such as flexibility, scalability, affordability, 24/7 availability, large storage space, and auto-update feature, among others.

Based on end-user industries, the market can be further segmented into IT & telecommunication, BFSI, retail & e-commerce, healthcare, energy & utilities, government & defence, and others. The retail & e-commerce segment is projected to lead the market, driven by the increasing number of e-commerce platforms in the country. Furthermore, the growing need to enhance customer service for retention purposes is expected to contribute to the growth of this segment.

Future of Conversational AI Platforms in India

According to a recent report from Gartner, the conversational AI platform market is estimated to be worth approximately $3.8 billion, with a projected year-over-year growth rate of 55%. Currently, chatbots are the most commonly used form of AI in businesses. However, their adoption rates are expected to nearly double over the next two to five years. It is anticipated that AI-powered chatbots will save up to 5 billion work hours by 2023. Additionally, the implementation of conversational AI in contact centres is predicted to result in labour expense savings of $80 billion by 2026.

India has an impressive linguistic diversity, with 22 officially recognized languages and a staggering 19,500 dialects. As a result, developing and deploying a conversational AI solution that can effectively communicate with customers and accurately capture their responses in their respective dialects poses a significant challenge. However, there are several young B2B companies that have come up with intelligent conversational AI solutions that are just right for the Indian market. With advanced speech analytics, this is and will be a game changer for the contact centre industry in India.

The speech analytics market in India has experienced significant growth, according to a report commissioned by Uniphore Software Systems and conducted by Opus Research. Enterprises are increasingly leveraging speech analytics to boost sales and collections, with approximately 57% of respondents placing a heavy emphasis on this technology.

The report highlights that 53% of respondents already utilise speech analytics for workforce optimization and plan to expand their programs. The report also reveals that speech analytics is being used for various purposes, such as identifying the root cause of customer experience failures (49%), quickly identifying customer intent (49%), gaining business insights (17%), improving marketing programs, product development, and amplifying business operations.

Furthermore, another report predicts that the speech analytics market in India will grow from $941.1 million in 2017 to $2,175.8 million by 2022, representing a growth rate of 18.2% during the forecast period.

Challenges faced

The market for real-time speech analytics solutions is expected to experience further growth in the coming years due to increasing adoption by various enterprises and corporates aiming to maintain operational efficiency. However, challenges such as high implementation and deployment costs may hinder the market growth during the forecast period. Additionally, limited awareness and concerns about data security and integrity may also restrict the market growth.

Furthermore, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in widespread lockdowns and remote work arrangements across the country, leading to increased concerns about cybersecurity and data breaches among enterprises. This has had a negative impact on market growth as well.

What’s Next?

It has been observed that smaller companies with more experience in consumer interactions have been able to derive significant benefits from conversational AI, while larger enterprises with less experience in consumer handling have faced challenges in implementing it effectively. However, conversational AI is being rapidly adopted by various other verticals beyond B2C (business-to-consumer). In fact, the average deal size for conversational AI solutions has increased by 28% in the last year alone, indicating a remarkable expansion and growth in its usage across multiple verticals. 

As we move ahead in the world of AI, it is important that businesses adopt technology to up their game and improve the services they provide. The competition in the market provides a lot of options for the end users to choose from and they would always opt for the services that provide an experience worthwhile. The bottom line is that Conversational AI is enabling human agents to do what they do in a much more efficient manner and it is up to us to give it a chance or not.