AI is all the rage today, with 76% of businesses expanding their AI budgets this year. In particular, the trend of AI conversational agents (i.e. chatbots and voice assistants) has become popular to maximize operations, especially in customer service.
But do AI chatbots live up to the hype?
Here we’ll go over the pros and cons of developing an AI conversational agent for your business. Overall, building a chatbot can significantly boost operational efficiency while also getting you big savings. Yet, it’s important to be aware of this technology’s limitations as you meet customer demands.
Pros of AI Conversational Agents
In essence, AI conversational agents automate certain interactions with your customers, freeing up your staff time. Currently, they’re in demand in industries such as real estate, travel, education, healthcare, and finance. What’s more, they can be leveraged internally to streamline employee resources in areas such as HR.
AI conversational agents run the gamut, depending on your customer channels. The most common types are chatbots or voice assistants. These agents can also be implemented for mobile apps, phone services, SMS, email, social media etc.
Specifically, implementing an AI chatbot can unlock key benefits for your business and customers.
For Customers
- Increase the quality of customer service. Chatbots can quickly serve customers with simpler inquiries, while your human agents dedicate themselves to complex ones. In fact, a recent survey showed customer satisfaction rates with AI chatbots at about 57%.
- Speed up complaint resolution and wait times. Having a chatbot lets your human agents get through customer inquiries more quickly, so that wait times and volumes are heavily reduced. Specifically, 90% of centers report improved complaint resolution speed with AI support.
- Provide customer service after-hours and in multiple languages. You can level up your service with automated chatbots during after-hours. And if you serve customers with diverse linguistic backgrounds, your AI can be outfitted with multiple languages.
- Elevate customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Chatbots can improve customer satisfaction by up to 80%, resulting in a stronger sense of brand loyalty.
For Businesses
- Improve operational efficiency. Conversational AI can handle a large portion of customer inquiries, boosting overall efficiency. For reference, studies show it can fully complete 25%-50% of customer inquiries.
- Support staff for greater productivity. With AI covering key areas, your customer service staff will be available for more involved inquiries and needs. In turn, this will increase overall productivity.
- Cut costs. Automating a significant chunk of customer interactions means you can reduce costs. Some estimates suggest you can save up to 30% of your customer service budget.
- Access to new customer analytics. Finally, AI conversational agents let you tap into new data that can help you make well-informed decisions about your staff and customer service.
In particular, adopting AI early can make a competitive difference. By implementing an AI conversational agent sooner rather than later, you can stand out in the market and achieve a stronger brand reputation.
Cons of AI Conversational Agents
Of course, you should take special care when implementing AI chatbots. Customers today aren’t yet 100% on board to use bot-led service. In particular, you’ll want to consider how to handle potential challenges such as:
For Customers
- Trust in bots. Trust is a major concern of customers, with 42% worried about getting inaccurate information from AI.
- Identify real needs. AI may not be capable of identifying the customer’s needs, especially if complex. This can lead to frustration and a failed customer interaction.
- Get detailed answers. In the same vein, the chatbot may not provide the depth of response that the customer requires, generating friction.
- Achieve language nuance. Chatbots may struggle to parse nuances in the customer’s response, leading to unsuccessful handling of their inquiry.
- Enjoy personalization. It’s vital to land that “personal touch” that’s specific to your target customer – whether it’s resolving a complaint, offering a discount or something else.
For Businesses
- Customer willingness to use. The first barrier may be customers’ willingness to engage with AI. 64% of customers prefer not to use chatbots, recent studies suggest.
- Hone in on brand voice. A chatbot should function with the same on-brand attention as your human agents. It’s essential to create responses and train chatbots with your ideal voice.
- Shoulder investment costs. Though the efficiency soon pays off, the upfront investment of building an AI conservational agent can be steep.
- Ongoing maintenance and updates. Your AI algorithm must be constantly updated, trained, and maintained to keep up with customer needs.
- Security and data privacy. You have a duty to protect and safeguard customer data. You’ll require top security protocols and processes to ensure this is the case.
Why Choose an AI Development Partner
While the challenges above can seem overwhelming, you can mitigate them with a well-developed AI conversational agent.
Building AI tends to be a big investment, which is why it can be risky. Although chatbots can be highly advantageous for business, it’s not a guarantee.
That’s where your AI development partner comes in. An expert team can guide you through the planning, development, implementation, and ongoing training of your AI conversational agent. Here’s why you should lean on a top partner to put your AI vision into practice.
1. Navigate Ever-Changing Trends
AI is a rapidly evolving industry, with an abundance of new trends, tools, and best practices. It’s worth having an AI expert help you navigate these trends and choose the best course forward for your specific project.
2. Get Expertise in Technical Areas
AI is an umbrella term for a variety of complex technical techniques. You’ll need AI specialists to ensure that you make sound decisions about your tech selection, implementation and training. These choices have significant impacts on the success of your project, which is why you require expert voices at the table.
3. Design the Best Solution for the Future
Since building AI can be costly, you’ll want to ensure that you undertake the best solution not just for now, but as you scale up into the future. A trusted AI development partner can help you analyze the options for long-term viability so that your investment truly pays off.
4. Maximize Resources and Time-to-Market
AI specialists are well-versed in setting up development and training cycles that are as efficient as possible. You can best elevate your team’s strengths and resources by trusting experts. In turn, greater efficiency means that you can speed up development time and beat the competition to the market.
5. Use Best Practices and Reduce Risks
The last thing you want from your investment is a low-quality AI conversational agent. Hiring an AI development partner means that your product is created using best practices. For example, AI experts are savvy in:
- Understanding your customer pain points
- Integrating AI with your legacy systems and tech stack
- Personalizing AI according to your buyer personas
- Designing brand-specific conversations and a human agent hand-off
- Achieving accessibility and inclusivity
- Training and updating your AI algorithm regularly
Overall, developing AI with top methods reduces the risks associated with low quality, functionality, and security.
6. Understand Regulatory and Ethics Implications
It’s tricky to understand the AI landscape – not just legally but also ethically. Issues such as data privacy and IP ownership are biggies. There are also countless negative social impacts such as fake news and bias in AI for education, employment, and policing.
With an AI development partner at your side, you can better handle these complex topics and ensure you’re charting a technically and ethically viable path for your AI product.
7. Receive Ongoing Support
AI isn’t a “one-and-done” deal. You’ll need to continually train your dataset and make updates according to your customer demands. These maintenance tasks are vital to improve the effectiveness of your AI over time. An AI specialist can help simplify this process through ongoing support.
Our Case Studies: MaIA and OLivIA
At OrangeLoops, we have firsthand experience delivering top-quality AI conversational agents for a wide range of uses. To give you a sense of our AI portfolio, we’ve highlighted two recent agents that we’ve built.
MaIA
MaIA is the chat agent available on our website that focuses on sales development. It’s designed to engage visitors, qualify leads, and provide assistance. MaIA supports our sales team by providing rich datasets about customer integrations.
Through MaIA, our sales team receives one-off and weekly reports via email that identify user needs, search intent, buyer trends, and more. Overall, this allows them to focus their efforts on pursuing new leads and customer relationships.
OLivIA
In comparison, OLivIA isn’t a client-facing chatbot. Instead, it’s an internal agent that’s tailored to streamline employee needs. OLivIA is specifically designed to facilitate HR information and support.
For example, OLivIA gives employees easy access to HR policies, internal communications, resources and more. In turn, this drives effective resource management and frees up our HR staff to focus on relationship building.
Build AI Conversational Agents With OrangeLoops
86% U.S. execs believe that AI will become a “mainstream technology” for business. Given the advantages of operational efficiency and cost savings, creating an AI conversational agent may be the right step for your business.
As you get started with leveraging AI, remember that your partner can make or break your product success. Take your time to find a partner seasoned in AI projects and best practices.
At OrangeLoops, we’re laser-focused on delivering products using cutting-edge technologies like AI. Our Boston software dev shop specializes in end-to-end AI consulting and implementation so that you can get a customized chatbot up and running ASAP. Get in touch to find out how we’ll carry out your AI vision!
Next up: Check out our in-depth article on FAQs About AI Conversational Agents!
Check Also:
- Integrating AI into Mobile Apps: Top 10 Lessons Learned
- Beginner’s Guide to OpenAI
- Boston’s AI Pioneers: How These Startups are Transforming Industries with Artificial Intelligence
- Embracing Product Discovery Best Practices for Market Success
- Our Ultimate Guide to Turn Your Business Idea Into a Viable Mobile App
