What you need to know about conversational artificial intelligence
Looking to scale your customer support capabilities without:
also growing the expense of your customer service team, or
losing that personal spark that makes your brand so special to your customers?
Then you’re in the right place.
Today, we’re at the brink of a massive shift toward a new norm for customer service and the overall customer experience (CX).
To remain ahead of the curve, you must get to know conversational artificial intelligence (AI), its impact on CX, and the best way to implement AI within your support organization.
Discover it all in the following guide.
Getting to know conversational artificial intelligence
Conversational AI is a specific category within the wider world of AI.
Conversational AI technologies use machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and other algorithms to understand the meaning of a conversation, analyze its intent, and return relevant information in a way that mimics human speech.
Conversational AI applications are being adopted across cutting-edge customer service teams to continue to serve personalized and human-like user experiences at larger scale and faster pace.
How to have a conversation with AI: Conversational AI chatbots
It’s important to know the basics of how conversational AI works because it serves as the foundation for one of today’s most modern and powerful customer support tools — the conversational AI chatbot.
When chatbots first hit shelves, many of them were rule-based. That means they were programmed with a set “menu” of replies, and would serve one of these replies based on words they recognized from a customer’s inquiry. This limited functionality works for simple requests like “Help me make a return,” but it’s easy to see how it falls apart when the situation gets any more complicated than that.
But now, we also have much more advanced chatbots that are powered by conversational AI. Instead of following decision trees that result in simplistic Q&A style communication — these smart bots can rely on context, data, and deep learning to problem solve, personalize, and carry on human-like interactions.
Remember that not every single chatbot you come across today will be powered by conversational AI. That can work for businesses that don’t field a lot of customer requests, or that have really big contact centers that can take over any mildly-complicated conversations. But if you’re truly looking to lead your customer service team to provide a better and more modern customer experience — consider conversational AI your new norm.
Why conversational AI is the new norm in customer experience
Here are the benefits of conversational AI, especially when delivered via customer support chatbots, that prove why it’s the new standard in exceptional customer experiences.
Empowers reps to focus on highest-value conversations
We’ve all heard the claim that AI is “stealing” jobs. To the contrary, when applying conversational AI tools to customer support situations, your agents will actually get to do the best parts of the job better and more often.
With AI quickly recognizing and knocking out simple support requests — and rerouting those that are more complex — to maximize operational efficiency, your reps get to focus on the tougher, and higher-value, conversations that require the logical thinking and thoughtful touches only human agents can deliver.
Provides robust support, even after hours
Night owls and customers outside your company’s time zone will rejoice when you add conversational AI-powered chatbots to your arsenal.
No more canned answers that don’t really solve anything or spending half a day replying to support emails and phone messages that came in over night. Smart chatbots provide robust, personalized customer support around the clock to keep customers happy and your backlog manageable.
Enables the self-serve option modern considers crave
Despite what you may assume, the majority of customers actually want to look for solutions on their own before contacting your company.
In fact, more than 80% of folks say they desire more self-serve options as part of the customer experience, according to NICE’s 2022 Digital-First Customer Experience Report.
What better way to enable them to self-serve than by providing an always-on, well-informed chatbot they can consult with the moment they have a burning question or need?
In-app live streaming made easy.
6 of the best AI bots in 2023 (and beyond)
The PwC 2022 AI Business Survey found that among AI leaders, AI has helped increase productivity, refine decision-making, optimize customer experience, upgrade innovation, and make many more improvements.
Ready to join their ranks?
Here are several different conversational AI chatbots from which to choose to propel your business performance and customer experience forward — no matter the use case.
1. Ada: Serving the retail sector
Ada promises to use generative AI (that just means it can generate new, on-topic content — it’s another way to say conversational AI) to automate customer service and enable your team to do the least work possible.
One of Ada’s focal points is ecommerce, where it creates proactive and personalized digital shopping experiences based on customer history, actions, and known interests.
Use Ada to help customers solve administrative issues (checking shipping, making returns, etc.), deliver sizing information, make relevant offers, reduce friction in the checkout process, and hand off customers the moment a human conversation is required.
2. IBM’s Watson Assistant: Top enterprise fit
Named a “Leader” in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms, IBM’s Watson Assistant had to be our top pick for the best conversational AI solution for big brands.
When using Watson to create (no code required) AI-powered virtual agents and chatbots, businesses can expect an intuitive interface, simple integrations, and ongoing learning that lends itself to fast yet personal, accurate, and friendly customer interactions.
3. Salesforce’s Einstein: For those deep in the Salesforce ecosystem
Einstein is the AI system behind Salesforce, injecting automation, speed, and intelligence across various elements of Salesforce Customer 360.
More specifically, Salesforce’s Einstein-powered bots can engage with customers to guide them through multi-step processes, help them check the status of claims, update orders, and more. All of this is delivered with top-tier personalization, thanks to their CRM-bot integration.
4. Drift’s AI chatbots: Assisting sales and marketing
With their focus on the power of conversation, it’s no wonder the Drift Conversation Cloud platform comes complete with conversational AI.
Sales and marketing teams can use Drift for lead and customer engagement, prospecting, qualifying, nurturing, and even conversion all through its powerful built-in AI chatbot.
5. Kore.ai: Unique focus on the employee experience
Kore.ai’s conversational AI technology offers smart digital and voice assistants that promise to deliver fast but still custom experiences for customers and employees alike.
What’s special here is the mention of employees.
While many conversational AI platforms naturally make life easier for the reps and other workers who engage with them, most don’t highlight that reality.
With features like centralized data storage and collaboration, smart search, and virtual assistants that help with internal HR and IT requests and interactions, Kore.ai keeps employee workflows in mind.
6. Sendbird’s ChatGPT AI-powered bot: Overall fastest and smartest option
Hyper personal and human-like conversations made possible by a combination of language learning models and first-party data from your own customers?
Seamless connection to the most popular and powerful conversational AI — ChatGPT?
Lightning-fast, no-code chatbot creation, set up, testing, and launch?
There’s only one AI chatbot that can deliver this kind of cutting-edge customer experience today, and it’s from Sendbird.
With a ChatGPT-powered AI bot from Sendbird, you get the speed and smarts of modern conversational AI and all the experience and expertise our company has been built on for years.
Sign up for a free trial (or dev account) to spin up a no-code bot, carefully test it for tone and quality, and launch it live on your app in a matter of minutes.
Want to make a few customizations? Take advantage of our low-code API integration to make the experience more your own.
Have development resources? Then you can go wild with the personalizations. With our chatbot sample apps, documentation, and sandbox as well as robust APIs, SDKs, and ready-made UI components, we reduce complexities so developers can be more productive.
From finance to healthcare, retail, on-demand, and beyond, a Sendbird bot provides the best enterprise-ready but small-biz friendly conversational interface for every industry and use case.
Boost engagement, retention, and customer satisfaction with conversational AI chatbots from Sendbird
You don’t have to be an IT expert or exhaust your entire development team to implement and reap the benefits of conversational artificial intelligence.
If you have a Sendbird Chat-enabled app, all you need is to create a chatbot in the dashboard and enable it in your app. You can seamlessly choose ChatGPT from OpenAI or Palm 2 from Google.
As a developer, you can also use our Chatbot API to do the same in just a few lines of code. Sign up for a free trial and head to the developer portal to get access to our many tutorials to quickly build a proof of concept (POC) for JavaScript, iOS, or Android.
Or, you can go straight to sales to get all your integration, billing, and product questions taken care of.
We can’t wait to help you shift to the modern side of AI-powered customer care.
