Key Questions To Ask Before Investing In Conversational AI

Generally speaking, companies, services, businesses, brands, etc. now recognize the importance of automating interactions with customers and the value of it. The value points discussed below drive home the benefits. Where today's automated customer interactions are concerned, if you have a lot of questions, conversational AI is a good place to start. 

Should your company invest in conversational AI? In order to get the answers you need, let's start by looking at the benefits of voice AI:

• Compared to other market solutions (Dialog Flow, the current IVR experience, etc.) customers are offered a significantly better option.
• In order to scale up or scale down, automation provides the flexibility to stay in tune with market realities.
• Any time of day, resolution and support are provided.
• Expensive advisors and resources are freed up.

There’s still one big question that's posed by numerous potential conversational AI users: "Which interaction and/or which workflow should be automated?" To answer that question, let's explore the answers to a few more.

When you talk to an AI vendor, ask the following…

Are Rule-Based Bots And Machine Learning Supported by Your Platform?

Rule-based preprogrammed chatbots recognize a number of intents. The responses they provide are also preprogrammed. No artificial intelligence is needed at this point.

A genuine AI agent is another kind of bot. Here, the agents are trained. Rather than giving pre-scripted responses. Deep learning techniques and machine learning are applied, using huge data sets. Make sure your vendor supports genuine AI agents and scripted bots if you prefer the flexibility of choosing either approach.

To Use Your Platform, What Software Does Our Contact Center Need?

"Whatever you have already." That should be the answer to the above question. Right out of the box, your potential vendor should support a healthy number of channel aggregators and many of the popular third-party channels. With any number of different services and third-party tools, the platform you're considering should, additionally, be able to integrate.

Across Channels, Can We Build End to End Customer Journeys?

Most chatbots are built to work on a single channel and are single-purpose. In a modern and versatile automation platform, however, it should be possible to chain bots together. Entire customer journeys can be better fashioned this way. The creation of branching conversation trees should be possible.

How Is Fall Over to a Live Agent Handled By Your Solution?

With pre-programmed responses, most automated systems and chatbots are designed to recognize inputs by a user and follow-up appropriately. "Graceful failure" is needed when the system identifies a user's intent that falls outside what the bot is capable of handling. You need to have control over how this happens, and it needs to be handled appropriately, in a customer-friendly manner.

Is Your Solution Proprietary, Open Source, or a Mix of Both?

Because you can make it do what you want, open-source software is great. That is if you have time to build your own solution, and you have serious coding talent and technical expertise in-house.

Support open-source standards with a strong vendor, and you have the perfect solution. This provides a platform that's easy to integrate with other software, is almost infinitely customized, and can be extended to offer any required functionalities.

Is This Solution "Low Code?” 

Non-technical people and operations will be able to create bots code-free, courtesy of a low code platform with a visual developer environment. The best people to create virtual agents are very often employees of a non-technical nature. Directly with customers, they work on the front line. Generally asked questions by the customers are familiar to these people and, as quickly as possible, they’re used to giving answers. 

Contact us today at Enterprise Bot if you'd like to find out how our team can help your team. You can also email us at sales@enterprisebot.ai.