gBusinesses everywhere are looking to upgrade their customer service with the help of AI-based bots. But it’s easy to underestimate just how beneficial these voice bots and chatbots can be. With the right voice bot technology working for your business, you can improve efficiency, improve customer perceptions, and even boost profitability.
How? And are there any limitations to these benefits?
How Voice Bots Improve Profitability
These are the most important ways that voice bots improve profitability, when utilized correctly.
- Reduced labor costs. AI has disrupted jobs in many industries already. Implementing voice bots in a given department or application doesn’t mean replacing all your human staff members there. Instead, it’s likely that you’ll use voice bots in combination with your human staff members to improve service even further. Either way, the deployment of AI voice bots has the potential to reduce your labor costs, ultimately reducing your business expenses and improving profitability.
- Higher overall efficiency. Organizations that employ AI tend to demonstrate higher efficiency at a wide variety of different tasks. Instead of relying on thoughtful manual action for every little decision, you can automate the bulk of this work.
- Faster response times. Faster response times in many applications, from practicing customer service to answering HR requests, can lead to higher profitability in multiple ways. It allows more queries to be processed in the same amount of time, it can be done automatically and without human intervention, and it can lead to higher satisfaction with the query’s resolution. All of these effects are positive, reducing expenses, increasing revenue, or both.
- Greater customer/employee satisfaction. Not everyone has a favorable opinion of voice bots, but there’s no debating that they tend to be faster at resolving the most common and most repetitive types of inquiries. Deploying voice bots is generally associated with higher customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. This is vital if you want to retain your customers and employees.
- Increased sales revenue. If you leverage the power of voice bots in your sales and marketing strategy, you can also increase sales revenue. These automated tools can help you respond to calls faster, spread information more efficiently, and even reach more people across more channels. The end result is that you’ll have more informed prospects, a richer pool of leads, and more closed sales.
- Broader reach. If you’re willing to utilize voice bots across multiple channels, you can use it to achieve a broader reach. Because you can easily scale up your voice bot operations, you can field thousands, or even millions of new inquiries without scaling up your workforce.
- Easier scalability. This quality also makes voice bots ideal for businesses that want to scale. Instead of having to hire human agents, one by one, you can scale up your technology and accomplish your goals much more reliably and efficiently.
- Lower rates of burnout and turnover. Incorporating voice bots into a job associated with stress can also lower rates of burnout and turnover. For example, customer service is associated with an abnormally high turnover rate due to human agent stress and burnout. If voice bots take over some of the most stressful and repetitive parts of the job, you’ll see lower turnover costs.
Improving Profitability Reliably
Unfortunately, adopting voice bot technology isn’t an immediate guarantee that your business will see higher profitability. In order to improve profitability reliably, you should:
- Define your goals. Some people incorporate AI simply because they feel like they have to. But if you incorporate AI mindlessly or without a thoughtful application, it could end up working against you. Before deciding on anything related to voice bots, clearly define your goals. What are you trying to achieve? How do you plan on incorporating AI in this environment?
- Do your due diligence. Always do your due diligence. Before purchasing any AI technology, review its capabilities, take it for a test drive, and compare it to its competitors.
- Launch a pilot program. Don’t immediately roll out your voice bots at scale. Instead, launch a pilot program and see how it performs. This will allow you to catch various bugs and issues before they become bigger problems.
- Gather data and analyze. Gather data related to your voice bots as you roll them out. Are they reliably improving response times? Do your customers appreciate them?
- Continue refining. AI voice bots are a perpetual work in progress, because there are always new things to optimize. Keep refining to keep improving your efficiency and overall experiences.
If done strategically and deliberately, AI voice bots can boost the profitability of your business. And because you can use voice bots across many departments and applications, you can multiply this beneficial effect many times over. If you want to remain competitive and continue seeing ideal results, a voice bot may soon become a practical necessity.
