About half (47%) of contact centres in the Asia-Pacific region are now looking at adopting voice AI solutions in the next 12 months as a business strategy to improve customer and employee satisfaction, according to a report from AI Rudder.
The report is based on a survey comprising more than 500 customer experience (CX) leaders in Asia, on the state of the contact centre industry.
Results show that nearly half (46%) have prioritised improving CX in the next 24 months. However, businesses still falling short on omnichannel implementation.
“When brands view their channels in silos, it is nearly impossible to personalise the experience for the customer,” says Kun Wu, co-founder and Managing Director of AI Rudder.
“The challenge now for organisations is to achieve personalisation at scale, without compromising the quality of customer experience,” said Wu. “For this reason, voice AI is becoming a critical avenue for businesses to manage high volumes of customer requests, while ensuring their services are seamless and intuitive.”
Looking into 2024, organisations are also looking to bridge the gap between CX and employee experience (EX). Customer interactions still require a human touch; quality CX is dependent on motivated and empowered employees.
Increased customer demand means that contact centre teams are more stretched than ever, and organisations are under pressure to optimise service standards while managing costs and workload.
Against this backdrop, solutions like voice AI are gaining traction as part of efforts to support staffing requirements, without compromising on service quality.
Given that calls have to be answered within a specific timeframe, organisations are looking at diverting queries to non-voice channels that do not require support from a human agent.
More than half (59%) are now considering the improvement of customer self-service as a key component of their CX strategy.
To address these issues, organisations are increasingly prioritising AI and ML and expect these investments to reduce the load on agents, improve employee retention (41%), and drive customer satisfaction (40%).
More than three-fourths (77%) have either started or re-calibrated their digital transformation priorities in the last two years, and over half (53%) are deploying a combination of AI and self-service applications, including voice AI assistants.
To reach the successful adoption of voice AI, understanding the nuances of voice interaction by collecting the right data pool to train AI models will be critical.
