Asia Pacific contact centers are expected to adopt voice artificial intelligence (AI) solutions in the next 12 months as a business strategy to improve customer and employee satisfaction. Philippine contact centers, for its part, are expected to use the technology to support Tagalog and Taglish.
The latest research by AI Rudder also revealed that half (47%) of Asia Pacific contact centers are now looking at adopting voice AI solutions in the next 12 months as a business strategy to improve customer and employee satisfaction.
Aside from Tagalog and Taglish, the platform supports more than 20 languages and dialects, including English, Chinese, Hindi, Tamil, Bahasa Melayu, and Bahasa.
The report, titled “The Future of Customer Experience with Voice AI”, was based on a survey comprising more than 500 customer experience (CX) leaders in Asia, on the state of the contact center industry.
Having prioritized customer acquisition and onboarding over the past three years, digital-first businesses now find themselves at the tipping point of digital transformation and are thus increasingly realizing the importance of CX in driving long-term engagement, winning, and growing their revenue.
According to the report, nearly half (46%) have prioritized improving CX in the next 24 months.
“When brands view their channels in silos, it is nearly impossible to personalize the experience for the customer,” Kun Wu, co-founder and managing director of AI Rudder, said.
“The challenge now for organizations is to achieve personalization at scale, without compromising the quality of customer experience. 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,” Wu said.
Looking into 2024, organizations 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 center teams are more stretched than ever, and organizations are under pressure to optimize 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, organizations 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, organizations are increasingly prioritizing 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 2 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.
