Are Voice Bots Fulfilling their Purpose?

Artificial Intelligence is gradually taking over every industry. However, in the travel sector, Artificial Intelligence seemed to have failed to bring in the desired effect.

FREMONT, CA: Despite the technological boom and the influence of Artificial Intelligence, customers demand a personal connection while dealing with queries and issues. The convenience of voice bots in the travel industry does not seem to be a good solution as they do not possess a personalized interaction to deal with the current volume call. Voice bots or Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVR) are software employed in call centres of huge firms to guide customers to their desired representative rather than with a recorded message with keyed responses. Voice bots are backed by AI and tend to give a natural tone. It is widely observed that customers are inclined to eschew voice bots despite the improvements witnessed from the previous redundancies. The introduction of IVR seemed sudden and forced to customers. The calls kept them waiting in a loop and the customers had to respond to incoherent call and answer scenarios. Nevertheless, the IVR systems are used by industries to deal with massive call volumes.

Unfortunately, the IVR systems fail to differentiate between the types of calls and customers. Hence, the whole system seemed frustrating to them and specially aged customers found it even more difficult to communicate. The IVR systems appear to be a misfortune because it fails to render a personalized call experience. IVR only has the potential to collect and save a limited amount of data which makes the callers pass through the same loop of purchasing history, customer journey etc. The inability to provide data-driven decisions based on the customer’s call experiences also added to the failure of both the company and the IVR systems. The IVR complicated the customer experience instead of simplifying it. This is not something the technology cannot fix. A possible answer is to invest in technology to construct a customer-focused, alternative intelligence-powered speech bot. Voice bot calls with increased response time, decreased total call time and redirecting callers within no time is expected to be incorporated soon.