It’s no secret that today’s customers expect highly-personalized, seamless communication across channels when they connect with companies. Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming a ‘must-have’ for brands looking to have a competitive edge in the battle for customer loyalty.
Using conversational AI to field basic customer queries is often an accessible starting point for brands. By 2030, the conversational AI industry is expected to be worth $41.39 billion. As conversational AI technology advances, more brands will look to enhance their contact center operations with features like a virtual agent.
To ensure that a virtual agent can effectively meet customer expectations and help deliver a great customer experience (CX), there are some considerations that brands need to keep in mind when designing AI conversations.
Keep it simple
Why is a customer reaching out to a contact center? To resolve an issue. Getting the customer from point A to point B, as quickly and efficiently as possible ensures the most seamless, satisfying, and trouble-free path to issue resolution.
Humans can realistically only remember three to five points at one time, so it’s critical to keep the conversational flow with a virtual agent simple.
Writing voice prompts that mirror the way customers actually speak, will provide a more engaging and effective experience. An overcomplicated, flowery language that may seem elevated on paper will likely fall flat, with customers in the conversational flow.
Companies are also wise, to avoid overburdening a custome,r with too many marketing or sales messages delivered through a virtual agent. These extraneous elements, at best, will slow down the journey to issue resolution and, at worst, may confuse or frustrate the customer.
The virtual head nod
Experts who study the science of human-to-human interactions note the importance of tone, expressions, and mannerisms in productive conversations. Absent these visual and tonal cues in AI interactions, good conversational AI design will provide discourse markers. Words like OK, thanks, or got it are necessary elements to mark the progress of interaction in a virtual conversation.
Discourse markers indicate that the conversation is moving along and that the customer has been understood. In the virtual world of conversational AI, discourse markers are like the head nods often used in face-to-face conversation to indicate understanding.
These virtual head nods can also be used to signal a change in the topic within a conversational flow. Or as a reporting tool to indicate the completion of a key performance indicator (KPI).
Managing expectations
The system delays or dead space can occur – especially when the virtual agent needs to retrieve backend information from an application programming interface (API) or customer relationship management (CRM) system to advance the conversation.
Building in prompts that clearly communicate the potential for wait time while information is located is the best way to manage customer expectations proactively. A simple statement like ‘Please wait while I look that up’ will provide assurance to the customer that the conversation has not been disconnected or abandoned when the virtual assistant goes quiet. A sound effect or even music can provide the same assurance.
Life happens
There are a variety of factors that might lead a customer to “erroring out” of the conversational flow – a barking dog, a ringing doorbell, screaming kids, multitasking, or just plain being distracted. Unpredictable life moments sometimes happen during customer service encounters.
In human-to-human conversation, it’s easy for customers to communicate that they’re confused and need to reset focus. Conversational resets are more challenging in human-to-AI exchanges, but there are error recovery techniques to help get the conversation back on track.
Repetition built into pivotal moments in the flow is an error recovery strategy that solves many of the most common causes of conversational derailment. For example, if a user has missed a question, the virtual assistant can recognize a delayed response, a lack of response, or a response not fitting for the question – triggering a repetition of the missed prompt. Adding additional details with the repetition, like suggesting potential responses for that question, can further support the customer, get the conversation back on track, and move the interaction along.
Even with the best-intentioned and best-timed error recovery tactics, there will be customers who just can’t recover from a conversational wobble or don’t want to continue with a virtual agent. In these instances, it is important to have a defined point of no return that will trigger an escalated connection with a human agent.
Game-changing technology for contact centers
With conversational AI technology, contact centers can apply deeper intelligence and automation across communication channels. This can result in more meaningful personalizations for customers and an effective issue resolution. Virtual agents are rapidly replacing traditional interactive voice response (IVR) and basic chatbots to create more human-like customer interactions, even when the human agents are not yet involved in the conversation. This technology allows human agents to better manage and address more complex customer queries by liberating them from basic or repetitive tasks. Conversational AI can be a game changer for the modern contact center when designed and applied well.
Conversational AI design is both an art and a science. It’s more than just writing a script for a virtual agent. Those designing this type of customer engagement need to bridge the gap between the machine’s technical functionality and the human customer’s unpredictable nature. Good conversation designers will always be an advocate for the customer. They will maintain realistic expectations about the role of conversational AI technology in the larger customer journey.
If you liked reading this, you might like our other stories
Finding The Right CX Talent
All You Need to Know: Google Duplex
Microsoft Dynamics 365 represents a robust cloud-based CRM solution with features such as pipeline assessment, relationship analytics, and conversational intelligence. It utilises AI-powered insights to provide actionable intelligence via predictive analytics, lead scoring, sentiment analysis, etc. Currently, Microsoft operates in 190 countries and is made up of more than 220,000 employees worldwide.
HubSpot is an inbound marketing, sales, and customer service software provider, offering robust CRM and automation solutions. Some of its products include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Operations Hub, Content Hub, Commerce Hub, Marketing Analytics and Dashboard Software. Guided by its inbound methodology, HubSpot enables companies to prioritise innovation and customer success.
Monday.com is a project management software company, offering a cloud-based platform that enables businesses 
Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks is a global AI-powered business software provider. Its tech stack includes a scalable and comprehensive suite for IT, customer support, sales, and marketing teams, ensuring value for immediate business impact. Its product portfolio includes Customer Service Suite, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Freshcaller, Freshsuccess, and Freshservice. Freshservice for Business Teams has helped several global organisations to enhance their operational efficiency.
Talkdesk offers an innovative AI-powered customer-centric tech stack to its global partners. The company provides generative AI integrations, delivering industry-specific solutions to its customers. Talkdesk CX Cloud and Industry Experience Clouds utilise modern machine learning and language models to enhance contact centre efficiency and client satisfaction.
The company offers comprehensive cloud-based solutions, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Gaming Consoles, Microsoft Advertising, Copilot, among other things, to help organisations offer enhanced CX and ROI. Its generative-AI-powered speech and voice recognition solutions,such as Cortana and Azure Speech Services empowers developers to build intelligent applications.
IBM is a global hybrid cloud and AI-powered 
Uniphore is an enterprise-class, AI-native company that was incubated in 2008. Its enterprise-class multimodal AI and data platform unifies all elements of voice, video, text and data by leveraging Generative AI, Knowledge AI, Emotion AI and workflow automation. Some of its products include U-Self Serve, U-Assist, U-Capture, and U-Analyze. Its Q for Sale is a conversational intelligence software that guides revenue teams with AI-powered insights, offering clarity on how to effectively keep prospects engaged.
Google Cloud accelerates every organisation’s ability to digitally transform its business. Its enterprise-grade solutions leverage modern technology to solve the most criticial business problems 
8×8 offers out-of-the-box contact centre solutions, assisting all-size businesses to efficiently meet customer needs and preferences. It offers custom CRM integrations support and integrates effortlessly with third-party CRMs like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk, and more. Offering global support in all time zones & development teams in 5 continents, its patented geo-routing solution ensures consistent voice quality.
Sprinklr is a comprehensive enterprise software company for all customer-focused functions. With advanced AI, Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform lets organisations offer human experiences to every customer, every time, across any modern channel.
Upland offers a comprehensive suite of contact centre and customer service solutions with products including InGenius, Panviva, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers. InGenius enables organisations to connect their existing phone system with CRM, further enhancing agent productivity. Panviva provides compliant and omnichannel capabilities for highly regulated industries. Whereas, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers are its AI-powered solutions, 
Zoho Social, a part of Zoho’s suite of 50+ products, is a comprehensive social media management platform for businesses and agencies. The Zoho Social dashboard includes a robust set of features, such as Publishing Calendar, Bulk Scheduler, and Approval Management to offer businesses all the essential social media publishing tools. Its monitoring tools help enterprises track and respond to relevant social conversations.
Hootsuite, headquartered in Vancouver, is a social media management platform that streamlines the process of managing multiple social media accounts. Some of its core offerings include social media content planning and publishing, audience engagement tools, analytics and social advertising. Its easy-to-integrate capabilities help marketing teams to schedule and publish social media posts efficiently.
Brandwatch enables businesses to build and scale the optimal strategy for their clients with intuitive, use-case-focused tools that are easy and quick to master. Bringing together consumer intelligence and social media management, the company helps its users react to the trends that matter, collaborate on data-driven content, shield the brand from threats and manage all the social media channels at scale.
Zoho Corporation offers innovative and tailored software to help leaders grow their business. Zoho’s 55+ products aid sales and marketing, support and collaboration, finance, and recruitment requirements. Its customer analytics capabilities come with a conversational feature, Ask Zia. It enables users to ask questions and get insights in the form of reports and widgets in real-time.
Salesforce-owned Tableau is an AI-powered analytics and business intelligence platform, offering the breadth and depth of capabilities that serve the requirements of global enterprises in a seamless, integrated experience. Marketers can utilise generative AI models, AI-powered predictions, natural language querying, and recommendationsons.
Fullstory is a behavioural data platform, helping C-suite leaders make informed decisions by injecting digital behavioural data into its analytics stack. Its patented technology uncovers the power of quality behavioural data at scale, transforming every digital visit into actionable insights. Enterprises can increase funnel conversion and identify their highest-value customers effortlessly.
Contentsquare is a cloud-based digital experience analytics platform, helping brands track billions of digital interactions, and turn those digital 
Amplitude is a product analytics platform, enabling businesses to track visitors with the help of collaborative analytics. The platform leverages the capabilities of 
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirement for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its platform helps play an essential role in managing different digital content or assets to improve customer happiness. Its easy-to-optimise content gives users appropriate marketing streams, ensuring product awareness.
Started in 2005 in a Sweden-based small town, Norrköping, Voyado offers a customer experience cloud platform that includes a customer loyalty management system. This platform helps businesses design and implement customer loyalty programs, track customer 
TapMango provides a comprehensive, customisable, flexible and feature-rich customer loyalty program. The loyalty tools include an integrated suite of customised consumer-facing technology, easy-to-use merchant tools, and automation algorithms, all aimed at enhancing customer experience. Adaptable to any industry, TapMango’s platform helps merchants compete with larger chains, converting customer one-time purchases into profitable spending habits.
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirements for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its innovative platform has played an essential role in managing different digital content or assets, to improve customer happiness or satisfaction. Some of its products include Adobe Gen Studio, Experience Manager Sites, Real-time CDP, and Marketo Engage.
