How to Cash in on Conversational AI

…would be more than $400,000 a year. Assume that the customer is also paying its provider $200 per agent for the software. The total cost is $20,000 for software plus $400,000 for labor.

On the other hand, if live agent tasks can be automated by virtual agents, the customer could eliminate labor costs. This enables service providers to charge significantly more for virtual agents because even if the cost of the virtual agents increased by almost 10 times, to $200,000 (or $2,000 per virtual agent), the customer still sees its service costs cut in half.

Virtual agents drive more revenue by adding value to your services

Intelligent virtual agents provide an attractive opportunity for channel partners to offer new product lines that will drive additional streams of revenue. They can help channel companies sell more services to existing customers and sign new customers who need advanced self-service or interactive voice response (IVR) capabilities. Because virtual agents can be configured with different classes of skills, you can package, price and deploy services with a level of granularity that is highly unique and deliver them at multiple price points.

Virtual agents can be configured with very basic skills — the most basic agent might simply answer the phone, ask the caller if she wants to maintain her place in queue and schedule a callback. An advanced agent might have the skills to understand human speech in multiple languages, determine intent using natural language processing, process PCI-compliant payments and respond in multiple languages over the phone, via chat or SMS.

Additional advanced skills include:

• Voice biometrics
• Transcription
• Multilingual capabilities
• SMS
• Outbound campaigns
• Intelligent routing
• Real-time sentiment

Virtual agents are sticky

Not only can virtual agents help you win more deals, they can also help you retain more of your existing customers.

Because advanced self-service and natural language are becoming increasingly required for midmarket and enterprise UC and contact center deals, virtual agents offer mission-critical capabilities. They become trusted and valued “members” of service teams, and once deployed, service organizations will focus on how to use more of their services. In fact, research shows that more than three-quarters of organizations using conversational AI have realized quantifiable benefits, and more than half say that these benefits met or exceeded their expectations.

Bottom Line

Advances in conversational AI are creating opportunities to drive enormous business value, particularly for channel companies. Adding virtual agents into your service solutions can help you bring the most advanced real-time self-service capabilities to market quickly and easily. Partnering with providers of these solutions can help you retain your most demanding customers by meeting complex technology requirements; pull through more sales by meeting prospects’ needs for advanced IVR/IVA and real-time customer service; and demonstrate the future of AI-powered self-service to your customers. It’s time for channel companies to cash in on the promise of conversational AI.

As CMO, Richard Dumas is responsible for all aspects of Inference Solutions‘ worldwide marketing. He has more than 20 years of experience managing enterprise marketing programs for customer service solutions. Follow him on LinkedIn or on Twitter @InferenceSol.