What Are Conversational Platforms? A Conversational AI Guide

You’ve heard buzz about conversational AI platforms, but do you really know what they are? And more importantly—how can your company benefit from them? As speech-based platforms surge in popularity, it’s more important than ever for businesses to understand the many potential applications for this type of technology. Check out our guide below to learn how conversational platforms can enhance your relationship with your customers.

Conversational Platforms Definition

A conversational platform is a type of artificial intelligence technology that allows people to interact with computers in a way that mimics human conversation.

Businesses integrate these platforms into their website, social media, SMS marketing, and other messaging functionality. And though the computer responses are automated, they can be tailored to the needs of the customer to get the information or help they’re looking for, often at a quicker pace than if they were waiting to talk to a human representative.

Artificial intelligence

Conversational AI Examples

The most well-known conversational AI examples may exist in your everyday life. For example:

Virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Home.
Chatbots, which many customers use for live-chat on their website.
An automated virtual assistant, which you may encounter if you’ve ever called a customer service number.
Or you may have used an FAQ bot, which delivers quick answers to common questions and is one of the most simplistic forms of conversational AI.

How Conversational AI Platforms Work

The technology behind conversational AI platforms is evolving all the time, but most of today’s platforms utilize the same processes, including:

Automatic speech recognition: First the computer listens to the human voice using automatic speech recognition.
Natural language processing: Then the computer uses natural language processes to understand what the person is saying.
Advanced dialogue management: Once the computer understands what was said, it uses advanced dialogue management to decide on the next steps and form a response.
Machine learning: As with all types of artificial intelligence, conversational platforms get smarter and more efficient over time, which is known as machine learning.

How Can a Conversational AI Platform Help Your Business?

Now that you understand more about what conversational AI platforms are and how they work, you may be wondering how you can apply them within your business. And once you understand the benefits, you’ll probably be itching to integrate conversational AI within your company as soon as possible.

Conversational AI platforms can completely change the way you interact with your customers, making it easier to reach more people at once and quickly meet their needs. They can help almost any business increase efficiency, personalize the customer experience, boost revenue, and more.

Increase Efficiency

There are endless ways conversational AI platforms can help increase efficiency within your business, but its benefits within customer service are some of the most obvious. For example, rather than hiring more and more customer service agents to handle increased call volumes, you can instead implement a chatbot to take care of repetitive tasks, deliver information to customers, or direct customers toward another department. With all the time you’ll save, you can put your agents to use with more complex tasks that require a human touch.

Personalize the Customer Experience

There’s no shortage of ways you can customize conversational AI platforms to your unique business. All of these platforms are built with a developer API, meaning they can be tailored to the needs of your customers. You can even craft messages based on your customers’ interests, how they’ve behaved in the past, or previous conversations with the bot. Customers will love the personalization, which will create more loyalty and increased satisfaction rates over time.

Boost Revenue

At the end of the day, your business goals and decisions are driven by your bottom line. Thankfully, conversational platforms and chatbots can boost revenue and drive sales in both direct and indirect ways. For example, you can find chatbots designed to enhance the customer experience at any point along the customer journey, from learning about your brand to post-purchase questions when the customer already has purchased and received your product. At any of these moments, a chatbot can be available to interact with customers on your brand’s behalf, increasing conversions and driving sales as they answer customer questions, support the customer’s purchase process and provide order support.

Lower Costs

Replacing repetitive tasks by adding a conversational AI platform to your business is a proven method to reduce the overall operational costs of your business. These platforms can save up to 30% of customer support costs for businesses. Conversational AI platforms mainly;

Free-up agent’s time. This allows agents to tackle more difficult tasks and makes the office run more efficiently.
Increase response time. Conversational AI uses machine learning to pick up on customer requests and provides a relevant response in seconds.
Answer routine questions. All of these features contribute to conversational AI answering up to 80% of routine customer inquiries.

Is Conversational AI Right for You?

With a greater understanding of conversational AI platforms, it’s up to you to decide if your business can benefit from this technology. If you’re looking for ways to reach more customers, boost efficiency, and enhance the buyer’s journey, conversational AI is one of the best ways to do so. The popularity of these platforms isn’t going away anytime soon, and you’ll get a leg up on the competition by adopting this technology before it becomes completely commonplace.