The world economy is clearly headed for “stormy waters”, and companies are bracing for a recession. Downturns always bring change and a great deal of uncertainty. How serious will the pending recession be – mild and short-lived or severe and prolonged? How can the business prepare and adapt?
When getting through hard times, some market players choose to be more cash-conservative and halt all new investment decisions. Others, on the contrary, believe the crisis is the best time to turn to new technology and opportunities.
What’s the right move?
A recession can be tough for a lot of things, but not for the customer experience (CX). Whether the moment is good or bad, CX teams have to keep the focus on internal and external SLAs, satisfaction scores, and churn reduction. In an economic slowdown, delighting customers and delivering an exceptional experience is even more crucial.
When in cost-cutting mode, CX departments find themselves under increasing pressure to do more with less. As before, existing systems and products require high-level support and training, new solutions brought in-house add to the complexity – but scaling the team and hiring new resources is out of the question.
And this is where technology comes to the fore. To maintain flexibility and remain recession-proof, businesses have started looking towards AI-powered conversational assistants being able to digitize and modernize the CX service.
Re-assessing investments in Al and ML
Over the last few years, investments in business automation, AI, and ML have been at the top of priority lists. Successful AI adoption brought significant benefits, high returns, and increased customer satisfaction. This worked during financially sound times – but now investments in AI/ML projects need to be reassessed.
There are several important things to consider:
- Speed of adoption: for many companies, the main AI adoption challenge rests in significant timelines involved in the project development and launch, which affects ROI. The longer the life cycle is, the more time it will take to start reaping the benefits from AI solutions – if they ever come through.
- Ease of integration: an AI solution needs to be easily laid on top of existing IT systems so that the business can move forward, without suffering operational disruptions.
- High accuracy level: in mission-critical industries where knowledge and data are highly nuanced, the terminology is complex and requirements to the dialog are stringent, accuracy is paramount. AI-powered assistants must be able to support contextual conversations and learn fast.
- Personalized CX: to exceed customer expectations, the virtual assistant should provide human-like personalized conversations based on the user’s data.
Increasing productivity with voice and text in-app assistants
Alan AI enables enterprises to easily address business bottlenecks in productivity and knowledge share. In-app (IA) assistants built with the Alan AI Platform can be designed and implemented fast – in a matter of days – with no disruption to existing business systems and infrastructure.
Alan’s IA assistants are built on top of the existing applications, empowering customers to interact through voice, text, or both. IA assistants continuously learn from the organization’s data and its domain to become extremely accurate over time and leverage the application context to provide highly contextual, personalized conversations.
With both web and mobile deployment options, Alan AI assistants help businesses and customers with:
- Always-on customer service: provide automated, first-class support with virtual agents available 24/7/365 and a self-help knowledge base; empower users to find answers to questions and learn from IA.
- Resolving common issues without escalation: let IA resolve common issues immediately, without involving live agents from CX or support teams.
- Onboarding and training: show the users how to complete tasks and find answers, guiding them through the application and updating visuals as the dialog is being held.
- Personalized customer experience: build engaging customer experiences in a friendly conversational tone becoming an integral part of the company’s brand.
Although it may seem the opposite, a recession can be a good time to increase customer satisfaction, reduce overhead and have a robust ROI. So, consider investing in true AI and intelligence with voice and text IA assistants by Alan AI.