Everyone wants the most effective business operations daily. Unfortunately, if we look closely at business operations, we will recognize that often, we use expensive highly qualified resources to do mundane jobs.
For example, airlines were spending a phenomenal amount of money on highly qualified booking and travel agents. They discovered the same tasks could be as effectively executed by transferring the tasks to their customers. To enable this, they invested in software that would help customers navigate their buying processes. This is an example of the self-service world.
So far, we have gone through two phases of self-service in the consumer world. Today, we are on the verge of entering the third phase.
Self-Service 1.0 – Filling up forms by ourselves and giving them to businesses and getting information back in the physical world, such as mail and other document delivery modes.
Self-Service 2.0 – We use mobile and web applications daily for Banking, Airlines, E-Commerce, Healthcare, and other situations. We rarely visit banks. We use their software for most of our transactions. Gone are the days when we saw travel agents to buy tickets. Our visit to stores is mostly on-line, and Amazon and Shopify have enabled us to buy most things by ourselves.
Self-Service 3.0 – All applications we have used in the self-service 2.0 era are poised to interact with users with human-like conversations. Each conversation, using voice and visual responses, becomes a learning moment for the application. As people converse with it, it learns more about you: what you like, how you speak, your dialect. It understands and feels human… not onerous, not robotic. It is something you want to converse with.
Here are four applications that are on the verge of joining the Self-Service 3.0 movement.
Banking – Self-service banking is the new normal, and every bank has to be able to deliver that as an experience to its consumers. As people have moved online and to mobile, they expect to be able to bank 24/7 with personalized conversations in their applications. Customers are asking for more informational, frequently asked questions, and 20% of time complex, multi-turn questions. Answering the questions requires context and additional machine learning components beyond basic FAQs.
Food Ordering – Today, every fast-food restaurant has humans to take care of the ordering process. Tomorrow, customers will have a conversation with the restaurant’s custom application on-site or mobile. The conversation’s nature will include taking customers through their menu items, pricing, specials, delivery details, and completing the orders respectfully.
Patient Monitoring – Most elderly patients are regularly visited by nurses and caretakers to collect health data. Soon, an empathetic voice assistant will be having a conversation with patients to collect basic data, saving some nurse visits and time.
Training – Every business has to train its employees, and often these processes and procedures keep changing, creating training challenges. “What can I do here?” and “How do I complete this task?” are all conversations that can be enabled in any application to provide the latest contextual information, with appropriate voice and visual responses. Every application can train us while we are performing a task.
These examples release people to use their time for more challenging and creative tasks that befits their experience and qualifications.
In the next few years, we will be ushering in and furiously adopting Self-Service 3.0 solutions on the World’s First Conversational Voice AI platform, Alan AI. We will have human-like conversations with software applications in the upcoming Self-Service 3.0 era, where solutions will create delightful human-like experiences to interact with banks, merchants, healthcare services, and more on a day-to-day basis.
Besides providing human-like, empathetic conversations, Alan AI Platform will release humans to do more productive, value-add work.
