The Complete Guide to Conversational AI for Your Business

What is conversational AI?

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become one of the most impactful technologies used across industries to connect people with the information they need. This could be a customer using a chatbot on their health insurance website, a traveler booking a flight over a voice-enabled virtual assistant, or a contact center agent using an automated assist tool to track down account details for a banking customer.

Today’s most sophisticated conversational AI enables human-like conversations, across every engagement channel that a customer or employee may choose, to deliver effortless, personalized experiences. Conversational AI powers these interactions across channels via an intelligent assistant such as Verint Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA).

Verint IVA combines cutting-edge natural language processing, machine learning, and robust analytics with a low-code collaborative environment that works within customers’ existing application ecosystems to automate customer and employee interactions.

How is conversational AI used for self-service?

Delivering a great conversational customer experience is critical to any company that wants to mitigate contact center costs by allowing customers to self-serve on their own schedule and on their own terms. By using AI-based IVAs, organizations can free up their contact center agents to perform more complex tasks by reducing average handle time and deflecting inbound volume through self-service.

Some of the world’s largest organizations are using AI to deliver delightful customer experiences. This technology is used by enterprises around the globe to:

• Help pay a bill.
• Reset a password or username
• Book a flight or train ticket.
• Find information about a medication.
• Ask about local government services.
• Find a medical provider.
• Schedule an appointment.
• Ask for roadside assistance in an emergency.
• Find details about your insurance policy.
• Receive proactive information about your travel schedule.

How is conversational AI used in the contact center?

While IVAs can deliver immense savings for your contact center, they also can be used to work alongside your human contact center agents. IVAs don’t only handle tasks typically handled by an agent, they can also help an agent deliver better service.

When you deploy a conversational AI solution in your contact center, you can provide your agents with guided resolutions and quick intent understanding. This can help lower average handle time, improve customer journeys, and enhance the agent experience while also lowering costs. It can allow your contact center to:

• Create a scalable hybrid workforce of humans and bots working together.
• Automatically fetch knowledge articles and answers agents need as the conversation progresses.
• Put everything an agent needs to know and a recap of the customer’s journey right on their screen, saving time and setting your agents up for success.
• Free up agents to focus on the time-sensitive and complex calls that truly require a human touch while improving agent productivity.

How does conversational AI deliver ROI?

Intelligent virtual assistants power a range of different use cases across industries that deliver immediate and lasting ROI. From lowering average handle time to boosting ecommerce sales, they can provide measurable results while also improving the customer experience and lowering contact center costs. Here’s a look at a few of the successes enjoyed by some of the companies using Verint IVA.

50% year-over-year growth in self-service usage for a roadside assistance organization using the virtual assistant in both voice and digital channels to help their members receive immediate service.

20% reduction in call transfer rates immediately after deployment, which helped a global hospitality company double its automated reservations through voice, digital, SMS, and mobile channels.

1.4M calls handled during open enrollment period—54% of which were able to actively enroll without human assistance—for an HR solution company that serves 20 million people worldwide with its Verint IVA.

What’s the difference between chatbots and intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs)?

Well, it depends on who you ask (and when you asked them). In fact, some people will tell you that in today’s market the terms “chatbot” and “intelligent virtual assistant (IVA)” are synonymous, and as the technology evolves, we continue to see the terms used interchangeably. But, traditionally, here’s how we’ve delineated between the two at Verint:

Chatbots have typically been viewed as simple question-and- answer bots that are deployed to perform relatively simple tasks. The term has come to refer to a solution that can provide a “chat”-like interaction, but that is often limited to more basic tasks rather than actionable results.

Intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs), on the other hand, use natural language understanding (NLU) and machine learning to identify customer’s true intent based on the words typed or spoken for a broad range of use cases and modalities of conversational automation. In short, an IVA is a next-level chatbot that can grow, evolve, and adapt to your customer or employee facing use-case needs over time.

What are low-code intelligent virtual assistants?

A low-code IVA is a virtual assistant built and managed through a user interface and requiring very little programming or code-writing expertise. It’s very helpful for enabling internal teams to easily and quickly create conversational flows and tune the assistant over time without extensive support. Look for low-code IVAs that offer pre-built connectors to integrate easily with your existing systems. The best ones provide a visual interface and an array of useful features, including:

Visual Workspace

• Manage your voice and digital assistants in a single, collaborative environment.
• Easily fine-tune conversational flows, tasks, and author responses to replicate human-like conversations.
• Capture interlinked paths and multi-turn conversations to identify and customize intents and entities.

Conversation Analytics

• Employ visual, customizable dashboards and reports to track and examine the conversational metrics that matter most.
• Use data to train existing or new models, improve current bot performance, and uncover opportunities.
• Track key metrics like goal completion, number of users and sessions, drop-off rates, agent transfers, user behavior, and more.

Easy Integrations

• Provide prebuilt connectors to most voice and digital channels.
• Work with your new or existing contact center, CRM, and business applications.
• Customize your virtual assistant to meet specific chat or messaging channel needs and brand guidelines to increase user engagement.

Out-of-the-Box NLU Models

• Provides NLU models for specific industries.
• Backed by a world-class dataset and one of the industry’s most robust NLU libraries.
• Can detect user intentions with high accuracy and extract entities to generate personalized responses that assist your customers immediately upon deployment.

What are GPT models and can I use them for my business?

GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) based artificial intelligence models, and other large language models, are an exciting evolution of conversational AI, and many companies are wondering how GPT models could be used within their customer service operations.

GPT tools (such as ChatGPT from OpenAI) can generate and augment prose and code development, summarize long-form texts, classify or create content, and answer questions. These models can be used to redefine, reengineer, or replace repetitive, manual activities and tasks.

At Verint, we’re already working with GPT models and large language models (LLMs) and know they will play a valuable role in automation. Verint Da Vinci™ AI & Analytics—the power behind our conversational AI—is built to swiftly incorporate any evolving or revolutionary commercially available technology into Verint Customer Engagement Platform. We believe these models can be important in conversational AI building processes—like integrating information from a knowledge management system, for example.

We also recognize that conversational AI models need to know and understand how businesses operate, the terms they use, the context in which they use them, and how those terms drive decisions through an organization’s ecosystems of business applications. Many GPT models are limited in providing the accuracy you need to deliver answers and actions that are specific to your business and your brand. Right now, Verint Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) can provide that specificity upon deployment.

Verint IVA is part of Verint Customer Engagement Platform

Verint Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) allows for the quick and efficient deployment of automation across an organization’s digital and voice channels to deliver consistent and personalized self-service experiences, while also improving contact center operations. With Verint IVA, an organization can scale the hybrid workforce of humans and bots with a low-code bot- building and bot-management environment, enabling rapid deployment to maximize ROI.

With Verint IVA, you can start small and scale. You can quickly get up and running with the knowledge that your IVA can scale in complexity, across channels and audiences—without the necessity of buying multiple technologies. Verint IVA handles a wide range of use cases, across all your channels—and it’s all managed through a single interface.

Verint IVA is part of Verint Customer Engagement Platform, which helps elevate every experience by providing an open approach to customer engagement.

As consumers shift to digital channels, brands are facing an increasing number of interactions and skyrocketing expectations. But many businesses have a limited set of resources to engage with customers. This widening gap between expectations and an organization’s ability to meet them is the Engagement Capacity Gap. Powered by Verint Da Vinci AI & Analytics, Verint Platform offers best-in-class applications and services—across workforce engagement, digital-first engagement, and experience management.

As a result, Verint Platform can work with your existing ecosystem to close the Engagement Capacity Gap while seamlessly delivering quality experiences across engagement channels and uniquely supporting the modern, distributed workforce of humans and bots at scale.