Customer Experience Emerged as the Top Use Case Among Enterprises Using Conversational AI

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Rasa Technologies, Inc., the company providing the leading conversational AI platform for customer and employee engagement at scale, has engaged Dimensional Research to survey engineers, product leaders, and executives building virtual assistants. Customer experience emerged as the top use case among enterprises using conversational AI.

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Across industries as diverse as healthcare, retail, telecom, and financial services, one thing is consistently clear: customer experience is critical. Businesses invest heavily in customer experience because even incremental improvements are multiplied at scale, resulting in increased growth and retention. Customers now expect personalized experiences, 24-hour support, and instant access to the brands they do business with, and enterprises who can differentiate themselves become leaders in their markets.

Enterprises look to a number of technologies to improve customer experience, and one of the fastest growing solutions is conversational AI. Conversational AI offers two crucial benefits: the ability to automate two-way natural language conversations with customers, and the ability to understand customers’ needs through analyzing conversations.

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Key findings include:

Customer-facing virtual assistants vastly outnumber other use cases, with the need for 24-hour support driving development

72% of organizations leverage their assistants for customer-facing operations, although organizations reported using assistants for internal operations as well. 64% were motivated by providing 24-hour support to customers.

Conversational AI stakeholders report that their main motivation for implementing virtual assistance was a need to provide 24-hour support to customers.  But 24-hour support isn’t the only reason businesses are implementing virtual assistants. Cost savings ranked a close second, selected by 59% of respondents. Many organizations field thousands of contacts each week for simple requests, many of which lend themselves to automation. Companies adopting virtual assistants can net substantial savings by removing simple requests from agents’ support queues, freeing human agents to take on more challenging problems.

Investments in conversational AI are increasing

67% of conversational AI stakeholders expect their conversational AI budgets to increase in the coming year, and an additional 13% said they expect it to increase significantly. Businesses that have already taken steps toward building virtual assistants are doubling down on that investment.

Many organizations are still at an early stage of conversational AI maturity

One third of enterprises surveyed are currently in production with virtual assistants. The top barrier reported is a lack of experience building virtual assistants, showing that companies are still in the process of developing the people, processes, and patterns needed for successful deployment.

Customer satisfaction is the top metric for measuring the success of a virtual assistant

70% reported that customer satisfaction metrics were used to track the success of virtual assistants, indicating that value to the customer outweighs immediate business benefits like cost savings.

Enterprises employ virtual assistants for employee engagement

The report highlights that many large organizations are also employing virtual assistants for internal use cases, such as automating helpdesk and HR functions. In some cases, internal use cases may serve as pilot programs to build conversational AI expertise and test technologies before putting a virtual assistant in front of customers.

Overall, the report illustrates why so many businesses implement conversational AI: virtual assistants offer value to customers and to organizations in equal measure. Alex Weidauer, CEO & co-founder of Rasa shares:

Leading enterprises have existing customer experience automation strategies in place. They also understand that customer service today is a maze that leaves everyone involved disoriented and disengaged. In order to meet customer and employee expectations, enterprises will have to redesign their customer experience into a single, unified, AI-first interface that allows for personalized, instant interactions at a fraction of the cost. In order to do this, enterprises need to make conversational AI a core competency and invest significantly in an enterprise-grade platform that can integrate deeply into their systems and processes, and provide measurable value.

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