How Conversational AI Is Making Employees and Customers Happier

In the form of a chatbot or virtual assistant, Conversational AI saves customers from having to navigate a complex website, because they can communicate their needs by text message.

Chatbots can also save lengthy calls to phone support. For example, there are few things more frustrating than a long wait for customer support followed by 20 questions to verify your identity. This is a challenge when businesses grow quickly and can’t always scale their support team to match. This is why many brands are now using bots and voice recognition software to automate their most common support requests without letting down customers. This allows call center support staff to advance to sales positions, where they respond to high quality leads that have been pre-qualified by the same chatbot.

In both environments, as chatbots are a machine learning technology, they become smarter over time. A bigger range of support requests are solved, in less time, resulting in happier customers and more focused employees.

While they’re a practical solution to many problems, text-based chatbots have one limitation. They can’t provide the empathy and connection we get from face-to-face conversation. Micro-expressions, eye contact, body language and dress say much more in a conversation than we tend to think. To begin to solve this problem, NTT DATA Business Solutions developed a chatbot in the form of an animated person. Digital Humans are designed to help us feel more empathy when communicating with a computer, so we can find the information we need with less frustration if it takes longer than expected.

As well as being more natural to look at, NTT DATA Business Solutions’ digital avatar uses face recognition and automatic speech recognition to identify people and interpret their emotions. As we do in our own conversations, it adjusts it’s tone of voice and body language to suit the situation. It even has the ability to remember previous conversations using speech recognition software, which eliminates the tiresome process of repeating information to a bot interface.

Our expert Thomas Nørmark, Global Head of AI & Robotics, introduces you to the world of Conversational AI. Learn how you can become an innovative leader by using the communication skills of Digital Humans and how you can increase your customer service.

AI technology such as digital avatars can help children and teachers with personalized education. In our example, our AI Learning Helper supports children to become confident readers. The teaching engine helps pupils with vocabularies, pronunciation, and understanding stories. The digital avatar can ask and answer questions and detect emotions.

The solution offers teachers a teaching helper dashboard providing information about the learning profiles and progress of their students.

Conversational AI can even help your employees to be more productive. In your workplace for example, shallow tasks like organizing a timesheet, asking HR about your leave policy, or requesting the printer instructions from IT, can easily steal your attention from more important work. Now imagine how this applies to everyone in your team. If you could text with a computer as you might with a colleague, and the computer could complete your task automatically, imagine how much time you could save for more meaningful work. Implementing this across a whole organization can not only be a major boost to productivity. By creating time for deep, challenging work, your employees can find more satisfaction in their roles and have greater loyalty.

But how can your employees benefit from digital humans? Staying professional and upbeat over a long shift can be a demanding thing to ask of your front-line employees. However, a Digital Human can relieve some of your busiest staff and give them the time to work on more creative and productive tasks, which will have a greater effect on the growth of your organization. Digital Humans also reduce the cost of continuously recruiting and training extra employees, and allow your business to scale faster than otherwise. With a Digital Human to support your branch manager, you could open a new location and start serving customers while the recruitment process is still underway. Additionally, by giving your employees more meaningful tasks, you can improve job satisfaction and reduce turnover, saving on hiring and training costs.