A well designed voicebot, or how to improve customer experience
A voicebot is otherwise known as a voice robot or virtual assistant that freely talks to people in natural language.
Thanks to advanced AI mechanisms, it recognizes various forms of human speech and understands the intentions, that is, what the interlocutor wants to really say and do.
The applications of voicebots today are wide-ranging: virtual assistants help in a number of industries, from customer service to HR and e-commerce to marketing, handling thousands of standard issues people call hotlines with, and running mass outreach campaigns.
One statement is invariably true: a voicebot’s job is to handle the issue with which a human calls, or to provide information effectively.
However, it is sometimes believed that a voicebot is an annoying mechanic toy rather than an actual customer support. Is there a grain of truth in this? The answer is: it depends.
For it is little discussed that in the case of voicebot technology – as in many other industries – that everything depends on the quality of the software. There are, therefore, voicebots that are poorly and well designed. What exactly makes up this quality? This we will discuss in the article.
While getting things done itself is important, what also matters is the quality of the customer’s experience when talking to a virtual assistant. This is a conversation with a machine, and a voicebot – by law and common sense – cannot pretend that it is not such, but in terms of ease of communication and mutual understanding the conversation should be similar to a human-to-human interaction. So what characteristics should a good voicebot have?
The right scenario
Voicebots work on the basis of a scenario, that is, a tree of possible paths a call can take – along with numerous branches.
A good scenario takes into account various possibilities, so when designing it, you need to have a good understanding of the business process in question, as well as the characteristics and most common queries and concerns of callers. This is one of the basic tasks of bot designers.
But what about the customer experience? People often complain that the voicebots they’re talking to repeatedly repeat a given formula or a question – for example, after each statement they ask if they can help with anything else or present a list of available options. Annoying?
It doesn’t have to be that way! The voicebot scenario can be customized at will – balancing the need to convey information with the comfort of the caller. Nothing is imposed from above, and a good interaction designer should consider both business requirements and best practices of customer experience.
Understanding humans by a voicebot
As already mentioned, the voicebot’s mission is to answer questions and get things done.
To do this, it needs to understand what the customer is saying (i.e., to get the words – including different accents and slurred speech – and ignore background noise), and then understand what the human wants it to do (i.e., to recognize the intent, regardless of the words used).
For example, when a caller wants to find out the amount of their account balance, they can put it in different ways – for example: “I want to know my account balance”, “I want to know how much money I have in my account”, “Please tell me the amount on my account” and so on.
Voicebot operates on the basis of large language models (LLMs) and proprietary intent recognition software, but it is also properly trained by the designer to understand the different types of utterances that may appear in a given conversation.
But what happens if the voicebot encounters a problem?
If the bot didn’t understand the words because the customer spoke unclearly or used unusual wording, it asks them to repeat it more clearly or in different words. When, on the other hand, the situation occurs on and on, it redirects the customer to a human consultant.
On the other hand, if the voicebot did not understand the intention because the situation or question was not included in the scenario, it redirects the customer to the consultant to resolve the issue. When a problem occurs repeatedly, the scenario is modified.
At Apifonica, interaction designers continuously monitor the work of each voicebot and check whether it is achieving its goals. If they notice a recurring problem, they make changes to the script. This ensures an increasingly high-quality experience for customers who call the voicebot.
Natural-sounding voice
The voices of voicebots no longer sound robotic and mechanical, contrary to the lingering belief.
For example, Apifonica’s voicebots have voices with the right intonation and which are incredibly impressive – there are pauses, tones and even breaths... There are many voices to choose from – female and male.
The customer’s experience of interacting with such a natural-sounding bot enters a whole new level.
Listen to what a modern voicebot sounds like:
Speed of response
A voice chat can’t have excessive pauses in the conversation, unlike the text chat. The voicebot must respond virtually immediately so that the caller doesn’t feel impatient or get the impression that the voicebot has disconnected.
The shorter the response time, the better – the best voicebots have it at about 1 second.
Dynamics of the conversation
A conversation with a voicebot, just as with a human, should be dynamic and have a natural flow.
And in such a daily conversation, for example, a human can interrupt the bot. In this case, the machine should still be able to follow the customer’s intentions and quickly adapt to the change that has occurred.
Today, our voicebot provides even better customer experience
At Apifonica, we are constantly working on our voicebot and the quality of the customer experience it provides. This year we implemented Hermes, the latest update.
Here are the top three new features:
- Background noise filtering – our voicebot can now filter customer calls very quickly and easily, no matter how noisy the environment is.
- Faster responses – the voicebot “thinks” faster and responds to a caller’s speech within 1 second (instead of 2.5 seconds).
- Active listening – our voicebot can also actively listen throughout the conversation and can be interrupted without losing information. This provides even more dynamic and natural conversations.
Discover the new voicebot live
Want to listen to a well-designed voicebot and discover how to improve your company’s customer experience? Our expert will tell you all about it!