Of all the contact centre use cases for AI, Pure Voice AI is the most disruptive – and potentially the most transformative. Unlike Agent Assist or auto-wrap that augment human performance, Pure Voice AI replaces the agent entirely for certain interactions.
What is the AI doing in Pure Voice AI?
Pure Voice AI uses fully autonomous AI agents capable of holding spoken conversations with customers—with no human agent in the conversation. For an inbound call, the AI could triage the call, and if it can deal with the interaction itself, it doesn’t need to trouble a human agent. If the enquiry does need a human agent, it can monitor who’s available and route the call to the next best available agent.
Ultimately, the idea is that these AI agents can answer questions, resolve issues, and even handle sensitive interactions such as payment disputes or appointment scheduling.
It’s far more sophisticated than IVR (interactive voice response) trees or chatbots. Pure Voice AI uses advanced natural language understanding, real-time decisioning, and speech synthesis to hold dynamic, human-like conversations.
Key benefits: 24/7 service
The benefits case here is far less about cost reductions, agent productivity gains and optimisations, as use cases 1-6 have already delivered well here.
It is far more about providing round the clock service and enhancing brand experience. Because we all have lives, and work, that mean calling between set hours can sometimes be difficult. But the reason many contact centres are not 24/7 with human agents is because the business case of the cost and overheads – from staff costs to heating and lighting – doesn’t stack up.
Smoothing demand
Not only is calling at set times difficult, it creates spikes in demand, for example around lunch time or just after work. What’s more, pro-active outbound calls can also be scheduled for more customer friendly times of day.
Multi-lingual cover
Where a contact centre needs to serve multiple languages, there is typically a primary language that most human agents speak, with a handful of specialists available for secondary languages. Which means that those secondary languages are a scarce resource, both in terms of availability and recruitment. With Pure Voice AI in the mix, it can detect the language being spoken and switch seamlessly into it.
Implementation considerations
While everyone is trying to rush to this use case, without computer use, proper integrations, optimised and redesigned processes, there is no real opportunity to leap-frog to full voice AI. Because the foundations are simply not in place to support it.
What can we expect to see?
While not quite there yet, it is just around the corner, and there will undoubtedly be a proliferation of pure voice AI, especially for outbound. Though businesses should expect regulation to swiftly follow.
As we await the true potential of Pure Voice AI, it is a case of charting a path to how you achieve this in future, not the focus for today. Down that road lies complexity, risk and far greater likelihood of project failure. When you could be realising value right now and incrementally from use cases that build the maturity on which to develop pure voice AI. A far safer path to value on every front.
To find out more about how CCP can help you make the right technology choices, read more here or get in touch.
This series of articles is drawn from our webinar with Jimmy Hosang, CEO and co-founder at Mojo CX. We explored seven key use cases for AI in contact centres, starting from the easiest productivity gains to value generating applications. You can find a summary of all seven use cases here, or watch the webinar in full here.
