The desire to communicate has driven the evolution of the human race since the dawn of time. Humans left their hunter-gatherer past behind and went on to build communities, if not entire civilizations, based on the ability to communicate information and tell stories. Even today, in a world of increasing complexity, with some aspect of technology permeating every aspect of our daily lives, communication remains the most important factor that connects people. Conversations across distance and culture, in some ways, make the world go round and the global economy with it.
Effective conversations make a difference and are critical in achieving our goals at every level, from social communities to politics or the business world. Connecting with both customers and employees is an absolute must for businesses. In a world where brands from all over the world compete for the same pool of consumers, treating customer interactions as one-time transactions can be detrimental to positive business results. People increasingly want to be wooed and to have an excellent, seamless, transparent, and consistent experience throughout their customer journey rather than simply paying for a product or service. Customer experience is thus becoming exceedingly important for businesses of all sizes.
What makes for a good experience? Several factors stand out, ranging from speed to convenience, consistency, and ease of use. Yet the biggest connector of them all remains the human touch. Regardless of how they buy or what they seek to buy, consumers need to feel connected to the brands they choose to establish a rapport that is not dissimilar to that which they would establish with an actual human being.
The challenge for businesses, then, is to learn how to use what technology offers to make each experience feel more human - without frustrating or adding friction for customers while empowering employees. Because the truth is that companies are also challenged to raise the bar internally as their workforce becomes less homogeneous and the work remains partially remote. Previously, the HR function was primarily administrative; however, in today's and especially tomorrow's work environment, providing an exceptional employee experience can become a critical differentiator. Technology is not a magic cure-all when it comes to experience. However, it can help companies create phenomenal customer experiences and reap the resulting benefits when done right. Especially since, as Gartner notes, customer satisfaction is associated with growth, margin, and profitability.
Conversations enable brands to communicate their mission, learn more about their customers, and build stronger relationships. Excellent conversations support a company's objectives and represent the barometer of its health. However, as we move toward a future in which customers expect to interact with brands at any time through various devices, channels, and touchpoints, businesses simply cannot invest in the personnel required to ensure such availability. Instead, they are looking to artificial intelligence to assist in some of these interactions.
Conversational AI enables companies to transform customer and employee touchpoints into quick, meaningful, and rich interactions. From this vantage point, the ability of conversational AI to be implemented across the entire process of company engagement - both externally and internally - across all business areas, from customer care to sales, HR, financial, and marketing, has made it so appealing until now. People could thus communicate directly with technology and receive seamless, timely information in return. However, viewing conversational AI as simply a technology stack, albeit a powerful one, limits its potential. The true business value comes from taking it one step further, which is what DRUID does with Conversational Business Applications (CBA). CBA combines the power of conversational AI with complete automations, allowing it to connect to a wide range of enterprise systems and RPA technologies to complete longer, more complex end-to-end business tasks.
The viewpoint we provide extends beyond Conversational AI as a technology, enhancing it with the power to understand the business context and to trigger intelligent actions while interacting with humans and delivering real value for businesses. So, when you connect Conversational AI technology with data, enterprise applications, and business processes to build applications that can naturally interact with humans, then you move past Conversational AI as a technology towards value-driven Conversational Business Applications.
Conversational AI platforms that rely on a list of key-value pairs are limited in the support they can provide from a business standpoint. Even if answers are returned to users in a natural form, most of the time, this still means the users require multiple apps across multiple systems to complete an end-to-end task, which takes time and effort. Conversely, CBA bridges this gap by handling user tasks in the backend and generating a complex automatic view based on multiple information inputs. By combining conversational AI with RPA capabilities, DRUID's conversational business applications respond fast to complex service requests. DRUID understands the business language and context of specific use cases by combining this information with NLP/ NLU algorithms, integrating with enterprise systems and applications to resurface and make use of relevant data.
DRUID's CBA enable users with dedicated digital workspaces. Employees, thus, can enter dedicated virtual workspaces specialized in various business topics (HR, Sales, Accounts Payable, Marketing, etc.) where they will permanently get assistance from a DRUID intelligent companion that can answer questions, trigger RPA automations, complete business tasks, collect and present relevant business data and even recommend the next best course of action, enhancing employee performance.
Imagine your back-office systems or legacy applications brought to life through conversational AI, working together perfectly to maximize productivity and business efficiency! Absorbing the best of what all technologies have to offer is crucial for your business growth. And risky for your internal user experience. The complexity, the costs, and the time invested into implementing and learning how to operate with new technologies take their toll on any business.
Instead of deploying new enterprise applications or developing the core functions of your existing systems to keep up with a growing need for self-service, simply deploy Conversational AI as the front-end of this landscape to benefit from all the technological empowerment in an agile way. This will transform how your CRMs, ERPs, IT Help desk applications, financing applications, etc., behave when users interact with them – in the most natural and friendly way. DRUID is special because when you deploy our virtual AI assistant, you get a conversational extension to your enterprise systems. You won't replace anything from your current investment, from your ERP or CRM systems, your RPA deployments, or other digital processes, but you will rather enhance them with a conversational layer that will help you resurface valuable data and expose it via multimodal experiences (chat, mobile, voice, rich content on webforms and webviews, conversational business apps) to streamline business tasks completion.
Conversational business applications add value to your business, empowering existing investments and your employees, accelerating your time-to-market, and enabling competitive advantages.
Having employees perform repetitive, low-value tasks falls short of providing the instant pleasurable experience that today's "always-on" consumer craves. At the same time, it is highly inefficient internally, with costs quickly piling up on the P&L and employee happiness declining. Moreover, today, people are impatient. They want instant answers, and they don't have the time or bandwidth to search for the information they need or learn how to use many different work-enhancing apps and platforms.
People aided by exceptional technology can complete better, faster, and smarter work. With CBA, employees no longer need to learn and search for multiple pieces of often conflicting customer or sales information. Instead, a sales agent, for example, can be presented at each interaction with a single conversational view of a customer and their contact sales, cross-sale, credit, purchase, and prospect history. Using CBA is like working alongside a human colleague who is very knowledgeable and super attentive but, more importantly, always available.
Customers today are impatient. They want only the best. The bar for customer engagement and experience has been raised so high that they are no longer open to accepting anything less than exceptional service. In practice, this means that they expect to receive answers instantly to any question they may ask, when they ask, and on any channel they ask.
Customers want access to information 24/7 and their problems solved in a blink of an eye. According to 2022 Achieving Customer Amazement study, 74% of customers would switch to a competing brand or company if they found out they provided a better customer experience. According to PWC, 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions.
Companies can increase customer satisfaction and retention by providing always-on, consistent, and excellent multimodal service and renewal options – and CBA is an outstanding platform to do that. Using CBA to ensure people get the information they need at the first instance that they need it ultimately leads to requiring fewer people and costing less, a win-win situation for any company.
CBA improves the predictive analysis process on existing clients and allows internal users to compile and access various statistics about how customers behave and want. Thanks to the complexity of its AI engine, it can seamlessly provide numerous perspectives on user engagement, contact center, language understanding, automations, business results, and ROI. Real-time evolution metrics quickly put data sets such as how many users engage with your chatbot, on what channels, how long the conversation lasted, how many topics a user asked during a conversation, top conversation flows or intents, response time, how many conversations were completed fully automatically or were transferred to a human agent, and so on into context. The CBA platform can transform millions of daily interactions into hundreds of precalculated metrics, charts, and tables, including business results and ROI, with significant performance improvements.
The future of business is fraught with unknowns. Various forces are shaping it simultaneously, whether we are talking about shifting consumer behaviors, disruptive geopolitical pressures, rising economic uncertainty, or accelerating climate change. Concentrating on steps to improve external and internal user experiences is bound to help companies thrive in a time that is bound to continue to be characterized by uncertainty. Investing in appropriate technology that can assist in providing faster resolutions and streamlining the customer care experience is a must. However, it must be emphasized that while speed is critical, so is maintaining the human touch that many customers still desire. CBA can strike a balance between efficiency and humanness that will result in increased customer satisfaction and the reputational benefits that come with it.