5 Things to look for in Conversational AI platform for Customer Support

Conversational AI for customer support is no longer an added advantage, it's a must-have. And it is catching up.

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According to Accenture, 80% of CEOs are planning to add conversational AI to their customer support. 

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And the results are visible too. 

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90% of contact centers that use conversational AI report improvements in complaint management & 80% increase in customer satisfaction, according to MIT Technology Review. 

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But the decision to buy conversational AI is difficult. With so many companies claiming to do the same thing, how would you make a decision on a conversational AI platform and how to know you’re getting the most out of it?

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In this blog, we’ll discuss what to check for in your conversational AI platforms to drastically improve the service quality and customer experience. 

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5 Things to look for in a Conversational AI Platform

We’ll delve deeper into these 5 important factors to look at while selecting a conversational AI platform for customer support. 

• Conversation Quality 
• Integrations 
• Customization 
• Conversation Analytics 
• Security 
• Bonus - AI Expertise 

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1. Conversation Quality 

Conversational Quality is an all encompassing metric. It basically means, what is the experience while conversing with the conversational AI assistant. Here are different things you can look for:

• Intent Identification : Does the AI understand the user's intent efficiently? Eg. Asking a query vs raising a complaint. 
• Root-Cause Analysis : Can the AI identify the root cause of the query? Eg. If a user asks about adding a user, it should look for documentation related to it. 
• Enterprise Search: Can the AI search for information through multiple types of documents to find the correct answer? 
• Iterative Learning: Can the AI learn from its previous conversations and knowledge sources? 
• Bot vs Human like language: Does conversing with AI feel like talking to a robot or a human?  
• Hallucinations: Does the platform have advanced methods to tackle hallucinations? 
• Accuracy, Precision & Recall: What are the different accuracy metrics for AI answers?  

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Your conversational AI platform vendor should have a ready answer for all these questions. 

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The AI is as good as its input. In order to improve conversational excellence, the conversational AI platform should offer versatility in terms of knowledge sources in order to train the AI on your documents. It should allow data ingestion from 

• Documents - Product documentation, case studies, 
• Spreadsheets - Customer information, metrics, 
• Videos - Tutorials
• Platforms - Notion, StackOverflow, Zendesk
• Websites - Webpages, FAQ sections 
• Text Files - JSON files 
• Integrations - Salesforce, HubSpot, etc 
• Custom APIs for custom sources of data import 

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Conversational Excellence is important because it is the main factor to determine user experience in customer facing applications. If your customer feels that your application offers incorrect answers, feels like talking to a robot or doesn’t solve problems, they’ll refuse to use it and therefore, render it useless. 

2. Integrations 

As your business grows, your customer support volume & number of platforms you use will increase too. You’ll need a conversational AI platform that not only grows with you but also seamlessly fits into your existing workflow, creating less disruption and smoother operations. 

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Always look for deep native integrations with APIs to trigger real-time data transfer without any loss of information. In case the platform doesn’t have the exact integrations, look for custom APIs that allow connections with your major technical platforms. 

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Why is this important? 

Such integrations help your conversational AI to search across all sources of information & reduce hallucinations to your customers. It also helps the business maintain up-to-date customer information across platforms. It ensures customer conversation data is added to customer profiles across your CRMs, support platforms and more. 

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3. Customization 

Every business has different needs. So while out-of-the box conversational AI applications are perfect for some, for others it might not be the best idea. 

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When it comes to your conversational AI platform, watch out for customization capabilities. This will allow your developers to have control over the conversational AI application in terms of look and feel, brand tone, sources, skills and more. Customization is a crucial differentiation factor for conversational AI providers. 

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Look for customization capabilities in terms of: 

• Branding : Your conversational AI should speak your brand language. Make sure design changes are allowed. 
• Integrations : Look for custom API integrations to allow for seamless data ingestion & sharing. 
• Deployment Channels : Look for the number of platforms where you can deploy your conversational AI 

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For customer support, it is important to ensure that your AI application blends smoothly with your brand look. It should look like a part of your application. And it should be present where your customers are: in product, or on your website or phone application. 

4. Security 

In customer support, you’re dealing with customer’s private information, which is extremely confidential. To make your conversational AI trustworthy, you must ensure that your provider has employed enhanced security measures. You can check for it along the following parameters: 

• Expertise : Are there AI security & privacy experts on the vendor team? 
• Identity Validation : How does the AI validate the customer’s identity before revealing account level information?
• Access Control : How does the platform allow access to your data? Are there limits to data access? 
• PII Data Masking : How is customer data encrypted and masked during data transfer & use?  
• Private Cloud VPNs : Does the platform offer private cloud VPNs or on-premise hosting options? 
• Certifications : What third party security and privacy certifications does the vendor have? 

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Security is the paramount requirement,especially when deploying conversation AI in regulated industries like banking, insurance, healthcare or government. Businesses should always be extra vigilant about safety metrics of their AI platform which uses customer data. 

5. Conversation Analytics 

Your customer conversations are the biggest source of insights. Customer conversations can provide insights into product usage, bugs, requirements and can help your business identify gaps in product or customer support experience. 

Ensure that your customer support AI platform allows you to gain insights about: 

• Number of conversations to understand trends of usage of self-serve AI assistants across channels. 
• Conversation topics to understand what are the major topical level issues that customers face to contact the support. 
• Trends of topics to identify increasing or decreasing number of requests per topic. 
• Feature requests to understand what kind of features are customers demanding. 
• Product bugs to understand which part of product features customers are facing troubles with

And more. 

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Today's AI needs to go beyond basic number crunching. It should unlock hidden insights by analyzing unstructured data, like conversations. Powerful techniques like generative AI clustering can reveal unnoticed gaps in content and automation. By harnessing conversational analytics, businesses can make smarter decisions based on real data. This improves customer interactions and streamlines internal processes. 

6. Bonus - AI Expertise 

When it comes to implementing conversational AI for support, there are many use cases at both customer and support agent ends. Selecting and developing conversational AI for the wrong use case or without understanding nuances, can steer your initiative in the wrong direction. 

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AI expertise - whether internal or external is extremely helping in getting the maximum benefit out of the new technology. Your conversational AI platform should offer your expertise and lending hand during your journey. 

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Take a look at the team behind the conversational AI platform - is it a team with no prior experience or a team of seasoned AI experts with academic or consulting experience? Check if the vendor provides professional services and additional onboarding & implementation assistance. 

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Why should the conversational AI platform have AI experts on their team? 

• Deep understanding of the field: AI experts bring in-depth knowledge of natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and other crucial areas for building effective conversational AI. 
• Professional Services: They understand different use cases, consult you on which use case to select & set correct expectations. They can also help you create the entire implementation plan which can lead to correct introduction of new technology in your organization. 
• Staying ahead of the curve: The field of AI is constantly evolving. AI experts keep the platform updated with the latest advancements in NLP, ML algorithms, and conversational design principles. This ensures the conversational AI platform stays competitive and offers the most effective solutions.
• Optimizing platform performance: AI experts can fine-tune the platform's algorithms to improve its ability to understand user intent, generate relevant responses, and navigate complex conversations. They analyze user interactions and identify areas for improvement, constantly refining the platform's capabilities.
• Addressing ethical considerations: AI experts are aware of the potential biases and ethical issues surrounding AI development. They can help ensure the platform operates fairly, avoids discrimination, and protects user privacy.

These are some of the factors you can consider while selecting a conversational AI partner. 

Pro tip - A real conversational AI demo with your own data is worth a thousand checkpoints

There is a reason why conversational AI and chatbots are almost synonyms. 

With similar UI and applications, one can confuse chatbot for high-end conversational AI. The real beauty of conversational AI is more than skin deep. It lies in how you can interact with it and the architecture behind it. And to see it all, you should go for a live demo, preferably with your own data to see the real benefit. 

So, next time you’re evaluating a conversational AI, reach out to the company with your requirements & ask them to train the assistant on your data. This benefits both the parties as you can experience the product with your data & the vendor can explain benefits in real time. 

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Alltius - An ideal choice for customer support conversational AI

Chat-GPT wasn’t made to improve customer experiences, Alltius is. 

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Alltius is a platform created as a result of decades of research at Carnegie Mellon and Wharton focused on one goal : Improve customer experience across all touchpoints. 

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Alltius is an all-in-one AI customer service platform for enterprises looking to deflect incoming tickets with self-serve AI options for customers & reduce customer wait times with AI assistants for agents

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Alltius’ AI assistant is trained on your company documents like FAQs, product documentation, tutorial videos, previous customer tickets, customer information and more. It has capabilities to perform multiple tasks like answering questions, debugging, drafting responses, performing actions like calculating account balance or taking action on behalf of customers, raising tickets, adding information into CRM or more. It is completely customizable as per your needs. 

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Think of it as an additional support employee who can be trained to do anything you’d want.  

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Conversational AI assistant for your customers 

Self-Serve AI is customer facing AI assistant that can be deployed on a website, in the product, Slack, zendesk, or any other customer facing channel. It can understand customer intent, instantly acknowledge customer query, identify customer needs and solve customer query within seconds. This reduces customer wait times, increases ticket deflection and improves customer satisfaction. 

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Conversational AI assistant for your support agents  

Support Assist AI is a support agent’s AI assistant that curates information from multiple sources so the agent spends more time in building relationships with customers. Support AI helps your customer support agent: 

• Understand customer intent - like happy, angry, dissatisfied 
• Solve customer query - with drafted responses 
• Identify up selling opportunities - with tailored pitches and best products to cross sell 
• Update customer information in CRMs - with easy integrations 

With features like customizable CUIs, version control, and seamless ecosystem integration, Alltius enables businesses to fine-tune AI applications for maximum efficiency and innovation.

It has been used by major brands to uphaul their customer service & reduce their customer support costs by $50k per month. In case you’re interested in implementing conversational AI for customer support, experience Alltius in one of the 4 ways: 

• Request a demo 
• Try a free trial 
• See the ROI from Alltius 
• Explore the platform

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A New Chapter in Customer Service: Embrace AI

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Utilizing conversational AI tools is not just about adopting innovative technology—it's about surpassing customer support limitations. Gone are the personalization challenges, response time lags, and quality inconsistency. The future of world-class customer centered service lies in effective Gen AI integration.

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In doing so, you not only meet customer expectations, you exceed them, setting a new standard in your industry.

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Remember, the customer experience you deliver today defines your tomorrow. Make it count!

Read more:

• How to make your own AI?
• Best AI sales assistant software in 2024
• Top AI customer support software
• Top customer service chatbots
• Top conversational AI platforms
• Best conversational AI platforms
• Best enterprise AI platforms 
• How to build conversational AI?

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