Talkbot Basics

29
Dec
Talkbot Basics  ·  Voice AI Technology
How AI can boost results in debt collection
Jennifer Zhang

Jennifer Zhang

CEO & Co-Founder

For many companies that need to conduct payment collections, resolving accounts that are past due is one of the trickiest parts of the business. Many of these customers are hard to contact, and once contacted, getting commitment to settle dues is another hurdle. Fortunately, conversational voice AI can help.

Harnessing the power of AI technology for debt collection

Artificial intelligence can be used in the debt collection process in a number of ways. First, AI can be used to automate manual processes like transcribing calls and categorizing customers based on their willingness to pay. These two tasks alone provide companies greater control over their debt collection processes because of the wealth of data that gets collected. Automatic transcription of calls transforms unstructured voice data into structured data. With it, enterprises can now do more detailed data analytics of their customer interactions. Those tasked with debt collection can gain a better understanding of risk behavior and improve collection tactics, moving from a reactive position into a more proactive one.

Loan provider gets more payment commitments with voice AI calls

This example features a finance company that provides loans and similar products to consumers. One of its biggest challenges is reaching accounts that are past due and making sure that commitment to payments are made. This often requires persistent outreach and multiple calls, which take a lot of time and effort for human agents. By switching to an AI-powered agent, the company was able to ramp up its call intensity proportionally to the account’s days past due.

call intensity 1-day, 2-day, and 3-day past due customers

With artificial intelligence, the company was able to call customers with overdue payments more consistently and with greater frequency. This resulted in obtaining “promise to pay” commitments from more customers – up to 60% for accounts that are three days past due.

Traditional bank gets clearer picture of consumer credit portfolio

In this second example, a large regional bank decided to deploy voice Talkbots for their credit collection operations. With each call, the AI engine records outcomes and tags customers accordingly.

The first layer of tags involve the call status – whether the customer was contacted or if the call failed to connect. Once the call connects and the Talkbot is able to speak with the customer, the AI engine then identifies whether or not the customer is willing to pay. If agreement is obtained, the AI agent then secures a payment date within a three-day window and records the response.

Having collections information structured in this manner enables the bank to see just how many of their delinquent accounts were willing to pay, and how soon. With this information, the bank is able to forecast its cashflows more accurately and update its collections strategy more proactively.

Fintech company gets record results in three-day collections campaign

This final example involves a non-traditional financial services provider that undertook a three-day call campaign for uncollected payments. Utilizing voice AI Talkbots, the fintech company was able to reach almost half of its customer database. Over 300,000 calls were made across a three-day period, obtaining payment commitments from two-thirds of customers that had overdue accounts. 

Of those that had committed to pay, over half promised to settle their dues within the day. Almost a fifth committed to pay the next day, bringing committed payments to 71% within a 48-hour window.

Getting ahead of back payments with artificial intelligence

AI powered much of the success of the above examples – artificial intelligence is what enabled companies to undertake the huge volume of calls to customers. And thanks to well-designed scripts, these companies were able to obtain payment commitments that previously eluded them. Results can be seen even in a short three-day campaign.
Are you looking to improve the outcomes of your debt collection activities? See how our voice AI Talkbots can help by booking a demo with us today.
Contact us

22
Dec
Talkbot Basics  ·  Voice AI Technology
Spot and tag credit risks with voice AI technology
Jennifer Zhang

Jennifer Zhang

CEO & Co-Founder

For many financial institutions, consumer credit risk is the biggest risk on their balance sheets. This is underscored by the reality that credit risk is the biggest cause of bank failures, according to Van Greuning and Bratanovik of the World Bank.

To effectively manage credit risk – specifically consumer credit risk – companies in banking and finance need to accurately assess an individual’s ability to pay back a loan on time and in full. This means they need rich and accurate data to make the right judgements. But even with advances in technology and digital transformation, financial institutions still face challenges with data for credit risk management.

 

How AI technology is transforming risk management

Thankfully, artificial intelligence is changing how companies manage consumer credit risk. Voice AI technology is particularly helpful in unlocking data that has already been collected but just sits in storage. One prime example is customer call recordings, which are stored as voice data. While these recordings may be useful as reference, much of them sit as unstructured data that take time to sort and analyze. Recordings are usually not used or reviewed except for quality checks and investigations into specific incidents.

With AI technology, rich customer information can be extracted from this previously untapped resource – data that may be useful for credit risk assessments. Artificial intelligence enables call recordings to be quickly transcribed and converted into structured data, which can then be used for analytics. Within all that new data would be signals or keywords related to risk management.

 

Detecting intent with natural language understanding

Transcribing and structuring voice data is only the first step in making use of conversational AI capabilities. One of voice AI’s more powerful capabilities is intention detection – figuring out what a customer plans or wants to do, based on verbal cues. Questions like “How much do I owe again?” or “What’s the minimum amount due?” can signal an intention to settle the account soon. When the AI neural engine detects these words, it can automatically tag the caller as “willing to pay” and proceed to obtain a commitment date on payment.

Intention detection is useful for less common circumstances, too. Keywords like “family emergency” or “job loss” can signal personal distress, and the AI engine can then tag the call as “special case”. The call can be routed to a live human agent, who can then talk the customer through workable options to refinance their debt. This helps banks and financial institutions take a more humane approach towards their customers who might be going through a rough patch. It’s a win-win situation: customers feel cared for, and the finance company gets an early opportunity to rebalance its risk portfolio.

 

Using data analytics to inform strategy

Another key benefit of having calls tagged automatically by AI is the ability to notice patterns as they arise. For instance, if a significant number of calls have been tagged with “don’t know how to pay”, the bank can deploy an information campaign on payment modes. This reduces the risk of non-payment for future customers who may struggle with how to pay their bills online or offline.

What’s more, AI labels can be customized based on business patterns. Companies can choose any number of tags to attach to their voice data, using the most relevant information that can shape their decision-making. Tags can vary from committed payment dates – which help companies follow-up on payments – to payment modes, which inform the bank which channels are more effective for collections.

With more data in their hands, banks can also take a wider view of their risk portfolio and recalibrate their strategy in a more proactive manner. Tags such as “invalid number” or “uncontactable” can signal a bad debt, and keep companies from wasting time on chasing down a non-payer.

The use of smart tags and automatic labeling have already helped a number of fintech companies and traditional banks optimize their debt collections. And these are only some of the ways artificial intelligence can help streamline financial operations.

To find out other ways AI can improve your processes and build smarter customer engagements, speak to one of our specialists today.
Contact us

30
Nov
Talkbot Basics  ·  Voice AI Technology
Deal with surges in customer queries using voice AI
Jennifer Zhang

Jennifer Zhang

CEO & Co-Founder

The year-end holiday season is upon us, and for many businesses, this is typically when things get really busy. Industries like retail and hospitality often see a surge in sales and inquiries – and as a by-product, an increased need for customer support.
 
If the increased volume were not enough, the holiday season is typically when everyone gets put under pressure. Shoppers are pressed to make their purchases in time for parties and events. Callers have to navigate competing demands for their attention. And call center agents tend to bear the brunt of customers’ short fuses and higher demands.
 
This is true for non-seasonal surges, too. Unforeseen changes in external regulation or policy can affect businesses in a critical way. New travel restrictions are a prime example; back in 2020, companies in the travel industry got inundated with calls and emails practically overnight. When scenarios like this happen, agents are typically pushed into high-stakes, high-stress situations. This comes on top of the mounting pressure to answer a growing number of calls.
 
In some ways, managing surges can be like a game of Russian roulette – you’re not quite sure when you’ll get shot. Fortunately, these risks are easy enough to understand and manage, with the right tools.
 

Inelastic resources can result in insufficient live support

For most call centers or customer support departments, resources and headcounts are fairly fixed. This lack of elasticity means sudden surges in support requests are hard to meet. Resources – specifically call center agents – can get really stretched. Say an agent typically handles 200 calls a day; that number can easily double to 400 calls on a peak season. Unless extra resources were brought in to handle the surge in volume, there will be potentially 200 unaddressed calls, or at the very least, poorly addressed calls. Businesses never want to be in a position where they have 200 unhappy callers – customer loyalty will take a hit, and eventually, so will sales.
 
Hiring additional agents would be the natural solution to this resource crunch. And while this might be workable, training and onboarding agents take time. Companies often spend at least two weeks to a month before deploying a new agent into the live environment. If you’re looking to simply fill a temporary gap, training new people may not make sense, especially if the cycle needs to be repeated after six months.
 
And that’s if talent is readily available. Recruitment is a time consuming process in and of itself. Finding the right people to serve customers is a tricky business; candidates must possess not just the skills, but the right attitude and in some cases, a love for the brand they represent. What’s more, contractual hires for short-term engagements can be even harder to find in a tight labor market. Sometimes this talent problem is solved through outsourcing – but quality can become an issue when it comes to service delivery.
 

Using AI customer service for busy seasons

Addressing elasticity and scaling issues without compromising on quality can be done by deploying artificial intelligence (AI) agents for customer service. Unlike human agents, machine-powered bots can take on more queries as and when they come. A human agent can probably take 20 calls in an hour; in contrast, an AI-powered bot can handle one million calls in the same timeframe. This makes AI call centers more flexible than a traditional call center manned by only humans.
 
Training bots also take less time than training humans. Once a proper script is in place, a Talkbot can be deployed and take customer calls within days. Machine learning capabilities enable the bot to adapt to situations intuitively, collecting more data points and refining its process as it goes along. For queries it can’t address, the bot redirects calls to a human agent that’s identified as the best person to address the issue.
 
Because they run on scripts and programmed dialogues, Talkbots can easily be redeployed to address rapidly developing situations. A call center or customer service team can choose to quickly shift AI bot resources to another function – from products to payments, for instance – in as short as a day’s time. This makes bots a lot more flexible than traditional hires.
 
Finally, AI call center bots can be decommissioned as quickly as they are deployed. This means a company doesn’t need to keep paying for a service it no longer needs. Services can be scaled down once the peak has passed, and more bots can be brought back on board once the business sees another surge coming.
 

Using data from artificial intelligence to stay on top of change

One often overlooked advantage of using AI bots is the wealth of data businesses get from customer interactions. This is particularly true for voice data, which comes as unstructured, messy, and hard-to-extract fragments of information. Unstructured data makes analytics a lot harder and time-consuming. With AI, voice data can be quickly transcribed, tagged, categorized, and subsequently analyzed for insights.
 
As an example, suppose a retailer has put one of its popular toys on a special weekend sale. Several parents buy the product, and a week later, a number of them call the store asking if they can have the item changed. In most cases, the agent will ask for the reason for a return or exchange, make notes, and file the information for reference. The data may not be looked at until after the surge has passed.
 
With AI customer service, the call will be transcribed in almost real-time, the data structured and analyzed, and patterns reported on dashboards almost immediately. The retailer may learn that 80% of buyers changed their minds because buyers realized that their child is no longer interested in the toy. This alerts the retailer to changing buyer preferences and may lead them to reassess their product inventory.
 
Moving it even further, if the AI agent is integrated with the business’ CRM system, the bot can make intelligent suggestions to the shopper based on purchase history. The machine can then intelligently offer products based on known preferences. If the database shows that the caller is a loyal customer, the bot can initiate a promo that gives an extra 10% off on purchases made that day. The result is a delighted customer, and a new closed sale.
 

Providing great customer care at reasonable costs

For many businesses, a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score of above 95% is the holy grail of customer experience. But to provide that level of service often means investing a lot into live support. This tricky balance can be thrown off when seasonal surges happen. After all, nobody can precisely determine how many additional agents they’ll need. Hire too many and you end up spending more than you should, hire too little and you get irritable customers waiting for long periods of time.
 
The good news is that AI call center bots can help manage that balancing act of delighting customers while managing costs. With AI-powered agents, customers will experience shorter wait times and human agents get more manageable workloads. Because a huge chunk of easily addressable queries are managed by machines, humans have more bandwidth to handle the most important tickets – giving the right attention to the right issues. Businesses end up with happier customers and fewer unresolved queries.
 
Artificial intelligence can also empower companies to be more proactive rather than reactive to sudden market shifts. Companies can prepare for upcoming surges by training bots once they see changes on the horizon. Furthermore, data collected by AI bots can be quickly analyzed and used to inform strategy to help mitigate new risks.
 

Customer service that’s personalized and deeply human

Today’s technology makes it possible to deploy bots that speak and text like the humans they serve, providing a personal touch that customers crave. That’s something that outsourcing your customer care operations will find difficult to achieve, especially if services are offshored. In customer service, shared context matters a lot in creating enjoyable experiences.
 
By using AI to automate low-value tasks, businesses are in a better position to deliver high-value services that delight, creating experiences that breed customer loyalty.
Wondering if AI customer service is the right solution for your business? Speak with a representative today.
Contact us

23
Dec
Talkbot Basics
Driving Viral Growth with Andrew Chen
Jennifer Zhang

Jennifer Zhang

CEO & Co-Founder

 

Did you ever wish you could bottle the magic that helped companies such as Uber, Tinder and Dropbox transform into the Unicorns they are today?

 
Last Wednesday (15th December 2021), in celebration of Andrew Chen’s book launch in Asia, we were honoured to host him during our webinar on “Driving Viral Growth” as our guest speaker. Over a thousand registrants signed up within the first week and we ever very quickly oversubscribed.
 
Andrew Chen is the legendary Silicon Valley Growth Hacker, and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Through his methodology, he has managed to grow companies the likes of Uber, Tinder and Dropbox to Unicorn status.
 
During the webinar, Andrew had an in-depth discussion on growth methodology with Jennifer Zhang, CEO and Co-founder of WIZ.AI. They discussed the importance of not only a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) but also the necessity of having a Minimum Viable Community (MVC), because even the most brilliant product in the world is useless without users and a strong community.
 
Most importantly, Andrew shared the real-world use cases of how Tinder, Slack and Clubhouse employed the Atomic Network leverage their community of users to grow at scale and create incredible retention rates past even the D +30 mark.
 

On this, Jennifer drew parallels to her experience on how WIZ.AI’s Talkbot solutions are helping our clients scale up customer engagements to help companies overcome the cold start problem while still ensuring cost efficiency. Part of Wiz’s vision is to grow with growing companies and we assist hundreds of companies

Jennifer noted that customers were growing numb to in-app notifications and other text-based engagement methods, providing diminishing returns and that traditional voice engagements provide the best Customer Satisfaction Score CSAT however were costly to set up and maintain.
By combining the cost efficiency of human-like conversational voice AI to provide the voice engagements that customers respond to, together with an omnichannel approach to customer engagement. WIZ.AI were able to help companies from regional banks to fast growing Unicorn start-ups to grow their network at scale.
 
WIZ.AI is committed and will continue to engage with the Growth Hacking ecosystem in SEA and contribute to the regional digital transformation.
 
If you have missed the session, fret not! A short summary of the key takeaways from Andrew was prepared to help you to scale the network effect.
  • A common trait of many successful Silicon Valley companies is that they are very good at connecting people together, to create communities of users that in turn invite more users to join.
  • Viral growth is not just a campaign, it is a journey of engagement and community that invites users to share their experiences with other users.
  • User cases such as Google Docs, Dropbox, Uber, and Tinder demonstrated network effect is equally valuable in both B2B and B2C industries. However, B2B is more about targeted engagements Company by Company and the growing communities within the Company, while B2C usually grows city by city.
  • One of the key approaches to tackling the Cold Start Problem is getting enough users to use the product at the same time. You will need to build not just the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) but the MVC (Minimum Viable Community) for your start-up to take off.
  • When a certain size of network is built, there are couples of metrics to monitor the ongoing viral growth, including yearly & monthly growth rate, retention rate and the number of connections, etc.
  • Growth hackers should be able to not only look at the micro but also the macro view on their strategy.

10
Nov
Talkbot Basics
What Is The Artificial Intelligence Revolution And Why Does It Matter To Your Business?
Jennifer Zhang

Jennifer Zhang

CEO & Co-Founder

Inventory Management Talkbot

Artificial Intelligence or AI is the technology behind the fourth industrial revolution that has brought great changes all around the world. It is usually defined as the study of intelligent systems that could execute tasks and activities that would require human level intelligence. Similar to the past three industrial revolutions, AI is leaving an incredible impact on productivity. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Revolution

The AI revolution has fundamentally changed the ways people collect and process data as well as transformed business operations across different industries. In general, AI systems are supported by three major aspects which are:  domain knowledge, data generation, and machine learning. Domain knowledge denotes the understanding and expertise of the real life scenario on why and how we need to engineer a task. The data aspect refers to the process of preparing databases required to feed on to the learning algorithms. Lastly, machine learning detects the patterns from the training data, predicts and performs tasks without being manually or explicitly programmed.  

Three key attributes of AI technology.
Intelligent Decision Making 

The simulation of human intelligence by machines can infer a fast solution for the problems that are often faced by humanity. AI is backed by advanced data analytics and machine learning, which means AI can learn and gain new insights as it keeps feeding on new data. With proper input, AI could come up with prompt and accurate decisions. In addition to that, the intelligence attribute of AI promotes productivity and reduces dependency on human support which makes AI highly autonomous and a convenient tool to have. 

Intentionality

Intentionality is often deemed as the technical and ontological attributes of computer programs that derived from the algorithms and knowledge engineering. This attribute can be interpreted as AI’s capability of delivering insights from the real time information and reacting in the way similar to its creators’ and users’. The responses usually strongly reflect the social context that creator and users are in. Additionally, with development of data ingestion, storage capacity, processing speed and analytic techniques, AI gets more capable of responding to the issues with increasing sophistication. This very much differentiates AI with the fundamental function of machines that merely carry out predetermined routines.

Adaptability and prediction

Machine learning facilitates AI to discover the pattern of the data that were previously programmed, which enables AI’s capability of making its own change as circumstances change. The attribute of adaptability profoundly enhances AI’s prediction and decision making. One of the commonly seen examples is Gmail’s Smart Compose feature, which offers the use of  personalised suggestions as users typing a sentence. It illustrates how AI adapts to one’s personal writing pattern and delivers appropriate suggestions.

AI in the Business 

Undoubtedly, the artificial intelligence revolutions had profoundly impacted the way businesses operate. The most common practises are the automation of repetitive tasks that require less human input. However, with the consistent improvement of algorithms, AI technology is no longer only limited to the capability of expanding productivity, but also becomes a necessary tool in engaging customers, providing service excellence, and driving innovation. Here are several industrial scenarios to demonstrate how AI transformed the nature and scope of business activities.

 

Contact Center

The contact center has evolved significantly over the years and has become more sophisticated thanks to the use of AI Automation.  We can see technological advancement of contact centers in the form of Chatbots and Talkbots that enables 24/7 availability and instant response for consumer engagement at scale. Changing the strategies to engage customers with AI based automation vastly boost service capability and reduce service failures that are usually caused by under-performing agents or emotional labour. While human agents require frequent and regular customer service training to maintain the service quality, AI Talkbot learns from every customer interaction and keeps improving to provide excellent service over time. This very much reduces labour cost associated with performance evaluation and contact center training. 

Furthermore, AI systems in contact centers such as Talkbot have the capability to be customized to deliver a more personal experience through goal driven dialogues based on the customer data and business metric. In other words, Talkbots can easily do upselling and cross selling if they are given sufficient information about the customers and the business plan. Even without any customer care training, Talkbots can conduct sentiment analysis from the conversation and unlock the hidden customer data in customer voice calls. This, in turn, provides great insights for future planning. Also, compared to the traditional contact center, AI systems show stronger capabilities in collecting information from each call which are used to generate the report in a more intelligent manner and with better insights. 

 

 E-commerce

Nowadays the e-commerce market is highly saturated and competitive. Top e- commerce companies heavily rely on AI technology to better understand their customers and to give their customers better service in order to remain competitive and profitable. Intelligent product recommendation is one of the typical applications of AI in the ecommerce industry. This is a real-time application of an AI algorithm that attempts to figure out customers’ preference based on their previous purchases, researches, and consumption habits. The collected insights enable e-commerce companies to personalize product recommendations for different online shoppers. To a certain extent, it enhances the shopping experience and potentially boosts sales. However, if the e-commerces overuses intelligent product recommendation and adopts an aggressive marketing strategy, the reverse effect might happen. Beyond the function of personalization, e-commerce businesses also leverage AI technology to support customer service through chatbots and talkbots to assist them with customer care, inventory management via demand forecasting, or product promotion. 

 

 Logistics and Supply Chain

 The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning has fundamentally transformed supply chain management and delivered strong optimization of capabilities associated with accurate management, high productivity, low operating cost and quick delivery.  For example, with the capability of handling big data, the AI technology could be used to automates the workflow of inventory management. Parcels could be packed and sorted in a seamless process at large scale, which would largely reduce processing time and minimize human error. Also, the AI system can forecast market demand from the market and purchase histories, facilitating the prediction of the future sales and providing information to support resource allocation. Moreover, AI algorithms are  also being used to optimize the shipping and delivery route, with some of the most advanced ones even involving the prediction and management of traffic lights.

Overall, in the information and data driven era, the potential of AI is tremendous. Business process automation could reduce stress on internal productivity and decrease reliance on human support while at the same time increase operational cost efficiency. Machine learning enables the company to delve into a more intelligent approach and continually drives the evolution business model. Companies should prepare themselves for the AI revolution wave, so they can leverage on the technology to achieve the optimal operational excellence.


02
Nov
Talkbot Basics
Fintech: Utilizing AI to assist the growth of Peer-to-peer Lending
Jennifer Zhang

Jennifer Zhang

CEO & Co-Founder

pinjol

Fintech peer-to-peer lending (also known as p2p or p2pl) is all the hype in South East Asia right now.  The region is populated by more than 650 million people who mostly do not have access to proper banking or financial service, making peer-to-peer lending a welcomed financial safety net especially in countries such as; Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines . With that in mind, it could be assured that the market growth of peer-to-peer lending will just grow bigger from here. However, those rapid growth will be faced by similarly rapid increase of challenges such as regulation from the governments, increased costs to handle huge amount of customers, increased needs of proper customer engagements, and even small challenges such generating and engaging leads on daily basis which sounds simple but requires a lot of company resources in term of time, costs, and pure efforts. 

Understanding the challenges might be the first step to prepare for the incoming problems in the future. However, companies should also prepare the solution for these future problems. One solution that is available now is the utilization of AI for multiple purposes in the business process. Here are several ways AI could be useful in keeping up with the rapid growth of peer-to-peer lending industry:

1. Big Data Management

Big data has revolutionised value generation for many industries including peer-to-peer lending. With the amount of data that is generated right now, companies without access to AI systems to process data will struggle to keep up with rapid development in the market and the industry. By using AI to process data, companies now could easily collect and map out consumer information such as their habits, likes and dislikes, activities, and personal preferences in a short period of time. This information is a disruptive tool that allows p2p companies to elevate their business processes such as supporting more accurate underwriting decisions, better assessment of prospective borrowers to provide accurate and more fair credit pricing, and also faster and more accurate decision making process based on data. In addition to that, with Machine Learning Technology the AI will improve overtime, which means it would be able to keep up with the rapid growth of the p2p industry.  

2. Business Automation

One of the pain points of business is the resource and effort it takes to finish repetitive and mundane tasks. For p2p companies it is even worse since they have to deal with endless procedures and verification processes. Fortunately, AI automation is more than capable of dealing with all of these repetitive tasks with ease, efficiently and effectively. Even better, they are often resulting in great output since AI systems are capable of consistently operating with best practice . 

With most tasks, procedures, and verification being automated it frees up company’s resources to be focused on strategically valuable tasks. For example, by using WIZ AI Talkbots to automate collection and collection reminders, collectors could redirect their efforts to  focus more on follow-up tasks and customer retention. 

3. Lead Generation & Customers Outreach

AI is not only useful for manual tasks automation. Advanced AI systems could even be used as a tool to reach and engage customers. Through technology such as Conversational Voice AI, p2p companies could automate their call centers to engage customers at scale and with lower costs. By automating lead generation and customer outreach with AI powered systems such as WIZ.AI Talkbots, companies could also redirect the efforts of their call center agents to deal with more important tasks such as closing deals or taking care of high valued customers instead of making calls to collect customers’ information, or answering FAQ which could easily be done automatically. 

Another benefit of integrating Voice AI systems in call centers is the consistency that comes with it. For lead generation activity it means the company could consistently generate a huge amount of high quality leads. As for Customer Outreach, it means that Voice AI Talkbots will help companies to engage more customers and consistently give them better customer service and customer experience, thus ensuring customer loyalty and the future business potential.

4. Risk Mitigation

As mentioned before, with AI taking care of data processing it helps companies to better plan the next strategic moves, including how to deal with potential risks. Not only that, with AI automation companies would have a tool to deal with unexpected situations. 

In the p2p industry, lenders and borrowers always need a reliable way to contact the companies either to find information or file complaints which are usually done through phone calls. In unexpected circumstances, the call center might be flooded with calls and the company will not have any choice but to bolster up the call center capacity. However, training new call center agents takes too much time. Even worse, most of the time after the crisis has passed, companies still have to take care of additional manpower which would be costly for an extended period of time. On the other hand, with AI based automated systems such as WIZ.AI Talkbots, companies could flexibly increase and decrease the number of bots according to the current needs. 

5. Increase Efficiency and Reduce Cost

All in all, in any Industry the expectation of integrating AI to the business process would be to increase efficiency and growth, as well as reducing cost. Luckily, based on all the points that were mentioned before, all of them would lead to business efficiency and cost reduction. By automating most business processes, companies could streamline many operations without sacrificing productivity. Also with AI systems companies would have access to more accurate data that is available real-time, which help companies to make more accurate forecasts, budgeting, and strategic planning to increase the efficiency in every aspect of the business. 

The benefits of integrating AI to business is undeniable. It is only a matter of time before AI automation is integrated in every industry for various business aspects. Peer-to-peer lending companies are privileged enough to be able integrate AI in their business early on. Therefore, as the system gets more advanced, early adopters will be more prepared and have sharper competitive edges in terms of familiarity and understanding of AI technology, also where and how the AI technology will develop and how to utilize the technology for the benefit of their business.


22
Oct
Talkbot Basics
10 ways WIZ Talkbots increase call center efficiency
Jennifer Zhang

Jennifer Zhang

CEO & Co-Founder

Call center’s efficiency is strongly tied with its capability and cost. Most enterprises struggle to stay flexible and be able to maintain a consistent high-quality service due to the volatile nature of contact center. Fortunately, WIZ AI offers the cutting-edge solution to break the industry bottlenecks and provide solutions to deal with changes in demand, high staff turnover, poor integration, and other problems that might occur. To better understand how WIZ.AI provides help to all those problems, here are 10 specific ways how WIZ Talkbots tackle the prominent challenges that are faced by traditional contact center and help them to achieve customer service excellence.

 

  1. AI Based Automation

When it comes to customer service, most customers prefer to talk to a real agent compared to an automated system. Talking to the bot can sometimes make them feel uneasy, or even unappreciated. That is why, automating the call center service could often place companies in an awkward position. On one hand, it could significantly cut the operational cost. On the other hand, the company has to sacrifice the service quality and might result in customers being unhappy. With this in mind, WIZ.AI develops Talkbots as a top-grade solution powered by Hyper-realistic Voice Dialogue technology, which enables the Talkbots to speak in a Natural Human-Like voice and support conversations with localized accent such as standard English, Singlish, Mandarin Chinese, Bahasa Indonesia, along with several other ASEAN language and dialect. However, what distinct WIZ.AI Talkbots with other automated systems is its capability to handle interruption, recognize intention, and follow that up with appropriate clarification and chasing statements, just human agents. WIZ.AI Talkbots sound so natural that 95% of users are not even aware that they are talking to a bot. In conclusion, automating call center with Talkbots could help companies lower the operational costs, while staying customer centric.

 

  1. Best Practice Preservation

Attempting to provide the highest standard of customer service, WIZ.AI Talkbots is trained based on successful conversations of the best call center agents. Then, the Talkbots will automatically streamline the dialogue and adopt the standardized workflow approach to meet the business objectives in different kinds of scenarios. 

Customer service training used to be one of the key measures for call center to minimize service inconsistencies and failures.  However, with the technologies developed by WIZ.AI’s, companies no longer need to rely on regular customer service training programs to maintain the best front line service quality. This also means the elimination of the training curve for new agents.

 

  1.     One Call Solution

Another competitive advantage of WIZ.AI’s dialogue design and management could be attributed to its powerful knowledge base. Unlike human agents that sometimes need to follow up on the unsolved problem in the previous calls, WIZ.AI’s Talkbots are capable of handling a wide range of frequently asked questions and routine tasks. If the Talkbot is unable to follow up on customer’s inquiries, or if the matter requires hands on human help, Talkbot will automatically redirect the call to the appropriate human agent. With this foolproof system, customers’ issue can be resolved efficiently and effectively in one call.

 

  1. Reduce “Dead Air” on Calls

Human agents are the spearhead of companies for customer reach out.  However, even though trained by the best customer service training companies, human agents cannot always deliver a flawless customer experience. Sometimes there are human factors that prevent agents from doing their best. One of the problems that mostly occur because of this, is Dead Air on calls. Dead air happens when neither the agents nor the customers have anything to say in the call. This long pause and silence during the call is the typical human factor that ends up lengthens call time, and worse it could give customers bad experience which in the end will reduce customer confidence. 

There are several reasons why Dead Air occurs, for example personal habits of the agents, fresh agents that have no experience, or even when customers asked about matters that agents are not familiar with. Whatever the reason behind it, customers tend to interpret the long pause or silence as agents’ incompetence in solving the problem they are facing. Consequently, customers were left with negative impressions and service experience. That is why, WIZ.AI Talkbots were developed with technologies that could guarantee immediate response to customers inquiries in 0.5 second. This could vastly reduce the potential dead air on calls and gives the customer more confidence in companies’ customer service.

 

  1. Shorter Wait Time

When experiencing an unexpectedly high volume surge, the company has no choice but to put the customers on hold for a long period of time. To solve this problem,  WIZ.AI’s Voice AI is the right solution due to our ability to increase call center capability in a short amount of time and at a low cost. Instead of sourcing a larger call center, installing more equipment, hiring more agents, and providing long and dragging agents training, the company can simply deploy more Voice Talkbots to cater a surge in call during critical situations. The operation can quickly be scaled from one Talkbots to a hundred Talkbots in an instant.  With WIZ.AI’s technology, the company will become more prepared when facing unforeseen large increases in calls; and the customers will not have to wait and be left unattended for a long period of time.

 

  1. Eliminate Repetitive Query

Beyond providing consistent customer service, WIZ.AI technology helps businesses to draw information through a comprehensive and user friendly dashboard. The system collects, transcribes, and analyses data from every single call engaged, providing deep insights about the company’s performance and customers’ preference. For instance, the most frequently asked questions potentially reveal that the relevant information about market response to a product that is offered to the customers, or the information about the most commonly required assistance potentially indicates an awkward existing current service’s function. With clear and concise data, the company then can act based on the data and improve the relevant aspects accordingly. After improvements are made the call center will no longer have to deal with those similar queries and instead could focus on more important tasks.

 
  1.     High Quality Lead Identification

Beside the ability to spot the service gap in real time, WIZ.AI’s intelligent customer data report is also useful in identifying the high value customer. Leveraging on the customers’ preference and behavior that are reflected on detailed call data, the company could tailor a detailed telemarketing training for the Talkbots and then automate the out-bound service calls. Armed with the effective lead identification tool and outbound automation, the call center further boosts its operational effectiveness and efficiency.

 

  1. Robust AI Evolution

In the traditional call center operation, management rely on regular and redundant training to maintain service quality; yet the benefits of customer service training do not reflect immediately. Compared to that, WIZ.AI’s Talkbots are a more preferable solution. Powered by the Automatic Speech Recognition function, the Talkbots conducts speech tests during every customer interaction; and its overall recognition accuracy improves as a result. Meanwhile, the human dialogue engineers, who play a similar role as the call center trainer, conduct ongoing evaluation and training to improve the Talkbots’s capability as well. If there is any new skill required to support the operation, the Talkbots can learn and deliver the mature & data-proven scenario experience immediately while simultaneously improving as the system gathers more data. 

9.     Omnichannel integration

Switching from one to another database or service platform is time consuming which could drag down and ruin the efficiency of business operation.  That is why Wiz AI technology is available for Omnichannel integration. For example, when supported by the integrated system, WIZ.AI’s Talkbots could access the customers’ information via the integrated CRM system to identify the high value customers and perform an outbound call for new product promotion. After the conversation with the customer, WIZ.AI’s Talkbots activated the integrated SMS and sent them the information in detail. By achieving a well integrated ecosystem of existing platforms, WIZ.AI’s Talkbots are able to deliver a quick response and service; at the same time create customers a sense of feeling that they’re in the right hands.

 

  1. Workforce optimization and cost reduction

With the Talkbots helps to handle the routine issues, the call center agents are able to spend more time to service the high value customer. In addition, without relying on human support at a massive scale, the contact center is able to cut costs in terms of hardware expense, recruitment, call center courses designing, contact center training, agents retaining, and so on. Most importantly, the customer service excellence that is backed by Talkbot helps the company reduce financial loss associated with service failure compensation and customer loss.


22
Oct
e-commerce AI
Talkbot Basics  ·  Teknologi Voice AI
Transforming Asian E-commerce Industry through Artificial Intelligence
Jennifer Zhang

Jennifer Zhang

CEO & Co-Founder

e-commerce AI

Having grown at a rapid pace in the past few years, e-commerce has become an important part of many people’s lives. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI), which has been embedded into various aspects of e-commerce, is becoming one of the key drivers behind this exponential growth. From improving customer interactions to facilitating post purchase services, AI provides merchants with powerful machine learning and algorithms to elevate the entire online shopping experience. In recent years, AI has already started managing online customer relationships without any human intervention.

Benefits of AI for E-commerce
1. Predictive Marketing

Predictive marketing is usually associated with big data and machine learning. With these two technologies, online retailers are able to collect customers’ data from various touchpoints. The data is then used to produce customer profiling with the help of artificial intelligence.
Dataism believes that algorithms could understand human beings better than human beings understand themselves, which is not unreasonable. Statistical modelling, machine learning, and deep learning enables AI to predict behavioural patterns accurately. Applied to marketing, this technology could predict things such as a consumers’ taste, household type, and seasonal demand. All this information can insights can help marketers design the most effective promotion for specific periods. E-commerce merchants can then create more effective sale strategies and be well prepared for future demand.

2. Efficient Sale Processes

AI creates a more efficient sales process by collecting customer insights, integrating with the existing CRM, and automating subsequent abandoned cart reminders. Even a simple chatbot can help customers in their purchasing activities. Leveraging on AI technology, online merchants can automate business management and free themselves from mundane tasks that used to require human support, such as price setting and answering frequently asked questions. In addition, AI helps enhance communication between merchants and customers. AI can quickly unlock customers’ hidden emotions during the conversation, providing guidelines for the system to communicate with the customer in a more relevant way. AI is able to engage with the customers more appropriately, and deliver the message more effectively. Retailers can thus lead customers through the funnel in a more intelligent and modern approach.

3. Increase Customer Retention

Customer retention is closely connected with the level of personalisation of product and service offers. Delivering personalised marketing content and shopping experiences to targeted audiences is one way to increase customer retention. With AI technology – in particular, deep learning and statistical modelling – e-commerce retailers can analyse consumers’ historical behaviour, demographics, and other information at scale. Retailers can then generate personalised advertisements, send direct emails, recommend products, and set prices uniquely suited to the shopper. Intelligent personalisation helps online business owners to build stronger emotional connections with their customers, and therefore increase customer retention and make customer more loyal.

The use of AI in E-commerce
1. Chatbot & Talkbots

Chatbot can be programmed to answer routine inquiries to customers, becoming an intelligent Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) bank. It is one of the AI technologies that is used the most frequently in supporting 24/7 customer service in the e-commerce industry. The Chatbot mainly provides prompt solutions for routine questions and helps customers with their purchase decision. Talkbots or voice bots, on the other hand, provide human-like conversational voice support over the phone, thanks to artificial intelligence. Unlike the chatbot sitting at the landing page, the Talkbot is usually deployed in call centers. Other than answering customer inquiries, the Talkbot is able to help the retailer manage schedules, send out reminders, and conduct outbound telemarketing tasks as well. Talkbots primarily ease the pressure caused by surge of demand, helping reduce operating costs and accelerate business growth.

2. Visual Search

Visual search is the process of mimicking the same processes that people use when we see and identify objects. This technology is designed to make the search process quick and easy by taking or uploading photos to the engine. For visual search, an image is used as a query. Search engines will need to understand it instead of just recognizing the image. Visual search vastly helps to enhance and optimize customers’ search results when shopping online.

3. Intelligent Inventory Management

Inventory management is one of the strategic areas for e-commerce merchant management. It is much more than delivering items from one place to another and sorting them out. Intelligent inventory management relies on large amounts of data to achieve operational efficiency. As mentioned above, artificial intelligence helps with better demand prediction, which at the same time resolves issues of inventory overstock and understock. Also, supported by AI data mining, e-commerce retailers can build efficient factory-to-warehouse transportation, which is critical for products with shorter shelf lives and higher demand volatility. AI bots can also boost inventory management efficiency by scanning and locating stock, then updating stock information.

Combined with capabilities of analyzing data, predicting demand, and suggesting the best delivery route, AI is becoming a powerful technology for retailers to expand inventory management capacity and improve merchant services.

4. Dynamic Pricing

AI-enabled dynamic pricing is the suite of tools that include competition monitoring, automatic repricing, and promotion assistance. By collecting information of inventory conditions, supply and demand relations, customer expectations, and other market information, AI technology can automate the pricing process. Online merchants no longer need to decide the discount and amend the price manually. Dynamic pricing improves the efficiency of the entire pricing process, which in return will optimize the profit for the merchants over time.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence has been proven to be able to save businesses a lot of effort, time, and money in every aspect of their business. In a tech-crazy and data driven climate, AI is a must for many e-commerce business owners to keep businesses competitive edge.


03
Sep
Talkbot Basics
The Future of Lead Generation
Jennifer Zhang

Jennifer Zhang

CEO & Co-Founder

Lead generation WIZ.AI

In this process, Prospective customers are also known as leads. In order to collect this leads companies need to engage in a process called lead generation. There are several ways companies could do lead generation. However, the most common and arguably the most effective way is through phone calls or a method called cold calling. A survey by Deloitte claimed that people still prefer voice communication over other methods of communication, especially regarding complicated matters. Cold calls also enable companies to reach their prospective customers faster, and in return allows companies to get faster and direct responses from the prospects. 

As effective as cold calls, however, it still comes with many disadvantages, such as the required resources and  somewhat unmeasurable return of investments. Not to mention when outbound calls didn’t get picked up, that lead might as well be considered lost, since it might not be called again in later time. Furthermore, counting human error as a factor, cold calls could be less reliable. Even the best call agents would have a bad day, and that day might be a good day for harvesting leads. Overall, using cold calls for lead generation is effective most of the time. However, it could be very unreliable and inefficient at times, more so if human errors are factored in. 

With the advancement of technologies, new tools started to emerge as solutions for better lead generation. Take chatbot as an example, with the existence of AI technology and several other supporting technologies, we can now build futuristic customer outreach tools that are entirely automated. Also, with such precise machineries the factor of human error could be minimized, thus ensuring the efficiency of the lead generation process. However, this futuristic technology is not free of disadvantages either. 

As good as chatbot technologies go, there are still limitations in the way they engage prospective customers. For starters, chatbot comes as a text based technology which means there is a high chance that the initial contacts they made with customers are completely ignored. Also, chatbots do not have the ability to classify the leads to single out the high value leads. Not to mention, the lack of originality and authenticity of chatbots when engaging the customers. In the end, chatbot could automate several simple tasks. However, the results are far from satisfactory. But what if there is a technology that combines the effectiveness of cold calling with agents and the efficiency of chatbots?

Effective and Efficient Lead Generation

To answer this problem, WIZ.AI comes with a technology called Talkbots, a conversational voice AI technology. Talkbots are highly specialized conversational voice AI assistants that can automate the many complex tasks needed to be achieved over a phone conversation, including lead generation. They are made up of a comprehensive AI system with the ability to engage multiple prospective consumers at once. Powered with ground breaking technologies such as Natural Language Processing, Text to Speech, Speech to Text, and other supporting technologies, Talkbots are able to interact with potential clients in a hyper-realistic way just like humans. This helps Talkbots to better identify high value leads. This means With WIZ.AI Talkbots, businesses could run a better lead generation process,  which in turn will generate better leads in terms of both quality and quantity

Talkbots also reduce the necessity for the company to put more resources into repetitive tasks. These resources instead could be put into more important tasks such as closing sales or customer engagements that require hands-on help. With Talkbots taking care of small repetitive tasks, the cost lead generation would be more efficient. Talkbots also consolidate all the best practice for lead generation, therefore there are no wasted efforts in every attempt to generate leads. 

Better than that, all of this could be done consistently since AI doesn’t get stressed by doing the same horrendous and repetitive task, which means the results would be consistently good. In addition to that, Talkbots also records every call with prospective customers. Every information of a successful call will be used to improve the Talkbots, making them better time after time, thus ensuring consistently better results in time. 

Ultimately, Talkbots are not only a piece of futuristic technology that is cool and convenient to have, Talkbots are the future of lead generation that could help companies to generate leads efficiently, effectively, and consistently gets better in the long run.


07
Jul
Talkbot Basics
A.I to your aid — Meet your new administrative assistants
Jennifer Zhang

Jennifer Zhang

CEO & Co-Founder

Remember how Google Duplex mesmerised the audience when it successfully booked an appointment with a hairstylist in a live demonstration? It was not only an introvert’s dream but also a sign of technological breakthrough in our times. Now that we have witnessed what A.I. can do for the consumer’s side, what about the business side of things?

Automation of appointment booking systems

Nothing is more exasperating than waiting for a patient to turn up at their appointment, only to realise there has a been a cancellation that you were unaware of. Every client who cancels their appointment at the last minute is a lost business opportunity. Someone could have replaced them if they logged in their cancellation or arranged for a reschedule at an earlier time. While an appointment booking system can partially automate this process, it still requires someone to man the computer or system. Ultimately, the most efficient way to mitigate cancellations would be to call every single client ahead of time to confirm their appointment booking status; but this is only possible with sufficient manpower which many small enterprises do not have. As busy individuals, reminders for appointments are also extremely useful and closely related to customer service excellence. What if we told you that the process of managing your appointments could be fully automated?

Wiz. A.I specializes in hyper-realistic talkbots that can manage your appointment booking system. From rescheduling appointments to logging cancellations, the talkbot is designed to call a large volume of your clients before their appointments to check their booking status and reduce last minute backouts. This would significantly increase the attendance rate and minimise the administrative nightmare of last-minute cancellations. 

One might argue that creating an appointment booking system on an app is another way to manage the high volume of appointments. However, it is always better to initiate first contact, which is why talkbots are perfect for this job. By calling customers at an ideal time, your business would be able to have enough time to make the necessary schedule adjustments which increases work efficiency by leaps and bounds. Additionally, being called by a company to confirm an appointment booking puts the customer at ease and leaves a positive impression of the company’s sincerity and proactiveness. This is standard of customer service excellence that many businesses would strive to achieve and maintain.

Appointment confirmation and its nuances — Can A.I handle it?

We’ve all seen how appointment confirmation processes can become complicated; with both the customer service personnel and customer flipping through their respective calendars to find overlaps. This back and forth exchange of “is this day okay” or “I can’t make it” can also contain a lot of nuances. Driven by A.I., machine learning, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and natural language understanding (NLU), the talkbot is able to accurately identify the intentions of the speaker and manage their appointments accordingly. Furthermore, it is also able to answer a whole bevy of frequently asked questions like the business’ opening hours and address.

The best part about the talkbot: most people are unaware of their existence. Over 90% of users thought they were conversing with a human customer service agent. Such hyper realistic, humanised experiences are a testament to the talkbot’s advanced text-to-speech system. Additionally, with highly customisable and user-centric scripts, conversations can be designed to be concise and efficient, reducing call and hold times.

While ASR and text-to-speech systems work hand-in-hand to provide the best customer service possible, the system’s continuous improvement further adds to its technological prowess. Machine learning ensures that the ASR system only increases in accuracy with every call and that the text-to-speech engine is further refined to provide an even more realistic caller experience. The talkbot is also an amalgamation of all your top customer service agents as the script would mirror their best practices and perhaps come in handy as an A.I. trainer for your newcomers as well. With machine learning, the peak performance of your best human call agents is now the baseline for the talkbot. Imagine the effect this would have on customer satisfaction.

The start of the pandemic was characterized by panic and a surge of calls for many healthcare organisations. If anything, Covid-19 has shown us how high call volumes can come at unexpected times. In the life & death urgency of a contagious pandemic, call centres need to be able to handle these volume surges to put their patients at ease. With such a short notice, it is impossible to hire a large number of call centre agents and administrative assistants, let alone train them to be able to answer business-related questions. In such cases, the talkbot is the perfect solution as it is able to handle the sudden increase in call volume with no time required to overcome a learning curve.

Now that Covid-19 has normalised the need to book appointments in advance, the demand for IT solutions that handle such bookings is also growing rapidly. When it comes to places like clinics and hospitals where overcrowding detrimental to safety, having a robust system for managing appointments is all the more crucial to maintaining public health.

Talkbots are more than a stop-gap measure for appointment bookings during a pandemic. It is also a viable and permanent solution that many companies can turn to. At a time where most business processes are being forced to digitise, many enterprises are already exploring IT solutions to increase work efficiency and reduce costs. Little wonder that A.I. solutions have increased in popularity in recent months, especially when many of these solutions have proven to be effective and can be implemented for the long term. There is no better time to venture into talkbots than now.


Page 2 of 4