Scaling conversational AI

Conversational AI has evolved beyond the domain of mere question-and-answer systems to deliver complete business outcomes, even improving customer satisfaction while lowering cost and increasing revenue.

A recent Forrester Consulting study estimated that a large organization implementing Virtual Agent Technology (VAT) can achieve $5.50 cost savings per contained conversation. And the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) found in a recent global survey an average improvement of 9 percentage points in customer satisfaction across all CSPs surveyed.

Implementing Virtual Agent Technology led to a 9 percentage point improvement in customer satisfaction, on average, according to a recent IBV survey.

 This certainly suggests there are real reasons for further investment in VAT. But an even more compelling case can be made for CSPs that increased VAT investment can broaden these benefits.

CSPs are a fertile ground for VAT because they experience pain points resulting from high volumes and diversity of customer interactions, including:

• A large number of customers, many of whom have low-value contracts that make the cost of interaction a critical factor for profitability
• A history of human-to-human interactions, either call center or storefront, that are hard to manage with consistent quality when done manually
• A broad portfolio of products with a diversity of business interactions that can be automated through self-service and tuned through frequent monitoring and analysis

Given the alignment of these pain points with VAT’s ability to help assuage them, it should come as little surprise that CSPs are early adopters and had the longest average implemented time of all 12 industries surveyed, at two years and one month.

CSPs were early adopters of VAT, and are enjoying above-average attainment of their anticipated ROI for VAT investments. 67% of CSP respondents have already achieved their ROI with 17% of these exceeding it.

CSPs can shorten time to value and reduce implementation costs through machine learning-driven analytics, simplified integrations, and pre-configured industry content.

Despite their success, our survey suggested that CSPs may not be deploying VAT as widely as they might, which could allow them to expand and optimize ROI attainment and further increase business outcomes.

CSPs were nearly tied statistically for the lead across all other industries surveyed on the percentage of respondents whose organizations had implemented VAT for use by external customers. But CSPs had implemented it less to assist internal agents and users—and came in last among other industries on implementations for use by internal customers.

Room for expansion: Where CSPs lead—and lag—in VAT implementation

Read the full report to learn where, when, and how telecom CSPs should deploy conversational AI—and how organizations can benefit from scaling this technology.