Businesses and brands want to provide customers with a seamless, engaging experience in the most cost-efficient and timely way possible. So they increasingly turn to technology to manage customer interactions. One of the best examples is a Dialogflow Voicebot—an IVR flow that harnesses the power of Dialogflow.
These virtual assistants answer customer queries and can work on many tasks that agents once handled—freeing businesses from the time and money spent on repetitive tasks.
While the provided time and money efficiency are one of the main reasons that Dialogflow voicebots are gaining popularity in the marketplace, the ability of these bots to perform more sophisticated tasks while ensuring continuous and quality customer interactions make it a must for many contact center operations.
Read on to learn more about how much of a difference a Dialogflow voicebot will make for your business.
What is Dialogflow?
Dialogflow is an NLU (Natural Language Understanding) module for conversational applications, like chatbots and voice assistants. It makes it easy to build conversational interfaces for websites, mobile apps, and mainstream messaging platforms, including Slack and Whatsapp.
Dialogflow lets you develop intelligent conversational interfaces on top of your products and services by providing a robust NLU engine to process and understand natural language input.
A full-fledged Dialogflow agent has three major components:
- Intents: An intent categorizes an end-user’s intention for one conversation turn. The end-user input is matched against the best intent within the agent based on training phrases, actions, parameters, and contexts. These define how your agent will interact with users. Intents specify how users express their needs when interacting with your agent. You can think of them as the conversation paths you want your agent to take.
- Entities: Dialogflow uses these to map what the user says to what the user wants. Entities are a Dialogflow concept used to extract information from user input. Intents allow you to understand a user’s underlying motivation for requesting information or performing an action, but entities are used to pick out specific pieces of information that your users mention. For example, they help recognize variables like street addresses, product names, etc. There are three classes of entities: system, developer, and session entities.
- Contexts: A context represents additional information included with user input or with an intent returned by the Google Dialogflow API. Contexts are used to select which intent should be executed based on the input of a previous intent. They help differentiate user input which may be vague or have a different meaning depending on additional details from your application, such as user setting and preferences or the conversation history. Without contexts, all intents would be triggered regardless of their relevance to the current conversation as they define which user’s request will trigger intents.
When you give Dialogflow an input text, it will try to match it against the intents you’ve created. If there is a match, it returns the intent and extracts any entities from the input text. If no match is found, it returns the default fallback intent. The best part is that all these interactions happen in milliseconds, providing your customers with fast but quality services.
Call Center Studio’s Dialogflow deployment has an 80% accuracy in intent processing—that’s the highest there is!
Check out our wide range of contact center AI tools that will help you maximize your contact center experience—both for your agents and customers.
What is IVR (Interactive Voice Response)?
Simply put, interactive voice response, or IVR, is a voice-controlled software that allows callers to interact with computers via the phone. Starting as a touch-tone system, IVR systems have evolved over the past years, implementing newer technologies and transforming into other forms such as AI-based Smart IVRs and Dialogflow-powered voicebots.
It is used for various applications, including automated menu selection and customer service systems, and applies to many industries varying from financial services to health care.
What Does a Dialogflow-Powered IVR Look Like?
Dialogflow-Powered IVR systems, aka Dialogflow voicebots, are basically voicebots that leverage Dialogflow technologies, including conversational AI, machine learning, and others.
With a Dialogflow voicebot deployment, you can offer customers a wide range of self-service solutions which are automatically processed through voice recognition technology and text-to-speech technology, saving your business time and reducing costs, and ultimately improving customer satisfaction levels.
Did you know that you can save your call center from $656,280 with just the perfect Dialogflow voicebot?
Read our success story to learn more about how we helped our client save both time and money with the best SR (Speech Recognition) and TTS (Text-to-Speech) technology.
Six Self-Service Processes You Can Offer with a Dialogflow Voicebots
With a Dialogflow voicebot, businesses can now build intelligent and engaging conversational IVR experiences for their customers without needing to hire dedicated IVR phone system developers and wasting valuable agent efficiency. This section explores six self-service processes you can offer using a Dialogflow-powered IVR system.
Want to do more? Let’s have a chat on how we can customize your Dialogflow experience.
1. Appointment Scheduling
Many organizations can benefit from an automated appointment scheduling system, but unfortunately, they may lack the technical know-how to implement the solution. However, a Dialogflow voicebot can provide the user with a way of creating their appointments (ex: booking a doctor’s appointment) without speaking with a representative. This bot will be able to take information such as name and phone number, ask for dates and times, and ultimately confirm an appointment.
2. FAQ
Several organizations have used bots and virtual assistants (VA) to provide customer service and technical support. But these bots cannot always provide the customer with the answers they seek. For example, when a customer asks a bot a question, it may have the information but not know how to interpret it, or it may simply give an answer it believes is correct for whatever reason. This miscommunication can be frustrating for both parties and may even unfairly influence the direction of the conversation.
Dialogflow voicebot enables your bot to understand text, classify questions, understand the context of answers, and provide personalized responses using conversational intelligence. Taking a simple question such as “How do I place an order online?” and applying sophisticated AI techniques to find the best answer is an excellent example of how AI can provide valuable support services.
Dialogflow works perfectly with IVR systems but also works wonders when deployed to chat services.
Discover how we helped the world’s third-biggest university decrease operational costs by 60% via a Dialogflow-powered chatbot!
3. Shipment Tracking
When online shopping, customers often want to know the status of their orders. In the past, when a customer called for order status updates, they would have to navigate through a maze of IVR options before reaching a human agent. This path was confusing and time-consuming. Moreover, it frustrated customers, who would hang up out of frustration or leave the line open while waiting to speak with an agent.
This poor customer experience resulted in longer average hold times (AHT) and increased call center costs. It also reduced customer satisfaction and loyalty. Today, that is long gone…
Dialogflow voicebot saves your customers from going through a series of rigid menus. Instead, all they have to do is simply ask for the status of their orders by saying, “Where is my package?” After that initial request, customers can follow up with more specific questions about their orders without having to repeat themselves or listen to menu options, making the entire process more seamless, efficient, and ultimately satisfying.
4. Taking Orders
Taking customer orders through an IVR is one of the biggest challenges for businesses. A system that can handle a variety of queries, control calls, and deal with complex conversations is not easy to develop or maintain, and off-the-shelf solutions are costly, hard to integrate and take months to deploy. That is where Call Center Studio comes in to save the day!
Our Dialogflow voicebot allows you to build your IVR within minutes. Simply upload a set of example phrases to train the Dialogflow console about what customers will say in their order request and link your order processing system. Need assistance? Have our 5-star rated experts do it for you!
Then, our Dialogflow-powered IVR system will help you take customer orders quickly and efficiently while providing your customers with an efficient ordering experience—no agent interaction required.
Want to learn how our client, a leader in the multi-chain fast-food industry, is handling 50% of their orders via our Dialogflow voicebot? Take a look at our success story.
5. Balance Check
The question isn’t whether banks should start using a natural language interface to their IVR systems but how soon they can adopt it. By utilizing a Dialogflow voicebot, banks can bring more efficient service to their customers while reducing costs.
Consider a bank with multiple branches across the country that needs to provide IVR services in multiple languages. In the past, this would have required an upfront investment in creating the appropriate prompts and building out a telephony infrastructure so that their customers could call in and check their account balance or get more information about their loans.
For example, if you run a bank providing comprehensive customer service, you need to deploy somewhat sophisticated customer care service bots. Using an intelligent IVR system will allow your customers to check their account balances without requiring them to interact with your agents.
6. Payment
Today, if you have a call center solution with robust integration capabilities, there is nothing that can stop you from integrating your payment gateways. And when you integrate those payment gateways to a Dialogflow voicebot, then you have the recipe for the best self-service payment system—saving money for your call center and time for your customers.
Sounds like the perfect solution for almost every e-commerce business out there, right?
Discover how we deployed a self-service IVR payment system for our multinational client in only 3 days—saving agents 6 mins/call AHT while ensuring that our client kept brand support costs at a minimum!
To Wrap It Up
There are numerous benefits of AI in your contact center, especially when it comes to improving customer experience. With self-service and leading technologies like Dialogflow on the rise, providing a Dialogflow voicebot will help you meet the growing expectations of your customers while ensuring that you minimize operational costs.
Book a demo today to get a closer look into Call Center Studio’s Dialogflow-powered IVR system, aka, Dialogflow voicebot, and discover other contact center technologies that will benefit your operations.
