Much has been said about intelligent voice assistants, but few people are able to measure the way in which they have been integrated into our daily lives.
They no longer just tell us about the weather or search for our favorite song in the car; they also help us schedule medical appointments without having to wait on the other end of the line and remind us of our outstanding payments.
In other cases, they even help us save time and focus our energy on what's really important.
At Vozy, we are passionate about finding ways to improve the human experience through the voice, so we invite Iveth Navarro, corporate manager of ITS InfoCom Costa Rica, and a Ricardo Marín, CTO and Cofounder of Vozy, to talk about how to accelerate portfolio recovery and improve customer service with personalized voice assistants.
Expectations vs. Fact: Lili's life before and after at ITS InfoCom
What is it really possible to achieve with a voice billing assistant?
Although today it is possible to do things that seemed like science fiction just a few years ago, to have healthy expectations it is necessary to remember two things: first, that a voice assistant is a tool.
Second, that without a good collection strategy and good customer knowledge, no tool is effective.
At ITS Infocom everything revolves around innovation and customer experience. That's why they acted cautiously at first: they didn't want to risk the behavior of their wallet, so they decided to test their voice assistant with their human advisors. They didn't have much expectation. They didn't expect, for example, natural interactions; nor did they think they could do much more than notify their customers or scan the wallet to speed up the process.
However, in less than two months, Lili had exceeded her expectations.
To put it in numbers, The voice assistant now covers 37% of the tasks previously handled by human advisors, achieving promise of payment indicators very similar to those of their human companions - the difference never reached more than 5%.
They didn't expect the voice assistant to be able to have such natural interactions with customers, or to be able to handle only the prevention segment on its own.
“What has changed the most has been the mentality to find new solutions,” Iveth tells us. “Today, we no longer seek to solve 100% of the requirement through people, but with virtual assistants, because operating costs are lower, there is greater productivity, a much faster and greater data sweep than can be achieved with a person.”
Who does it better: a voice assistant or a human agent?
As Iveth mentioned earlier, the difference is minimal. In some cases, the voice assistant has had better contactability in early hours than a human advisor, but the real difference is not in its performance but in the role it plays within the overall portfolio recovery strategy.
Let's imagine that, like ITS InfoCom, a business has a solid strategy and a deep understanding of its portfolio behavior. What would be the 3 main benefits of having a voice assistant, if so?
- By the type of technology, the assistant is a highly scalable tool. You can make a thousand or ten thousand calls - you don't need to make extra effort to provide a mass service.
- The level of automation that the platform manages allows you to delegate the most repetitive tasks that do not add value, compared to the effort they represent.
- The ability to customize and flexible conversations throughout the entire call execution process turns the voice assistant into a versatile and easy-to-adjust tool. “In a matter of minutes, a conversation can be adjusted to scale,” Ricardo adds. “The versatility and agility of the voice assistant dramatically reduce solution implementation times.”
How difficult is it to integrate a voice assistant into your team?
When it comes to integrating with a voice assistant, there are few platforms as intuitive to use as Vozy. Depending on the case, the platform is easily integrated with various systems, in addition to the customer's telephony.
This works like this: when customers call the company, the call is redirected to the Vozy platform, where the voice assistant answers. This redirection is free of charge because it occurs over the Internet.
However, there is one important thing to keep in mind when choosing Vozy for your company's processes: the customer must already have those web services exposed. “With that requirement covered, however, integration is very easy because from our web platform we have the interface to configure it,” Ricardo concluded.
Recommendations for using voice assistants in the financial sector (... successfully)
We asked Iveth and Ricardo for recommendations to implement voice assistants in portfolio recovery since their apprenticeships with Lili, and I must tell them that They are ground gold:
- Strategically decide how and at what time to integrate voice assistants into the billing process. The voice assistant can add value to the process at different times, but at no more than preventive measures. Many customers fall into an early default on a recurring basis, which can be avoided through gentle reminders at the right time, making it possible to significantly streamline the process quickly.
- Carefully analyze portfolio behavior to prioritize segments correctly. “This covers the records that, according to their analysis and history, are most likely to recover that payment,” Iveth adds. The way to optimize it is to invest in a prevention issue, and a voice assistant is a practical and cost-effective way to achieve this.
- Define the default segment in which you will use your voice assistant. Start by defining the demographic characteristics of your customers; after all, the type of portfolio and its behavior start from the approval of the credit, not its recovery. Identify the records with the greatest potential to be managed with the voice assistant and launch a test.
- Get a deep understanding of the behavior of your portfolio. This will allow you not only to clearly define your strategy, but also the motivators that will maximize the contactability of your contact base, whether through human advisors or voice assistants.
- Determine the size of the debt before assigning a customer a voice assistant. It's important to know when to leave your voice assistant in charge of a campaign and when to use it as a complement to your human advisors, and one factor to take into account should undoubtedly be the debt levels.
Best Practices for Designing an Intelligent Voice Experience in the Financial Sector
“The most important thing is to understand that a voice assistant generates trust and peace of mind in voice channels in the financial sector”, explains Ricardo. “People tend to trust machines more than other people, unfortunately, so it's a really good tool for building trust in financial processes by voice.”
However, the topic is not that simple. To truly add value to the end user experience, it is necessary to design conversations that adequately convey that clarity and empathy to the user, and to achieve this, it is crucial to understand very well the business case in which the voice assistant will be implemented.
The Future of Voice Assistants
One of the most interesting questions in the conversation — and one of the last ones, too — was related to the future, one of the topics we like the most at Vozy. What is the future of voice assistants in, say, five years? Ricardo didn't hesitate to answer.
“It will increasingly become an assistant both for users who seek self-management and for agents who handle the most complex interactions with those users. It will be used more and more Speech analytics to improve those conversations and connect more effectively with users; every day the conversations will be more natural, more empathetic and clearer.
Conversational intelligence technologies are already being implemented so that voice assistants increasingly understand our needs and ways of speaking; and that will allow it to become an entity capable of evolving the conversations we have with customers to another level.”
We want to thank all those who attended our online discussion “Effective billing with customized voice assistants” for their questions and their great curiosity; learning improves the individual, but sharing knowledge elevates us all. We look forward to seeing you in our next online edition!
If you want to know more about how voice assistants can radically transform the experience of your users, your team and your business, go here: Www.vozy.co
