That is still basically true. But it's becoming much clearer how the average business should approach AI and, more importantly, for what reasons and benefits.
The first two use cases
- Make the staff who already work with your customers and clients more efficient and effective.
- Offer automation to the customers and prospects who contact you, and to the ones you reach out to.
One platform, every channel
Whatever you choose, you want to reuse most of it across communication channels, and even across languages. Don't select a product that only works with chat, or only with email, or only with inbound voice calls. Partner with a technology provider that can work with you across all the channels you need now and in the future, on a single platform.
Crawl, walk, run
It's just as important to adopt a "crawl, walk, run" strategy. The world is littered with projects that tried a big-bang launch and, in the end, didn't offer enough flexibility, and couldn't be rolled out in phases, each with its own return on investment.
Phase it. Each step should pay for itself before you take the next one.
Why ITR is a good first step
So why is AcuCall discussing this? Because our ITR (Interactive Text Response) is exactly that kind of phased step. ITR itself is rules you design — automation, not AI; our own speech recognition and text-to-speech join in when a flow moves to voice. It lets you automate text-based customer contacts quickly:
- payment collections;
- order renewals;
- address changes;
- simple appointment confirmations;
- surveys.
The same approach works for similar inbound requests. In our experience, flows like these can handle a large share of routine contacts without an agent, and hand everything else to a person in the same thread.
ITR runs on the same platform as our dialer and IVR, so a flow you build for texting can grow into voice later, and our own speech recognition and text-to-speech are there when it does. That makes it easy to evolve as solutions and technologies change.
Before you dismiss AI or jump in with both feet, send me a message or give me a call. I'll be glad to walk you through my thinking. You'll be happy you did.
