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There are many different approaches to designing a roadmap for your technology investment. Do you want to tackle your worst legacy pain points first? Do you want to focus on improving the customer experience? Do you want to address easy candidates for efficiency improvements and automation?
Your particular approach will be driven by what kinds of pains your users and your call or contact center agents are experiencing, competitive pressures, your budget and the size of your appetite for taking on a new initiative.
The four areas to tackle
As a starting point to designing your conversational AI roadmap, consider where your organization stands in each of these areas:
1. Pain points
| Are your legacy telephony and IVR technologies limited in their capabilities? | Do agents have to access multiple systems to assist customers? |
| Is your IVR system difficult to update? | Is your support for non-voice channels limited? |
| Does your aging on-premise infrastructure need to be moved to a cloud provider? | Are your routing capabilities rudimentary? |
2. Competitive pressures
| Are your competitors further along in innovations around user the experience? | Does omnichannel support feel incomplete or out of reach? |
| Are you treating customer service as a differentiator? | Is customer loyalty currently not a priority for your organization? |
3. Budget
| Are you limited in your ability to invest in innovation? | Is your budget dominated by big ticket items like re-platforming or cloud migration? |
| Does cost reduction require new technology investment? | Do you repeatedly have to defer strategic investments? |
4. Risk
| What appetite does the organization have to take on a high-stakes, high-visibility, big-budget project? | What resource availability and skills do you have on your team to take on a new technology? |
| How comfortable are you in venturing into new technology areas such as AI? | Are you ready to lead a new technology initiative, and have the bandwidth? |
How chatbots can help
Chatbot projects have been moving from medium-term to near-term on technology roadmaps because they neatly address many of these points at the same time.
Chatbots can immediately:
- Introduce or expand support for modern, non-voice channels on the web and in messaging apps
- Automate interactions between your customers and the systems and data they need
- Provide an innovative, cross-channel user experience
All of this can be realized with a moderate initial investment and scoped as a low-risk, project with a short timeline.
Two years ago, chatbots were seen as an area for future investment for anything but the largest organizations who could make a significant investment in the technology.
But times have changed and the technology has evolved. Chatbots are now one of the easier technologies to implement that can be rolled out incrementally and can deliver measurable results quickly.
Next steps to getting started with Conversational AI
Chatbot projects often start off as purely informational – how can we take our top 100 support questions and provide answers through a messaging interface?
That's an ok place to start. But make sure the tools you use to realize these simple use cases are ones that will scale functionally and systematically to meet the full potential of enterprise conversational automation.
When you think about the evolution of conversational automation in your organization, consider the channels you want to support, whether you are communicating with authenticated or unauthenticated users and what systems are required to deliver value to your end users.
Watch this 30-minute webinar video to see an example of how an insurance company used a messaging interface to transform how its customers accessed and completed a key business process.
Cognigy.AI is the platform of choice for major brands including airlines such as Lufthansa, parts manufacturers such as Bosch and Toyota, and major insurance carriers and banks. Learn more at Cognigy.com.
