Conversational AI: Examples and Use Cases

Intro

Conversational AI is a popular topic in the world of enterprise business, with many organizations exploring or actively adopting AI Agents to help automate customer service processes. 

Rather than simply discussing the usefulness of Conversational AI, we’ll show you its practical applications by examining real-world examples of Cognigy clients who used AI Agents to transform their businesses. 

So if you’re skeptical about the capabilities of AI or you want to know more before adopting a solution, you’re in the right place. We’ll explore genuine cases that illustrate exactly how CAI addresses specific business challenges and achieves tangible results for some of the world’s biggest organizations.

What is Conversational AI?

Conversational AI is an AI system that interprets language to enable human-like interactions between computers and humans. It leverages Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Machine Learning (ML) to comprehend and respond to user inputs across various communication channels, including text and voice. 

Chatbot vs Conversational AI

Conversational AI enables AI Agents to perform far beyond the capabilities of traditional chatbots by providing more engaging and natural interactions. Rather than being forced to follow scripted, keyword-based conversations, Conversational AI creates AI Voice Agents that understand the context and intent behind user inputs, enabling them to handle complex queries and provide relevant, accurate responses.

Benefits of Conversational AI

The benefits of Conversational AI are immediately compelling to a large organization, as the technology is directly tied to improved productivity and reduced costs. We’ve covered the benefits of Conversational AI in-depth in our overview guide, but we’ll also recap them here:

• Improves automation: CAI allows you to deploy an AI Agent that can handle repetitive tasks and streamline processes like ID&V and call summarization. This reduces costs and improves overall efficiency. 
• Offers 24/7 service: An AI platform allows you to answer calls at any time of the day without the associated staffing costs or regional considerations. Customers will get instant support whenever they need it. 
• Enables scaling: AI Agents can instantly answer calls even during peak periods, allowing you to capably deal with high call volumes in a cost-effective way. 
• Supports human agents: Supports human agents with real-time transcription, sentiment analysis, and task suggestions, increasing productivity.
• Translates 100’s of languages: CAI enables fluent, human-like interactions in multiple languages, expanding global reach and reducing translation costs.
• Enhances customer satisfaction: AI agents improve overall customer satisfaction scores by enabling 24/7 service with reduced wait times, engaging customer service, and faster resolutions. 
• Increases containment rates: compared to pre-AI chatbots, Conversational AI vastly improves containment rates – a measure of how many interactions can be handled entirely by an AI without the need for human intervention. 

With these benefits in mind, let’s explore some real-world examples of CAI and identify how each organization benefited from implementing AI Agents in their customer service workflows…

6 Real-World Examples of Conversational AI

Lufthansa Soars To 16 Million AI-Powered Conversations 

Lufthansa is Germany’s largest airline and naturally deals with an extremely high volume of customer calls. This was made even more challenging during the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, where anxious passengers were constantly trying to reach the airline to find out about bookings or gather information to help reassure them.  

Human teams simply could not deal with this high demand. Instead, the airline implemented Cognigy’s Conversational AI platform, deploying over 16 AI-powered agents across multiple channels and languages. These agents are tasked with handling over 10,000 customer interactions daily and carry out vital tasks such as rebooking flights, providing travel information, offering alternative flight options, and processing refunds. 

The integration of Conversational AI has enabled Lufthansa to efficiently manage significant increases in customer inquiries, especially during peak times and unexpected disruptions like strikes. The AI agents' multilingual support and real-time translation capabilities have broadened accessibility, ensuring personalized and reliable service for a diverse customer base. 

In summary, AI Agents have allowed Lufthansa to achieve a scalable, resilient customer service framework that has lowered average handling times and fields over 16 million conversations autonomously every year.

Key Takeaways:

• Lufthansa's deployment of over 16 AI agents has automated more than 10,000 daily customer interactions across various channels and languages. 
• The AI agents' multilingual and real-time translation features have enhanced accessibility and personalized customer interactions. 
• Implementing Conversational AI has enabled Lufthansa to manage over 16 million conversations annually, improving efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

For a deeper insight into Lufthansa's journey with Conversational AI, watch this video. 

Virgin Revamps Chatbots To Improve Member Support

Virgin Pulse is a global health engagement company with a member services team that offers support to customers through email, phone, and digital chat. The team wanted to improve upon their existing keyword-recognition bot, which had been largely unsuccessful, having achieved a containment rate of just 3%. 

Working with Cognigy, Virgin Pulse developed an AI Agent that was fully integrated with Zendesk LiveChat and was deployed across the brand’s member, login, and enrollment pages so that customers could get answers wherever they needed them. 

The AI Agent was trained to understand member intents with a 97% accuracy rate, covering 29 different topic areas. It provided answers sourced from articles on the Zendesk Help Center, facilitated automated ticket creation, and smoothed transitions to live agents when necessary. This approach ensured a hands-off maintenance process through automated pipelines that fetched, converted, and uploaded new articles from Zendesk, thereby keeping the AI's knowledge base up to date.

Virgin Pulse’s AI Agent was an immediate success, doubling user sessions from 12,000 to 30,000 and achieving a 40% containment rate within a month of deployment. 

Key Takeaways:

• The AI Agent could support users across 29 different topic areas, achieving an average Model accuracy score of 97%
• Virgin Pulse's AI Agent improved containment rates from 3% to approximately 40% within one month of deployment. 
• User sessions doubled from 12,000 to 30,000, reflecting increased engagement and satisfaction.

Get on the pulse of AI Agent implementation by watching this video to learn more about Virgin Pulse's journey with Conversational AI: 

Henkel Utilizes AI To Offer Instant Customer Support

Henkel, a leading FMCG manufacturer, wanted to offer an innovative support option to help customers deal with common household stains. Henkel’s team spotted a clear challenge: people often searched for stain remedies in moments of panic and were bombarded by countless results without any real direction toward the most appropriate solution.

To create a more intuitive customer experience, Henkel used Cognigy’s Conversational AI platform to provide an engaging chatbot service that could provide instant 24/7 support across any device. The chatbot was capable of identifying over 2,500 different variations of substances, fabrics, and surfaces in order to deliver the most useful treatment recommendations in real-time. 

The chatbot has been a success for customers and the organization itself. The AI Agent has been a key factor in helping Henkel deliver on its ‘cleaner living’ mission. 

Key Takeaways:

• Henkel's AI chatbot can identify over 2,500 variations of substances, fabrics, and surfaces, providing precise treatment recommendations.
• The AI Agent offers 24/7 assistance to customers browsing using whatever device they prefer. 
• The chatbot has improved brand awareness and helped Henkel deliver on its brand mission. 

E.ON Energizes Its Customer Service Options With Cognigy 

The E.ON Digital Technology (EDT) team supports E.ON’s international business endeavors by focusing on building innovative customer solutions. The team’s core goals are to bridge gaps between IT, business automation, and marketing by creating AI Agents that can be rolled out to offer a consistent customer experience across multinational territories.

To achieve this, EDT needed to find a scalable solution that was easy to train and could help free up the strain posed by repetitive manual tasks for E.ON’s valuable human live agents. The team chose Cognigy due to our platform’s modularity and custom integration capabilities with any NLU system, as well as the intuitive user interface that allows for easier AI Agent design and orchestration.

E.ON quickly developed a team of 30+ AI Agents that utilize Conversational AI to support both customers and employees. These agents have already excelled in providing intuitive customer service – having achieved a 70% automation rate across 2 million annual conversations. This has effectively removed the workload of low-complexity tasks from E.ON’s customer service representatives, leading to a significant drop in operational costs. 

Key Takeaways:

• E.ON deployed over 30 AI agents across various channels, achieving a 70% automation rate and handling over 2 million conversations annually.
• Cognigy’s Conversational AI Agents reduced the workload associated with low-complexity tasks for the E.ON team, which meant they could be more resource- and cost-efficient. 
• E.ON's subsidiary, Essent, continues to innovate with AI Agents designed for CX. Using Cognigy.AI, Essent developed an award-winning AI agent named Robin, offering automated services such as meter readings and contract changes.

Take a look at this video to learn more about how CAI helped E.ON reinvent its CX process. 

Mister Spex Has An AI Vision For The Future 

Mister Spex is Europe’s leading digital optician. To better serve its 7 million customers across 10 countries, the team wanted to explore using an AI Agent to provide consistent customer service that is unaffected by agent shortages or peak periods. 

Rather than deploy the AI Agent on a new channel, the team decided to focus on telephone calls to help manage high call volumes and assist customers where they needed it most. A significant portion of incoming calls were related to routine queries such as ‘Where is my order?’ (WISMO)—an area in which Conversational AI can truly excel. 

The deployment of an AI Agent with Conversational AI capabilities immediately transformed the call process, eliminating the need for outdated IVR systems and automating the initial data collection elements of the call. The AI Agent could verify users by asking numeric questions about house numbers and postal codes, which minimized the risk of errors compared to name or email verification. Once verified, the AI could check the CRM system to retrieve order status or route the call to a human agent if the case was too complex. 

With 52% of all WISMO queries now fully automated, Conversational AI has helped the Mister Spex team boost agent efficiency to save up to 30 seconds on every single call.

Key Takeaways:

• AI Agents deployed to help optimize phone interactions for Mister Spex. The agents quickly achieved a 70% caller verification rate and fully automated as many as 52% of all WISMO queries.
• Agent efficiency has increased across all areas of the customer service team, with up to 30 seconds saved on every call. 
• Intelligent routing helps ensure relevant cases reach the most suitable support agent to decrease customer wait times and improve positive outcomes. 

Toyota Drives Self-service Forward

Automotive manufacturer Toyota sought to enhance customer service by automating support for common inquiries and proactively assisting vehicle owners with maintenance issues. With millions of customers across the globe, peak periods often overwhelmed their customer support teams – so Toyota needed an automated solution that would help alleviate the pressure on service teams and also proactively contact customers to promote preventative maintenance. 

To achieve this, Toyota worked with Cognigy to train AI Agents that were deployed across multiple channels, including phone and text chat. These AI Agents can instantly answer calls and begin handling routine customer inquiries, alleviating the burden on service teams and providing quick, efficient support. 

If the customer’s problem was too complex, or they simply preferred to speak to a human agent, the AI Agent would create a contextual handover and pass the customer to a service team member, which meant live agents always had a full understanding of the problem and could reach a satisfactory resolution fast. Toyota also introduced an E-Care AI Agent linked to a car’s onboard electronics, which helped ensure customers were not missing out on important servicing and maintenance requirements. 

Toyota’s AI Agents have made life far easier for contact center agents and have helped ensure customers feel valued, vehicles remain safe, and dealerships can operate more effectively by planning preventive maintenance in advance. 

Key Takeaways:

• A team of 25+ AI Agents deployed to chat and phone channels to allow Toyota to serve customers better. 
• 98% of users indicated that they love the AI service, and 95% book services through it.
• Toyota’s customer service agents are now more productive and are better able to cope with periods of peak demand. 

Want to learn more about how Toyota implemented AI Agents? See a demo of their system in action here: 

6 Potential Use Cases For Conversational AI

If those examples are too specific to an organization and you’d like to explore broader applications, take a look at these potential use cases to see how CAI can fit into your customer service processes.

Customer Service Agent

The broadest use case for CAI is employing an AI Agent who acts as a frontline customer service agent. By instantly answering calls and communicating with customers, an automated service agent can save time and money and improve the likelihood of positive outcomes. 

ID&V 

Identification and verification processes are crucial to almost every contact center. Unfortunately, they take up valuable time and are dull, repetitive tasks that can demotivate human agents. AI Agents are the perfect solution for these processes. They can quickly identify and verify a user by asking them to provide details that are checked against your CRM. The agent can then either progress the call and resolve the task itself or pass it on to a human agent. 

Self-Service Chatbot

Self-service is big business. Customers often seek out ways to complete tasks themselves, but pre-AI chatbots tended to cause frustration due to errors and a lack of scope. AI Agents are a more intuitive self-service option that allows users to complete simple tasks such as changing personal details or managing bookings, all without speaking to a human. 

Agent Assist

Conversational AI can also support your human agents, rather than acting solely in a customer-facing role. With Agent Copilot, human agents will never go into a call blind and will instead get a pre-qualified case with a full summary of the interaction so far. 

Once they pick up the call, the Conversational AI remains active and can transcribe, translate, and analyze sentiment during the call. AI Agents will also detect questions and display answers on the human agent’s screen to make resolving issues faster and more efficient.  

Conversational Insights

Conversational AI enables a deeper level of analysis for contact centers, giving you the ability to analyze conversations at scale to identify common queries, topics, and sentiment trends. Thanks to its ability to understand and interpret language, CAI spots patterns and trends that go far beyond metrics and unlock valuable insights you can use to transform your service processes. 

FAQ Chatbot

An AI Agent built to act as an FAQ chatbot is the perfect way to deal with your most common customer questions. Rather than trying to force customers to a static webpage, an AI Agent can become a dynamic source of support that either pulls answers from your pre-existing knowledge hubs or creates new ones using Generative AI. For more information on how the two technologies work, see our guide to Conversational AI vs Generative AI.

The Future Of Conversational AI

Conversational AI is not a standalone technology. It plays an important role in helping AI understand human language and hold lifelike conversations – but it is only one part of a larger AI ecosystem. 

As your organization scales, deploying AI Agents helps you reduce costs, meet demands, and even improve customer service outcomes. To make sure those AI Agents meet the complex needs of your customers, work with Cognigy, and we’ll help you succeed with the expertise we’ve demonstrated via the examples in this article. 

Choose the technology favored by leading enterprise businesses and work with Cognigy to revolutionize your customer service processes today. Click here to learn more.