Conversational Search & FAQ Voice Bots

Conversational AI for all your customer dialogs and surveys!

Fast, Easy, No-Code

ASK and it will be given to you …

SEEK and you will find …

KNOCK and it will be opened to you …

In today’s age of information, finding the relevant nugget of information is surprisingly hard. Websites have sophisticated layouts, influential media, and a ton of content. Customers coming to your website want answers to simple questions like your return policy, shipping costs, store hours, and a host of little things that they scour several pages to understand where to get. They often call the customer service number for general questions that can be addressed without getting a human in the loop. Site-wide search returns several page results, which is hardly helpful because we are back to the needle in a haystack situation. 

Wouldn’t it be nice to serve up these answers as an actual human would on the other end of the phone line to customers as they browse the store? In this article, we will describe a human-like solution for answering questions, except that unlike a human, it is a lot cheaper, fully scalable, and always on – 24*7! 

This blog will talk about how voice bots serve that need.

The Problem: Finding simple information quickly

The Solution: Conversational Search and FAQ Voice Bots

What does the data tell us of the state of adoption of voice bots?

According to Chatbots Magazine, companies can save 30 percent by using digital assistants to answer customer questions. Businesses must be ready to integrate them into their existing business model.

According to a recent study by MIT, 90 percent of companies reported a decrease in customer service time with the help of assisted agents. (Stats)

Retail and healthcare are leading the charge with voice bot adoption.

Voice Commerce: Conversation AI adoption in retail

The purchase is when the rubber meets the road. Before that, there is a complex orchestration funnel of discovery and deliberation and a window of opportunity to persuade the consumer and help him make a choice. Voice search is 3-6 times faster than text typing. Being within breathing distance can help with questions comparing products and prices, not to forget voice is more suitable for multi-tasking. Nothing can replace an in-store experience, but there is no denying that voice makes an online shopping experience exceptional.

Healthcare Voice Assistants: Nearly Tripled in Two Years

Healthcare is expensive, and there are limited healthcare professionals. Covid has fueled the demand and usage further. Voice assistants are a great way to provide service to low-income households. 

Using tireless and consistent voice bots, several use cases around self-service benefit from automation. According to research, being unable to answer simple questions is a challenge that people face, and finding basic details about a business’s address, phone, etc., is the second challenge mentioned. Every website has some form of FAQ that a customer needs first to discover. A voice bot is a perfect go-to application. In addition, it is context-aware and offers more targeted and relevant assistance. Questions around the self-service, product and services catalog and domain-specific quick questions are ideal for complete automation.

Although retail and healthcare are ahead of the adoption curve, the other industry verticals are not far behind. The novelty of the experience, especially if you can make it delightful, goes a long way towards customer satisfaction, engagement, and retention. Some of the top use cases by industry vertical are listed below:

You may ask what happens if the responses are off the mark? Also, what if the user is not satisfied with the answer? That is quickly addressed if we ask the users whether the response matches their expectations and record their response. Both the text and the audio can be recorded and analyzed. The answers can be tweaked over time to improve overall satisfaction. The hit rate (how frequently are users asking for it) of a search or FAQ item will indicate the quality of the search data uploaded.

What if the question does not have a relevant canned answer? That would be a missed opportunity! The good news is now you are in the data-driven mode, and you are collecting every bit of the back and forth interaction. If a suitable match is not found, a fallback intent can step in to indicate that to the user. The question will get flagged for the operational folks to review later. The call can be transferred to a live agent so a human can be introduced when truly needed. 

DIVYA

DIVYA is a no-code, cost-effective, easy-to-use platform to create voice and text bots in minutes. The DIVYA  Builder app can create a dialog where questions can be asked both ways, i.e., the voice bot can request a response to specific inquiries, and the user can also ask questions.

The business user sets up the dialog to solicit questions from the user. For example, ‘What are the store hours?’ and then the user looks up the response and says it aloud. In some cases, it may be necessary to ask more questions back to the user to give a more accurate answer. For example, which store are you inquiring about? Some of the context information can be looked up, and some have to be asked back to the user. For example, if the user says, ‘Is there any more SKU X in this store?’ the voice bot may respond, ‘May I know which color you are looking for?’ or ‘We do have a few items in red, green, and blue.

The inventory stock is running low; would you like to make a purchase? I can help you with that.’ Context information can be passed into the voice bot as well. For example, the user is on the product page for SKU Y, so there is no need to ask. Instead, the SKU can be noted while saving the interaction. The analytics team may want to add more details to that product description or offer a targeted coupon to the user to purchase that item since the interest level has been ascertained. The diagram below shows a simple workflow to answer FAQs as free text or key/value SQL search.

Free Text Search Example

The closest match to the question is returned

Key/Value Search Example

Additional questions are asked to get the keys -e.g., country and grade, in this case,

  • The first step is to consolidate FAQs/Search data in a CSV/JSON file and upload it.
  • You can use a friendly name to refer to it later, and you can upload any number of documents. 
  • DIYVA provides several curated templates that can be cloned and reused. One such is a search template that comes in handy in this scenario.
  • After cloning, you can add the name of the index in the SEARCH section and any additional metadata. 
  • It takes ~3 minutes to Build/Deploy the FAQ/Search bot 
  • Once deployed, it provides a URL to invoke the voice bot. You can use free text search or key-value SQL style search by giving the search keys as input to the search block.
  • When satisfied, you can test it right in the tool and embed it in your website or any of the other channels you wish to deploy it to.

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