With conversational AI becoming a top priority for businesses across industries, here are five best practices for developing a successful strategy.
We’re now launching conversational AI projects for businesses in industries like hotels, healthcare providers, insurance companies, soft drink and snack food producers, retail stores, pharmaceuticals companies and wealth management services.
Here, we've gathered some best practices and strategies that can help you too prepare for the opportunities ahead:
- Invest both for immediate success and longer-term tangible benefits. These can include boosting sales, increasing customer convenience, improving the customer experience, reducing costs, etc.
Example: For a financial services client, we helped develop an Alexa skill to voice-enable balance inquiries, transfers and fund information requests. This skill is part of a full-year plan for voice and chat solutions across multiple channels and devices and is now being recreated to support Google Assistant devices.
- Link projects so that code, frameworks, lessons and best practices build upon one another.
Example: We helped a pharmaceuticals company establish a conversational AI center of excellence that includes methodologies and templates to score and prioritize use cases, establish a governance framework and maintain an ongoing enhancement process for live, deployed solutions.
- Let your customers be your guide for how you prioritize voice skills, chatbots, virtual agents, AI-enabled mobile apps, etc.
Example: A commercial airline client brought in our conversational AI advisory team for a customer needs assessment after successfully deploying its first two chatbot initiatives. The project includes customer interviews to determine feature and platform prioritization for help establishing a multi-channel/multi-modal roadmap for 2019.
- Seek innovation partners able to support strategy and roadmaps – not just deliver tech skills for point solutions and isolated projects.
Example: We worked with a European automotive company to manage a 20-country rollout of voice, chat and mobile solutions for a customer sales and service initiative. The project includes business case and ROI analytics, user experience design, parallel deployments into the 20 countries and ongoing enhancement of launched components.
- Think beyond chatbots, voice skills and smart speakers to an omnichannel, multi-device and multi-modal future of highly contextualized, intelligent, transactional functionality.
Example: A healthcare insurer has asked us to architect and deploy a conversational AI framework capable of scaling across web, mobile and voice devices; supporting Google, Alexa and Siri assistants; addressing multiple messaging services; and delivering secure and compliant privacy. The insurer’s goal is to fully operationalize this framework for all the channels their members might use when seeking assistance with their healthcare coverages and options.
For more information about how Cognizant helps organizations benefit from AI, check out the white paper Accelerate Business Growth and Outcomes with AI.
