Research Finds Customer Service the Top Use for Conversational AI

Dimensional Research found recently that customer experience is the top use case for conversational artificial intelligence among businesses.

Enterprises look to a number of technologies to improve customer experience, and one of the fastest growing solutions is conversational AI, the research found, citing two key benefits: the ability to automate two-way natural language conversations with customers, and the ability to understand customers' needs by analyzing conversations.

Among some of the other findings were the following:

• 72 percent of organizations leverage their assistants for customer-facing operations, although organizations reported using assistants for internal operations as well.</li/
• 64 percent were motivated by providing 24-hour support to customers. Cost savings ranked a close second, selected by 59 percent of respondents.
• 67 percent of businesses expect their conversational AI budgets to increase in the coming year, and an additional 13 percent expect it to increase significantly.
• One third of enterprises are currently in production with virtual assistants.
• The top barrier reported is a lack of experience building virtual assistants, showing that companies are still in the process of developing the people, processes, and patterns needed for successful deployment.
• 70 percent reported that customer satisfaction metrics were used to track the success of virtual assistants, indicating that value to the customer outweighs immediate business benefits like cost savings.
• Many large organizations are also employing virtual assistants for internal use cases, such as automating helpdesk and HR functions. In some cases, internal use cases serve as pilot programs to build conversational AI expertise and test technologies before putting a virtual assistant in front of customers.