Is an AI Voice Assistant Right for Your Business? Pros and Cons

AI Voice Assistant Pros & Cons

Does your business get the same three phone calls multiple times a day?

For lots of local businesses, questions like “What time do you open/close” and “Can I schedule/change my appointment” account for 50% or more of incoming phone calls.

This is normal, but it’s fair to wonder: how much of your team’s time is going to answering the same basic questions, over and over and over?

AI voice assistants are a hot new technology, and they may be more in reach than you’d expect.

What Is an AI Voice Assistant?

An AI voice assistant can take in natural language from callers, determine intent, and then provide an answer in response, also in audible natural language.

It’s not like the old interactive voice response (IVR) systems — think “press 1 for sales” or “say ‘account balance’ to hear your balance”.

Rather than using complicated menus of pre-planned responses, AI voice assistants give callers the ability to describe what they need in their own words.

The best AI voice assistants sound remarkably human. For basic interactions, some callers may not even recognize they’re not talking to a human.

Can an AI Assistant Really Help My Business?

If you haven’t played around with one of these systems yet, you may be thinking one of two things. Either “This sounds amazing, but probably too good to be true,” or “There’s no way our business can handle setting up something this advanced.”

The truth is somewhere in the middle.

AI assistants can do a lot, but they aren’t as capable as your human team members, and they aren’t right for every single business or use case.

And setting them up does take some effort, but a lot less than you might be picturing. And you won’t need deep technical skills to get started.

Best Use Cases for AI Voice Assistants

AI voice assistants perform best in situations where businesses receive lots of similar questions with easily verifiable answers.

For example, a tire shop might use an AI voice assistant to handle basic calls about hours of operation or whether a customer’s vehicle is ready for pickup. If every customer service rep is helping a customer in the shop, the phone rings endlessly. Conversely, a rep on the phone can’t pay attention to the customer standing in front of them. If AI solves even 25% of calls before getting the human rep involved, that’s a huge win.

Another good use case: businesses with well developed, clearly defined workflows.

If you have a ticketing system in place or your CS reps are almost always looking up the same 5 fields in customer accounts, you can probably point your AI voice assistant at that same information and give it access to do those tasks.

There are lots of similar scenarios of increasing complexity too. The more advanced your tech stack and digital workflows, the more complex it will be to set up an AI voice assistant to take advantage of it all. But if you’re already handling the initial complexity of that tech stack, chances are adding an AI voice assistant isn’t going to put your tech team underwater.

Where AI Voice Assistants Falter

AI voice assistants still don’t fare as well when emotions enter the picture, or when customer conversations are complex and open-ended.

A customer that’s angry about a mistake on his bill generally isn’t going to respond well to AI. He wants to talk to a human that can do something about it.

Similarly, a customer with a complex, highly specific question about how to use software is going to see through an AI hallucination or confidently-wrong answer in seconds.

Last, smaller businesses that don’t handle super repetitive phone inquiries likely won’t get enough value out of an AI voice assistant to be worth the front-end complexity.

The last thing you want (and the last thing we want for our customers) is new tech that adds complexity and overhead without solving anything in particular.

So… Is an AI voice assistant a good move for your business? We can’t answer for everyone here — but we can walk you through the decision-making process and even help you land on the right technology solutions for your specific workflows and needs.

Schedule a 30-minute call today to discuss your needs.

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