For all businesses, delivering personalized customer service should be a top priority. Providing personalized and positive customer experience helps to convert prospects, retain existing customers, and ultimately, impacts your bottom line positively. But how do you elevate your customer experience efforts to get the desired results?

Voice recognition combined with the power of AI and machine learning is the answer! It is the technology that allows a program to identify and decode human speech. Speech recognition allows customer support reps to capture all the voice data captured in voice recordings which helps human agents to improve their customer experience.

This powerful technology is also important for surfacing marketing collaterals, scheduling meetings, and creating customer service tickets. Especially, AI-powered voice assistants will be one of the many opportunities that businesses will leverage to improve CX by sending instant replies to their queries and sending links to buy or transfer the customer to a live support associate if needed.

In this article, we’ll decode why you need to deploy voice recognition in customer service and the future speech recognition trends that will play a significant role in the customer experience world.

So, let’s dive right in!

Decoding the Need for Voice Recognition in Customer Service

As voice recognition technology continues to rise in popularity, there are plenty of opportunities rising for businesses in this space as it can revolutionize the way brands provide support to their customers. This powerful technology has vast applications in the customer service field when it comes to providing stellar customer experiences. With voice recognition, you can:

• Transcribe and analyze the customer phone calls for effective sentiment analysis and brand perception assessment.
• Increase efficiency in the workplace by allowing employees to complete their tasks faster.
• Improve accuracy in the workplace by ensuring that information entered into the databases and other systems is correct.
• Provide seamless shopping, search, and customer experience.
• Detect and address common challenges before they become problems.
• Reduce average handle times of calls and improve customer journey satisfaction.

The Current State of Speech Recognition in Customer experience

Over the past few years, the customer service industry has been buzzing about tech lingos like voice recognition technology to provide personalized customer experience. Established brands are realizing the potential and necessity of speech recognition more than ever. There is a huge potential for businesses of all sizes to leverage speech recognition technology to better serve their customers and prospects. Here is a breakdown of the rise and usage of voice recognition technology.

• The global voice recognition market size was forecast to grow from 10.7 billion USD in 2020 to 27.16 billion USD by 2026 at a CAGR of 16.8%.

• By 2025 40% of all inbound voice communications to call centers will use speech-to-text technology.

• Around 75% of voice search results will rank in the top 3 positions for a particular question on a desktop search.

• There will be more than 8 billion digital voice assistants in use by 2023, up from an estimated 2.5 billion at the end of 2018.

In the customer service industry, voice recognition has revolutionized service, with customers finding it almost preferable to live chat, phone, and email support. The growing need for automating tasks, retaining customers, and providing personalized customer experience are some of the key factors to drive this massive growth.

How Voice Recognition Can Help You Take Your Customer Support Efforts a Notch-Up

Meeting customers’ expectations requires service providers to rethink the customer journey and how they build trust with them. Voice recognition powered with AI can be a powerful tool that helps bridge gaps along the customer journey and creates more authentic connections. Here’s how voice recognition empowers customer service providers.

1. Provide Exceptional Customer Experience: Voice recognition allows businesses to go above and beyond the traditional Q&A session in an attempt to know their customers better. It gives businesses a unique opportunity to identify their customers’ interests, preferences, and expectations, in order to get familiar with their thoughts on products, competitors, and rising trends. By analyzing the content of all recorded interactions with a particular customer, a company can build a comprehensive customer profile and leverage it to deliver exceptional customer experience.

2. Offer a Frictionless, Search & Shopping Experience: Using highly accurate, natural language-driven, automated voice recognition tools enable retailers to make informed assumptions about the gender, age, location, and even the mood of the customers. The popularity of home-based voice assistants is already making people more confident when it comes to voice-activated searches. Not only is voice search more convenient for customers, but it also gives businesses an opportunity to sell more, and to know more about their customers. Also, using voice as a verification method for online payment will add to a seamless shopping experience, with the added benefit of security.

3. Solve Customer Queries Faster: Today customers expect to talk through the details over the phone to get a quick resolution to their queries - all without skipping a beat. Despite having many channels of communication, people are using their mobile devices to connect with businesses. It’s because experience is better and it’s familiar. Many customer service brands are leveraging voice recognition technology with AI to solve customer customers’ queries in an accurate and efficient way. To provide quick resolutions to your customers, you can:

   • Prepare a list of frequently asked questions and curate answers for them.
   • Talk to the sales team about common challenges that your customer face.

4. Help to Amplify Your Brand Reach: If you plan to exceed your brand globally or already cater to a global customer base, you need a voice assistant with multilingual capabilities. In the coming years, many businesses will deploy multilingual voice assistants to boost their localization efforts and amplify their reach. Since many customers prefer to use their native tongue to communicate with their trusted brand, in 2023 and beyond, many brands will consider using voice assistants with multilingual capabilities to improve their customer support efforts.

5. Empower Call Centers to Humanize CX: In the coming years, voice assistants will become more human-like and play a key role in automating call centers with the help of AI. AI-integrated voice assistants will make them more intelligent and assist customers just as human representatives. The rise of voice assistants will help businesses solve customer challenges even before they arise. Without any doubt, voice assistants are already performing mainstream tasks like collecting customer feedback and FAQ to enhance customer experience. So, in the coming years, many businesses will employ voice recognition technology to improve their business efficiency and productivity and to humanize their customer experience.

Key Trends to Look Out for in 2023 & Beyond

Now that we have established how voice recognition technology can take your customer support efforts a notch up, let’s take a look at the newest and upcoming voice recognition trends that we think will play a crucial role in your business’s success.

• Voice assistants powered by AI and machine learning will continue to improve.
• Voice-based chatbots will go mainstream in 2023.
• Automatic speech recognition (ASR) will facilitate real-time conversations.
• Optimizing SEO for voice-based search will be a top priority for brands.
• Voice cloning will take a front seat in 2023.
• Smart speakers will drive voice search adoption.

The Bottom Line

No doubt, that the future of voice recognition technology in customer service would be inclined toward artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation. In this customer-centric world, companies that do not leverage this technology are going to lag behind the competition. Therefore, businesses must invest in voice recognition to provide a stellar customer experience to get a competitive edge.