Engineers have been trying to work on Voice Technology since the 1960s. People have always wanted to have a conversation with a computer, and we are able to make that possible.
In 2018, at the Google IO conference, they unveiled a bot named Duplex who successfully called and set up a salon appointment. The bot sounded exactly like a human to the point that the person on the line had no idea that they were conversing with a bot. Google was taking a shot at providing the world’s first bot for commercial purposes.
Ever since then, many companies have emerged looking to dominate the voice skills design.
One such company is VOIQ. VOIQ helps deploy voice bots for businesses in sales, marketing, etc.
What Makes a Voice Bot Successful in Marketing and Sales?
A conversational chatbot can take an input of text, this text goes through natural language
understanding, and it provides the output text, which is hopefully the right answer. To convert or leverage a voice bot, we need to work with speech recognition, which took 60 years to develop and AI.
With these technologies, Google developed its Assistant, and Amazon built the Alexa. But to
have the voice bot make a call, we need to add an extra layer which is the programmable
Telecom layer. Until recently, only top telecom companies had access to the technology to
allow voice bot automation calls.
This could lead to more companies working on voice bots in the coming years.
The voice bot must understand the difference between a ringtone, voicemail, and IVR. It must also recognize the time difference and not ring up a person at 5 AM in the morning, as it may create a wrong impression of the brand. The voice bot may also ring up the wrong person and continue the conversation without realizing that it is a wrong number.
Such situations can be handled efficiently via a platform.
For voice bots to be effective for marketing and sales, they have to be trained differently for each campaign and just one campaign will not be successful all the time.
As a manager who looks over the teams that make calls, you will be interested in the thousands of calls made, the responses, the time, objections, and much more.
Features of Voice Bots in Marketing and Sales
1. Human Sounding
As voice bots developed, many companies started working on developing voices for
these bots. The main focus when you install a voice bot is to ensure that it sounds
human-like. They may sound like a human, but not perfectly human.
You may have to train the voice bot to get them to sound perfectly human.
2. Ideal Customer Profile
Customers tend to hang up when they get marketing or sales calls, and this is not
entirely due to the voice bot. It may be due to the fact that you do not have the ideal
customer profile or ICP.
3. Scheduling or Rescheduling
In sales demos, only 50% of the people that have been scheduled actually show up. You
can work this number up to 75% of your voice bot calls and confirms that they are
showing up. The voice bot can do this by themselves, by calling up people who are
scheduled to show up for the demo or people who didn’t show up and help them
reschedule it.
4. Trigger Workflow
The voice bots can function by themselves with minimal human assistance. You can set
instances where voice bots are triggered. For example, you can send out an email
campaign and have the voice bot ring up people who have opened the email to follow
up on it.
5. Handle Objections
In any marketing and sales calls, the customers will respond with objections such as 'not
right' or that 'we already use your competitor'. Voice bots can be trained to handle
such situations so that they can respond to such objections and make the marketing
stronger.
Conclusion
Voice bots can be quite effective in the right use cases. The more human-like they sound, the
more effective they will be. With many companies working on the voice for the voice bot, voice technology will only improve with time.
Companies like VOIQ already provide voice bots for sales and marketing, and this can help
businesses cut a lot of costs and make their campaigns better.
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