Voice: The Future Of Customer Engagement

Digital voice technology – think virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant, and so on – is changing the role of customer engagement in the enterprise, altering the function of traditional on-premises or cloud-based customer-relationship management (CRM) applications. CRM (covering sales, marketing, and service software) traditionally had only limited voice interaction with the customer: voicemail for customer service agents in a call center setting or computer voice-driven phone directories for customers to reach the correct department. The penetration of these voice technologies was not very high for the simple reason that they don't really add value for the customer in saving time or reaching the right person in the right department. Quite a few forces have come together to enable voice technologies to add more value to the customer, including cloud compute power, mobility, powerful hardware/silicon chips, and advances in natural language processing (NLP). Let's explore some of the ways voice assistants are changing the role of customer engagement in an enterprise.