16 Mar 10 key criteria for choosing the best voicebot

Imposed by the digital revolution which is engulfing all areas today, the voicebot is considered the "must have" for all companies wishing to boost their customer service and best satisfy their customers.

However, implementing a voicebot is not a task to be taken lightly. It can help you achieve your customer loyalty goals, but it can also generate user dissatisfaction.

For this reason, companies must take the time to select the right and ideal chatbot for their business.

If, like most people, you are uncertain about which focal points to consider when selecting the ideal voicebot, we present 10 key criteria for choosing the best voicebot.

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What are the prerequisites for choosing the best voicebot?

Before embarking on the selection of the ideal voicebot for your activity, you will need to take the time to ask yourself the right questions in relation to what you want.

For example, you need to determine whether you just need a basic bot or whether the company should invest in a complex bot.

When it is basic, the voicebot will take care of some simple tasks such as: refer to a database to answer users' concerns, provide users with information on a procedure, etc.

On the other hand, a complex voicebot can perform more complicated tasks, for example, making a reservation on behalf of the user, etc.

Another preliminary question to solve is to make the choice between a navigational voicebot and a conversational voicebot.

The first allows the user to communicate with the artificial intelligence by selecting proposals predefined by the system and integrated into the operation of the bot.

As for the second, it integrates natural language communication features into the voicebot so that the bot uses words, sentences, etc. to chat with the user.

Once you have taken stock of the type of voicebot you will need, you can now dwell on the key criteria to choose the most effective.

Our advice : Don't rush into choosing a voicebot until you've addressed the preliminary issues related to defining a personalized policy for selecting the right conversational AI for your business.

It is better to waste time to better define what will be useful for you than to rush this step and face other unwanted repercussions.

What are the 10 criteria for selecting the best voicebot?

To make the best choice of voicebot, it is possible to take into account several criteria. We have selected here the ten (10) most important criteria in choosing the best voicebot.

These criteria are applicable regardless of the field of activity in which you operate.

Can the voicebot adapt to several communication channels?

Today, communication tools are numerous and new communication channels continue to emerge.

With this in mind, in addition to their assisted contact centers reachable by telephone, companies mark their presence on the websites, or even on the mobile applications on which they offer self-service customer transactions.

The voicebot makes it possible to break this segregation between the channels which no longer really has any reason to exist since the integration of the tools now makes it possible to offer exactly the same services on all the channels.

In choosing the ideal voicebot, you must put forward a robot that is positioned on most points of contact between your customers and the company.

In other words, it is important for the company to deploy a voicebot that adapts to all the communication media used by its customers. Tomorrow, self-service transactions offered by voicebots will also be accessible through social networks.

When the voicebot meets this criterion, it allows the company to offer a better customer experience to all its customers.

In addition, this solution, which consists of transforming your conversational robot into a multichannel agent, also allows your company to increase its visibility: it responds everywhere (on all media), at any time (as soon as the customer contacts it) and in any place (thanks to the dematerialization of communication media).

What is the expression language of the voicebot?

Imagine that you are talking to a voicebot to get information about the prices applied by an airline and that the chatbot gives you the list of products available in an airport supermarket.

There is no link between this request and the answer provided by the robot.

This situation creates frustration for users and can discredit the service offered by the integration of the voicebot. The same thing happens when the vocabulary used by the bot is not adapted to the lexicon of the sector of activity.

Consequently, the language of expression of a voicebot constitutes a criterion of choice that promoters must consider when deploying it.

To do this, it is important to equip the voicebot with the semantic dictionary specific to the field of activity so that it uses the technical terms understandable by the users who use it.

Can the voicebot interact with your customers in their language?

Some organizations are commercially active in territories covering several countries or simply in multilingual countries, such as Belgium, Switzerland or the United States.

In these regions, in the same concern as the subject discussed previously, it is essential that the voicebot can understand customer requests and provide them with the information sought in their language, without having to redeploy as many different voicebots.

The logical rules applicable to these interactions must be able to be easily defined both globally for the sake of consistency, and in a personalized manner for each language, according to particular uses.

Synthesis and voice recognition engines are now available in most languages, but it is still necessary to have them integrated into the voicebot, and above all to have equipped it with the language model correctly adapted to the targeted profession in each language concerned.

Finally, if the voicebot is correctly configured, it is now able to automatically identify the calling customer by various processes (automatic recognition of the telephone number, or entry of identity parameters with or without voice authentication).

The dialogue can then be continued from the outset in the language of the caller.

Is it possible for the voicebot to integrate with other technological tools?

Here is a key question that allows us to classify voicebots according to the criterion of interoperability. When we talk about interoperability , we are referring to the ability to collaborate quickly with other systems.

In reality, it must be recognized that the technical needs for which an organization decides to set up a voicebot differ from one company to another.

However, a good voicebot must be able to easily integrate into the entire technological environment of the company and operate while using the information available.

Among the ecosystems with which the voicebot must be integrated, we can cite, for example, a CRM tool (Customer Relationship Management), an HRIS platform (Human Resources Information System), an appointment management diary , an inventory management system, an accounting software, or more generally, any information system etc.

In practical terms, let's take the example of a large retail outlet that also sells online. In setting up a voicebot to improve online sales, it will be very important for this company to select a voicebot capable of drawing information from the database and indicating to customers the availability of the products sought, their costs, etc.

Is it possible for the voicebot to interact with a human agent?

Very often, a voicebot is designed to answer different questions registered in a database. In reality, it is a conversational agent programmed to give types of answers according to a precise database.

Despite this major advantage, the voicebot is not totally perfect, which means that sometimes it fails to respond precisely to the user's request.

This situation occurs especially when the user makes requests that are too complex or asks for specific details that the voicebot understands without having been configured to take them into account or cannot even understand.

However, in the field of customer relations, one of the basic principles is to give a clear and satisfactory answer to the consumer.

To overcome this lack of precision, some voicebots have a feature that allows the Internet user to be redirected to a human agent, selected according to his skills in correctly processing the customer's request.

The latter can replace the conversational agent and take care of the client's request.

Similarly, some customers looking for fluidity want to chat with a human person to confirm all the information provided by the conversational agent. The criterion of escalation to a commercial service becomes a critical point that guides the choice of the best voicebot among these users.

Alongside the improvement of the customer experience, the interaction with the human from the voicebot also makes it possible to increase the productivity of the company which builds customer loyalty and if possible encourages them to action.

Which back-office to track voicebot performance?

It is one thing to integrate a voicebot into your platform or your information system, but even more important is to monitor the performance of the conversational robot.

The purpose of this monitoring is to determine statistics: rate of resolution of user problems, proportion of correct answers provided, level of customer satisfaction, decision-making time, etc.

If you do not give a point of honor to this criterion when choosing your voicebot, it will be almost impossible for you to know what levers to act on to optimize the functioning of artificial intelligence.

To achieve this, it is important to analyze how the back office provided with the voicebot works.

Ideally, it should provide you with a dashboard that gives you a summary of the bot's performance (traffic statistics, type of requests received, responses provided and quality of service provided.

The back-office must also be able to give the possibility of modifying the answers, of configuring the flows (decision tree, choice of answers, etc.).

Our advice : The back office of a voicebot must be understandable and easy to use for your technical services.

We recommend that you opt for a voicebot with a back office that does not require a very high level of technicality.

What is the reputation of the voicebot publisher?

Voicebots are designed by several publishers whose competence, technicality and reputation vary from one publisher to another.

To choose the best voicebot, you cannot make an on-the-fly selection. It is necessary to do some research in order to have more information about the publisher before you decide.

In principle, this criterion allows you, on the one hand, to assess how the similar voicebots that the publisher has deployed with other actors operating similarly to yours work (same areas of activity, similar issues, etc.).

On the other hand, the objective is to collect the appreciations and criticisms relating to these voicebots in order to make a synthesis which can guide you in the choice of the best voicebot.

In case you receive a lot of negative feedback on the performance of similar conversational solutions, it is obvious that you will opt for another vendor's choice.

Finally, through customer references, it will be easier for you to determine the essential features that your voicebot must have so as not to make the same mistakes as your predecessors.

And if you still have doubts, do not hesitate to put the editor to the test of a concrete short-term pilot project.

You will thus judge not only the flexibility and the quality of the tool but also the level of implication of the publisher in the rapid consideration of your real needs.

Will the voicebot adapt in an agile way to changes?

In a constantly changing world, it is no longer possible to take too long to design systems before deploying them.

As soon as a new solution has been designed, market conditions have already changed.

Voicebots are no exception to these constraints. Faced with these new challenges, it is essential for users to be able to adapt the operating rules themselves with tools that are easy to administer, without depending on programming specialists.

And once changes are introduced, we can no longer afford to wait for the next scheduled shutdown of the service to deploy a new version of its settings.

On the contrary, like many critical systems, a voicebot must be modifiable online without generating a service interruption.

What will be the availability of the voicebot?

Customer interaction management tools have a growing impact on their satisfaction and, beyond that, on their loyalty. It is now impossible to grow by keeping dissatisfied customers.

In addition to the essential qualities of voicebots listed above, their availability naturally becomes just as important, insofar as they assist human agents, or even replace them more and more often.

We now expect a voicebot to be able to resist automatically without service interruption total or even partial unavailability of its resources (data centers, energy, servers, disks, networks, databases, etc.).

What is the cost of the voicebot?

Of course, you should always opt for a voicebot that responds to you at a better value for money. However, it is important to assess all the expenses related to your project and select the solution that will be within your budget.

In order not to be faced with financial worries later when deploying your voicebot, it is recommended that you find out enough about the operating and billing methods of the conversational robot that you are choosing.

Today, cloud technologies make it possible to choose the mode of operation best suited to your constraints: an outsourced system will exempt you from infrastructure installation, operation and maintenance tasks.

Conversely, an internalized system sometimes offers you stronger security guarantees. Among the billing methods that exist, we can mention billing by volume, by flat rate, by the number of API calls, etc.

You must compare each of these modes with each other, and then make a comparison between the proposals of several publishers in order to select the best ideal voicebot for your company's economic model.

In addition to all these costs, it will also be necessary to take into account the setup costs which are added to the overall cost of the voicebot.

Why opt for the Vocabase solution?

Once the selection criteria are defined and examined, the question also arises: who to entrust with the project to set up a voicebot.

By adopting the Vocabase solution , you no longer have to worry about this concern.

As soon as you book an online appointment with Vocabase professionals, they will guide you through every step of deploying the ideal voicebot for your business.

Furthermore, Vocabase not only collaborates with a range of internationally recognized partners, but also has undeniable experience in identifying and deploying artificial intelligence solutions for a large number of companies and clients.