The Conversational Flywheel – Continuously Improving Customer Support

The Conversational Flywheel is an approach to managing customer interactions that enables businesses to meet customer needs through quick, personalized, and cost-effective multi-channel support. It also ensures you attract, service, and retain customers in a scalable, affordable, and satisfying way.

Why is the Conversational Flywheel valuable?

The Conversational Flywheel is cyclical in nature. Rather than adopting a linear structure with a definite start and end, each cycle feeds into the next, contributing data and learnings that improve future interactions. Consequently, businesses using technology based on a Conversational Flywheel methodology, such as EDC’s Conversational AI, can deliver increasingly personalized and effective customer support and messaging and successfully automate more inquiries. This results in more satisfying customer experiences and greater customer loyalty.

Understanding each stage of the flywheel

1. Understand

   The Understand stage is the phase in which the AI identifies customer intent. While basic customer support technologies achieve this via keyword recognition, this approach can give an incomplete and often inaccurate picture of the issue at hand and consequently can result in fewer successful interactions. EDC’s Conversational AI solution employs Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technologies to establish the customer’s actual intent and determine whether they are looking for product support, making an inquiry, or browsing products.

   Developing accurate intent recognition capabilities is key. It makes for more satisfying customer experiences and lays the foundation for the customer interaction to come.

2. Connect

   In the next phase, EDC’s Conversational AI solution connects the customer with the appropriate support resource. Depending on the customer’s intent, this could be a human agent, a bot, or another self-serve resource. Typically, this decision is made according to query complexity. Simple, routine inquiries that are easier to automate are directed to bots, while complex issues demanding greater nuance are routed to human agents.

   Here, the emphasis is on resolving the customer’s issue in the first interaction. This means correctly identifying the correct resource and routing accordingly.

3. Assist

   During the Assist phase, the customer receives assistance in the appropriate channel via personalized responses, support, or product recommendations. Personalized engagement is more likely to result in a successful resolution as it seeks to respond to specific customer needs. During this stage, AI is beneficial because it can offer predictive assistance, identifying needs based on previous interactions and suggesting solutions before the customer asks. It improves response times, guides users through processes, and engages customers directly.

4. Automate

   In the final Automate stage, EDC’s Conversational AI tool automates routine tasks, freeing human agents to focus on more complex tasks that maximize their value. For instance, AI conversational technology can handle billing inquiries, appointment scheduling, or product information requests, reducing response times and cutting costs significantly. Importantly, automation is not the end of the process. All the data collected during this phase feeds back into the AI to improve its understanding and enhance future interactions. The flywheel keeps spinning.

Three key benefits of Conversational AI in the flywheel

Throughout this four-stage, cyclical process, Conversational AI feeds the power of the flywheel and benefits businesses in three core ways.

1. Data collection - EDC’s Conversational AI tool collects more data with every interaction, enabling continuous learning and improvement.
2. Personalization - Using this data, the solution can deliver more personalized responses, increasing engagement across all touchpoints.
3. Scalability - The solution is highly scalable, enabling businesses to flex in line with demand and process thousands of simultaneous interactions without compromising customer support quality.

Conversational AI with EDC

By helping to optimize every stage of the customer journey, automate routine inquiries, and deliver personalized interactions, EDC’s Conversational AI solution enables businesses to implement the Conversational Flywheel approach, resulting in more satisfying customer interactions, greater engagement, and improved customer loyalty.

Contact our expert team to learn more.