Elevating the Value of Speaking Up with Voice
Elevating the Value of Speaking Up with Voice
About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from…...
Read moreAI is like a pebble (or boulder) dropped into a calm glassy pool we call experience. Once it hits the surface, AI creates ripples that can shift and change that still calm in weird and wonderful ways. Arguably, the first ripple was AI’s capacity to amplify intelligence and change where and how we could turn conversations-into-data, data-into-intelligence and intelligence-into-decisions. The second ripple was generative AI’s capacity to ingest and generate content from text prompts, delivering everything from bold new images to stunningly accurate summaries.
Now, we prepare for the third ripple: AI’s capacity to deliver voice-first engagements.
What is a voice-first engagement?
- A voice-first experience is one that leverages AI to power spoken language as the primary form of engagement
- In a voice-first experience, the customer or employee simply asks a question to launch a bi-directional conversation
- What started as robotic voices and limited responses are now full conversations between AI and people with human-like voices, inflections and emotions
- The smartest voice-first experiences thread conversations across channels of choice, can connect to fully self-services journeys or connect to live, human agent engagement
It is hard to deny that AI-powered voice generation is a hot conversation. Foundation models like Amazon’s Nova Sonic make building with voice-first far more accessible. Partnerships like that between ServiceNow and 3CLogic continue to expand, making deploying and reshaping experience with voice seamless and smart.
In announcing a new layer to a long-standing partnership, ServiceNow and 3CLogic intend to connect conversations more directly to relationships by bringing AI Voice Agents into enterprise workflows. In a press release, VP of CRM and Industry Workflows at ServiceNow, Terence Chesire, emphasized that these voice-first agents and experiences could “automate service at scale, improve efficiencies and deliver experiences that feel more human.”
It’s this connection to humanity that will make a voice-first AI experience strategy critical as we head into the next phase of the AI maturity curve that transitions AI agents into proactive experience-empowering AI assistants.
So why voice-first? Because customers expect it. Full stop. Today’s customer service and support landscape is not the only place voice is leading the way. From home (“Hey Alexa, order that new snack everyone is talking about!”) to the car (“Siri, I’m lost and need to charge…get me home!”) to out and about shopping (“Find three other stores where this shirt is available and check if it’s on sale,”) voice has become the interface of choice for a growing list of engagements.
Hands-free self-service where an utterance is the prompt is quickly becoming the standard to streamline the customer’s journey to their resolution. What’s so different about this moment is the expectation for free flowing, more human connection. Customers have seen the generative capacity for voice and video and expect that same back and forth, not the cold monotony of a GPS mispronouncing street names. When they opt into an AI powered experience, they still expect humanity to shine through while not changing their own patterns of speech and behavior. They just want to talk.
Customers aren’t the only stakeholder with high expectations: experience leaders have their own list of demands. They expect quality of voice with total control and governance. This paves a path well beyond a “bot” or “assistant” rolling a recorded voice message. Instead, these new voice-first assistants come with the power of generative and agentic AI that can listen, question and engage, reason and even show appropriate emotions from humor, sympathy, formality but most of all empathy. This new voice adopts the tone, tenor, language and lingo of a brand turning a passive moment into a truly branded engagement.
As organizations forge a path into this voice-first era, there are new questions that must be answered and embraced enterprisewide.
What are the “obvious” moments for voice AI?
- Service-led environments are a clear starting point.
- The contact center can develop more self-service engagements to quickly deliver branded service through voice AI agents while human agents gain more time and bandwidth to tackle the more complex and more valuable service cases.
- Internal employee experiences are also an opportunity for “internal customers” to have voice-first service experiences making it that much easier to ask for an explanation of health benefits and then simply asking to be re-enrolled.
- IT service desks can also deploy voice AI agents to address more routine requests making the mundane feel more personal across the enterprise.
Where can voice push beyond obvious to deliver something more unexpected?
- Marketing-led environments are ripe for voice AI agents.
- Content transforms when a customer can ask questions of a website taking the marketing drive for content personalization to a new, far more interactive level.
- The opportunity to transform sales and e-commerce motions thanks to voice AI agents is possible when AI models have access to real-time product and pricing data.
Creativity is the key limitation to where and how voice can be tomorrow’s interface. The questions experience leaders can now ask starts with where could we just have a conversation? Can a field service technician just call in and explain the work that has just been completed without ever typing a single word or tying up a human dispatcher’s time? Could a customer ask about the latest deals and promotions before their shopping gets underway? Could employees just ask for time off?
But there is another list of questions to be asked when seeking out conversations to deploy including does the technology being embedded have the guardrails and controls to ensure safe and operationally observable conversations? Can you customize and control the voices that are now engaging directly with the people who matter most to the business, namely customers and employees? While teams can try to script empathy, can the voice AI being deployed be trained to be funny?
Thanks to voice AI, organizations have an opportunity to speak up. A brand’s voice can greet a customer in the channels and interfaces of the customer’s choosing. Passive recordings become a thing of the past as voice AI drives new conversations that fill the experience gap without sacrificing policies or cost. So, welcome to the new age of experience where modern AI empowered flows effectively guide a customer from curiosity to cart without lifting a finger. Thanks to voice AI, it’s time to speak up without straining our voices.
Image AI generated using Adobe Firefly Image 4. No real racoons were asked to wait on hold.
Future of Work Marketing Transformation Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity B2C CX ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI AI Analytics Automation business Marketing SaaS PaaS IaaS Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP finance Healthcare Customer Service Content Management Collaboration Chief Customer Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Product Officer
