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Consumers prefer interacting with voice and chat assistants over humans, creating opportunities for businessesNEW YORK, Sept. 5, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Capgemini Research Institute has found that consumers increasingly prefer to interact with bots rather than humans, especially when it comes to researching products, learning about new services or following up on post-purchase customer service queries. According to a study launched today, nearly 70% say they will progressively replace visits to a store or bank with their voice assistant within three years' time. The "Smart Talk: How organizations and consumers are embracing voice and chat assistants" report – which surveyed more than 12,000 consumers1 who use voice/chat assistants and 1,000 business executives – was commissioned to understand both consumer and business leaders' perspectives on conversational interfaces uptake, implementation and satisfaction, building on the 2017 research Capgemini conducted into voice assistants. The new study demonstrates the pace of change over the last 12-24 months: 40% of those now using voice assistants have started doing so in the last year. Businesses are also seeing the benefits, with many considering conversational assistants to be crucial for customer engagement, and the overall customer experience. More than three-quarters of businesses (76%) said they have realized quantifiable benefits from voice or chat assistant initiatives, and 58% said that those benefits had met or exceeded their expectations. Benefits included a more than 20% reduction in customer service cost, and a more than 20% increase of consumers using digital assistants. However, while the business and user advantages are widely understood, the report found that actual roll out is lagging behind enthusiasm and demand. According to the study's findings, fewer than 50% of the top 100 players in automotive, consumer products and retail, and banking and insurance have voice assistants, and the same is true of chat. Consumers display a significant increase2 in use of voice assistants as their experience improves The report also found that consumers have increasingly praised the ability of conversational assistants to provide a better experience. In 2017, 61% of consumers expressed their satisfaction in using a voice-based personal assistant like Google Assistant or Siri on their smartphones; this number rose to 72% in 2019. Moreover, in 2017, 46% of consumers were satisfied with using a voice-based speaker device like Google Home or Amazon Echo, and 44% with a voice and sceen-based voice assistant (not phones) like Amazon Echo Show and Amazon Fire TV; these numbers rose to 64% and 57% in 2019, respectively. Convenience and personalization will drive conversational assistants into the mainstream "This research establishes that conversational assistants are the future of customer interactions, valued by consumers for their convenience and by companies for the operational efficiencies they enable. Compared to our study released in early 2018, a much higher proportion of consumers now foresee voice assistants as their first choice within the next three years. In the meantime, the expectations of customers are evolving as they progressively use the technology," said Mark Taylor, Head of Customer Engagement at Capgemini Invent. "Privacy and security also remain paramount. Since our last research, it seems there has been little change in consumer concerns about how voice assistants affect privacy and data security. Companies must do more to address both these concerns and consumers' increasing expectations, as conversational commerce increasingly moves into the mainstream." Stan Sthanunathan, Executive Vice President at Unilever echoes the need for businesses to adopt voice assistants: "The biggest experience that we've had is to not look at conversational interfaces as a cure for all the problems that you have, but instead to use them to augment human intelligence. This makes human intelligence a lot more productive. Voice or chat bots can communicate with multiple people simultaneously. They therefore help in reducing the amount of stress and strain on our human agents who are responding. These interfaces eliminate anywhere between 20% and 30% of issues reaching the human agents because they are answered then and there. And even when the issue is guided to a human being, it is actually a lot more purposeful." The report identified four critical success factors for organizations to leverage this growing consumer appetite for conversational interfaces:
For further information, access the full report here. Research Methodology
About Capgemini About the Capgemini Research Institute 1 The 'consumers' referred to in the report are existing users of voice/chat assistants
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