Voice as a preferred customer service channel is making a comeback. While some experts have speculated on its demise and even advised customer service professionals to retire their voice channels, these predictions are premature. Despite the rise of digital self-service channels like chatbots, interactive voice response, and online forms, phone calls and direct voice interaction with customer service representatives are becoming increasingly relevant again in contact centers. It's not hyperbole to say that in customer service, we need voice more now than ever. Consumers still find value in the personal connection and ability to resolve complex issues through live conversations. And, with an assist from generative artificial intelligence, companies will soon rise to the occasion and provide a highly personalized voice experience at scale.
What is making voice relevant again? Here are some of the key factors that are driving the voice resurgence.
Consumer Dissatisfaction With Legacy Chatbots
As a recent Wall Street Journal article sums up, "When it comes to consumer chatbots, there seems to be a pretty clear disconnect: Companies generally like them, and consumers generally don't." Businesses looking to cut costs and enable self-service view chatbots as an efficient way to achieve both, while customers find chatbots to be impersonal, limited, and slow to respond. Further, they find it difficult to be handed off from a chatbot to a human agent.
Chatbots are useful in specific situations in which customers have simple questions. They need to check their credit card balances, for example. However, for more complex service scenarios, legacy chatbots can have some limitations. The good news is there is a new generation of chatbots on the horizon that will be able to address many of the shortcomings of its predecessors thanks to conversational AI.
Generational Attitude Shifts
We've been hearing for years that millennials will avoid talking on the phone at all costs. However, their younger counterparts, Gen Z, are not as inhibited. Seventy-one percent of Gen Z consumers say that live phone calls are the quickest, most convenient way to get to the heart of a customer service matter to find a satisfying solution, according to McKinsey. Further, this demographic is 35 percent to 40 percent more likely to call customer contact centers than their millennial counterparts, and when they do, they expect a seamless, personalized experience, not a chatbot.
Cultural Changes Due to the Pandemic
Even with the rise of self-service as a more modern, talk-free way to engage with companies, there are times when customers just need to pick up the phone. A flight has been canceled, or a billing issue needs to be resolved right now. Listening to a menu of options and pressing a series of buttons simply won't do.
Further, since the pandemic and the isolation that followed, the pendulum has been swinging back toward voice as a way to communicate. A recent study by ContactBabel found a huge change from pre-pandemic findings, which had previously put web self-service as by far the most popular channel of choice for urgent interactions. Live telephony has replaced web self-service as the preferred channel for urgent interactions despite the massive investments by many businesses to achieve the opposite effect... In fact, 2024's figures show an even stronger preference for the phone.
Everyone is Listening
Just a decade ago, most consumers watched television to get their news or entertainment. That information paradigm has changed thanks to the podcast. In 2024, there were 546.7 million podcast listeners worldwide, a 7.85 percent increase from the previous year. By 2027, the number of listeners is forecasted to reach 651.7 million. Listening, it seems, is the new watching. Consider the recent trend of sending voice messages instead of texts, rebranded by Gen Z as voice notes. Instant messaging platform WhatsApp launched a voice feature that regularly processes about 7 billion voice messages every day.
AI is Evolving at the Speed of Sound
In our lifetimes, we've never seen technology move as quickly as artificial intelligence. Now, AI can finally deliver the value we've been talking about for the last decade. The world's biggest tech companies, like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, are pouring billions of dollars into AI engines that are altering every aspect of our work and personal lives. Generative AI and related technologies, such as natural language processing, real-time translation, and large language models like ChatGPT-4o, are changing the game for audio and voice. It wasn't that long ago that consumers chuckled at voice recognition software's clunky interface and processing capabilities. But that has all changed.
Today, engineers building AI-powered voice applications like AI agents and other voice-first solutions are free from the legacy, script-based approach to customer service. Instead, they are exploring more free-flowing, natural language models that can handle multiple thoughts in multiple directions before evaluating the best response, known as "tree of thought" reasoning. Where legacy chatbots and IVRs were just OK at best, we are now at a turning point where AI can genuinely enhance customer experiences.
While some might view voice as a relic of the past, as we've outlined above, there is ample evidence that it is not only relevant again but one of the most popular customer service channels of the future.
In the near future, we can anticipate a world where every interaction with companies will be as easy as talking to a friend. Imagine calling an airline, an insurance company, a bank, or a retailer, and within one second, an AI agent answers the call, knows your name, account number, and the details of your last transaction with that company. If you call back in five minutes, that same AI agent picks up instantly, recognizes you, and continues the conversation seamlessly. You could also send a WhatsApp message to this AI agent and have the same experience. With the advances we are seeing in genAI, this isn't only possible, it's beginning to happen.
Soon, companies will be able to build an AI agent for every customer. From the customer perspective, it will feel like having a personal, dedicated concierge who assists throughout their journeys and knows their unique preferences. Each conversation will flow naturally and be much more lifelike than ever before.
These dedicated AI agents will take personalization to a new level. Companies will be able to select voices based on geographic regions and even specific customers. While this is already possible to some extent, future advancements in end-to-end audio models will make it even more seamless. Currently, speech-to-text and text-to-speech are common. In the future, end-to-end audio models will enable real-time adjustments like changing accents or languages on the fly. These models aren't enterprise-grade yet, but they're rapidly improving and could be ready within the next 12 months.
The future of voice is here. It's time for the customer service industry to answer the call.
Malte Kosub is co-founder and CEO of Parloa, a provider of artificial intelligence-powered automation for customer service.