It’s 9 AM on Monday. A support agent logs in to a mountain of backlog tickets and voicemails. Before they can help customers with complex, time-sensitive issues, they have to spend the first hour on manual data entry just to get records up to date.
This is the daily reality in many contact centers. It’s a frustrating, inefficient cycle that leads to agent burnout and slower resolution times. This cycle doesn’t just affect agents; it maintains the customer experience gap between what customers expect and what customer support departments are able to offer.
But it doesn’t have to be. Conversational AI is fundamentally changing the landscape of customer support by automating the routine tasks that consume an agent’s day. This technology is predicted to save contact centers $80bn in operational costs in 2026.
Conversational AI is the next level of generative AI, in which natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) are used to understand and respond to human speech. But this is more than just your average chatbot; conversational AI has voice-first capabilities which can revolutionize the way customers and brands communicate.
Here, we’ll take a deep dive into the use cases of conversational AI for customer service, provide a checklist you can use to determine your support team’s conversational AI-readiness, and explain how you can get started with an AI-powered solution for improving customer interactions.
Why Voice-Based Conversational AI Outperforms Chatbots
With conversational AI voice interactions, AI agents answer instantly, speaking with customers in a way that feels natural, helpful, and engaging. This is vital, as customers aren’t always that interested in how their issues get resolved or who solves them; they just want to know that they will be addressed in the shortest amount of time possible.
More and more customers are embracing artificial intelligence and chatbots, especially when it means getting questions answered in real-time from AI assistants without having to wait for a human agent. 82% of customers would use AI to see if it could help them more quickly, instead of waiting for a live agent to answer the call.
Why Voice-First Matters in Customer Support
Though customers are growing more and more comfortable with AI chatbots, there are some situations in which text-based solutions simply aren’t enough. Many B2B customers and high-touch B2C customers prefer talking to someone when they have an urgent situation, even if that someone is an LLM-based conversational AI agent and not an actual human being.
Voice-first AI offers more intuitive language understanding, looking for non-verbal and contextual cues to recommend solutions that align with the customer’s intent and sentiment. It can also better prioritize needs and direct calls where they need to go more accurately and efficiently, cutting down wait times and increasing customer satisfaction.
Above all, voice-first conversational AI automates repetitive tasks. Your human workforce now has more time to respond to complex inquiries without getting frustrated or burnt out.
| Customer Support Scenario | Voice-Based AI | Chatbot |
| Provides automated responses to standard questions | ✅ | ✅ |
| Offers in-depth responses to complex questions and situations | ✅ | ❌ |
| Conveys realistic signs of empathy and reassurance | ✅ | ❌ |
| Able to understand context and sentiment across platforms to provide personalized, omnichannel support | ✅ | ❌ |
| Allows for hands-free and accessible interactions for customers who aren’t able to have a text-based conversation | ✅ | ❌ |
| Saves customers’ time by answering their questions accurately and instantaneously | ✅ | ✅ |
Top Use Cases for Conversational AI in Customer Support
Use Case 1: 24/7 Call Routing and Intent Detection
Customers can become frustrated if they have to reword and retype their queries multiple times. Conversational AI uses natural language understanding (NLU) to analyze a caller’s request and determine their intent. In doing so, the AI can route the call to exactly where it needs to go, leading to a faster resolution and increased CSAT scores.
How Natterbox Helps: An AI Assistant can act as a 24/7 AI receptionist, understanding caller intent to intelligently route them to the right person or department, eliminating frustrating IVRs.
Use Case 2: Automated FAQ and Routine Inquiry Handling
Customer inquiries can often be anticipated and answered with automated responses. For FAQs and general troubleshooting, voice-based conversational AI can typically answer customer questions with a high degree of accuracy. This provides 24/7 access for customers and frees human agents up to handle more complicated service requests. For one Natterbox customer, this meant replacing a third-party answering service that cost £4,000 per month.
How Natterbox Helps: We’ll train your AI Assistant on your website or help documents to provide instant, around-the-clock answers to common questions, deflecting a high volume of routine calls. See how:
Use Case 3: Pre-Call Authentication and Data Capture
Voice-based AI can support human agents by preparing for the call before it even reaches them. The AI can verify a caller’s identification and collect key user data before handing off to a live agent. This improves accuracy, protects customer privacy, and ensures human agents have the context they need to provide top-notch service. It also solves the pain of poor data quality by updating customer records automatically, reducing overhead for the entire department on multiple fronts.
Use Case 4: Real-Time Agent Assist
Using the power of natural language processing, voice-based AI can analyze a call in real-time to provide instant feedback and support for human representatives. This in-the-moment coaching helps optimize the customer experience, allows agents to provide personalized support, and lowers the chance of escalation.
How Natterbox Helps: AI Advisor provides live coaching and can surface relevant knowledge base articles to agents during a call, helping them resolve issues faster and more effectively.
Use Case 5: Post-Call Wrap-Up and CRM Logging
Automation of after-call work and CRM logging provides huge time benefits to call centers and customer service teams. Instead of agents spending several minutes after each call on manual data entry, AI can handle it for them. By automating these repetitive tasks, teams benefit from fewer errors, lower average handle time (AHT), and higher resolution rates, freeing agents from the frustrating daily backlog.
Use Case 6: End-to-End Task Automation
For more complex workflows, a fully autonomous AI can handle the entire process from start to finish without human intervention. This could include processing a refund, rescheduling a delivery, or canceling a subscription.
How Natterbox Helps: A Natterbox AI Agent is built to take action. Because it’s 100% Salesforce Native, it can securely access records, make updates, and complete complex tasks end-to-end.
What Not to Automate With Conversational AI
It is important to remember that some tasks simply require a human touch. These include hyper-technical issues, ongoing complaints from dissatisfied customers, billing disputes, and any situation that demands genuine human empathy or ethical decision making. If going above and beyond is likely to be just as important as a speedy resolution, then it may be better to keep humans in the loop.
Checklist: Is Your Customer Support Team Ready for Conversational AI?
Take a look at this checklist to help you consider whether AI-powered voice conversations would improve your customer experience:
- You experience high volumes of repeat customer queries, and at least half of these come in via phone.
- You’ve received feedback that your customer response times are too slow and wait times are edging over 2 minutes.
- Your cost per contact is on the rise, and your CSAT scores aren’t rising accordingly.
- You need to streamline your workflows and give human agents more time to focus on complex issues rather than repetitive tasks.
- Text-based, AI-powered chatbots don’t provide your human staff with the support they need and/or don’t resonate with your customers.
- Agent turnover is high due to burnout and frustration with manual processes.
- The scalability of your current AI tools can’t keep up with customer demand.
If you checked multiple boxes above, it might be time to consider voice-based conversational AI.
How Natterbox Powers These Use Cases Inside Salesforce
Natterbox provides a comprehensive suite of AI tools built 100% natively on Salesforce. This means you can start small with an AI Assistant for simple tasks, use AI Advisor to empower your human agents, and scale to full AI Agents for complex automation. All within a single, unified platform, with no-code deployment, scalability, and enterprise-readiness in one comprehensive package.
Schedule Your Natterbox Demo Today
Getting started with Natterbox is probably a lot simpler than you think, especially if you’re already using Salesforce. If you want to see numbers like a 54% reduction in hold times, or £48,000 per year saved on third-party answering services, let us show you how. Scheduling a demo is fast and free. We’re looking forward to talking with you.