In customer service, chatbots can significantly enhance the customer experience. Not only from the customer’s perspective, but they are also a great way to streamline business operations.
With technology not yet advanced enough to entirely remove the human-element to customer service, it is vital that chat bots are supported by human operators to avoid damaging customer relationships.
With this in mind, Martin Brown, CCO at FM Outsource, explains what is behind the consumer scepticism around artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots. He also talks about how the technology can most effectively be implemented at its current technological level, and as it progresses in future.
What the customers say
Research by FM Outsource found that chatbots were flagged by 36 percent of respondents as the most likely channel to deliver a poor outcome, suggesting scepticism around the technology. It is a step change from this 2017 report in which 83 percent of consumers said they would be more loyal to a brand offering a chatbot to check order status and product research.
More encouragingly however, FM Outsource found 44 percent of respondents would be willing to deal primarily with AI-powered customer service chatbots, as long as the technology progresses sufficiently.
According to Brown, the scepticism is likely due to improper use of chatbots.
He says: “This is likely due to businesses using them for jobs that are beyond their current capabilities and not always having human operators immediately accessible to the customer. This is typically done to cut costs quickly, however, this is not the best approach when introducing chatbots to customers.”
Brown believes that there is a relatively simple way to improve customer perception regarding the outcome of interactions with chatbots.
He explains: “Ensuring that chatbots are interruptible when necessary to allow human representatives to take control is important. Team members should be able to step in and deal with customer concerns that cannot be solved by bots, at the current level of technology development.
“Chatbots are undoubtedly the future of customer service, but there does need to be an advancement in the technology before it is viable to fully replace human operators. Chatbots at present cannot respond sensitively to emotions or understand delicate situations,” he continues.
Complex queries
Earlier in 2022, CX Network looked at how to supercharge a chatbot strategy. One key take away was to avoid putting chatbots on emotional, complex queries.
This is because while 93 percent of customers expect quicker response times, 68 percent of tem also desire human agent availability over a bot. It is when bridging the digital and human worlds that chatbots really come into their own.
One approach to tackle this is to analyze the top reasons for customer contact and consider which can be resolved with a rigid response and could be dealt with by chatbots. This is often a customer’s preferred method of resolution for simple questions. For the more complex questions left on the list, create process flows and identify further chatbot features that can deliver the required responses possibly combined with a human agent.
Customer chatbots that get it right
CX Network has covered dozens of examples of successful chatbots, some of which are incredibly advanced.
IPsoft launched conversational AI agent Amelia in 2014 to facilitate a hybrid workforce. As an advanced virtual assistant, she is ‘hired’ to work alongside humans and can handle a number of use cases. It has been so successful IPsoft now trades under the name Amelia.
Meanwhile, the government of Finland further enhanced the country’s citizen experience with the deployment of Municipality Kate. An omnichannel AI-powered messaging service, Kate can converse on more than 1,200 topics and uses natural language processing to understand citizen's questions.
We have also seen a successful chatbot implementation by financial technology organization Refinitiv, led by CX Network board member Richard George.
Has your business noticed a negative customer attitude toward the use of chatbots? Let us know in the comments below.