There’s a growing thought that AI is taking over the world. That is far from the truth. Rather, it is like a child that needs constant education and supervision to learn and perform this task of training. For the foreseeable future, humans will have to feed AI systems with customer-facing experiences and situations to ensure the machine has references and large resources of knowledge from which to draw. Humans will have to regularly intervene to provide the answers that chatbots can’t, or don’t feel confident about.
In most cases, chatbots are not currently capable of handling and completing complex transactions that ensure a customer’s overall experience is both smooth and satisfactory.
The most important aspect of the human intervention, however, is empathy. Human agents are the ones who differentiate a brand’s customer service, not the chatbots. While some chatbots are being trained in sentiment and emotions, it only helps them deal with rudimentary problems, while more nuanced interactions will require a human.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of blending bots and agents will be your agents themselves. Not only will chatbots augment agent tasks by providing data, insights and analysis, they will reduce the average handle time (AHT) to ensure more interactions are completed with more efficiency per interaction.
But in the digital age, AHT really isn’t the best metric. It’s about Total Customer Interaction Time. This decreases, too. The bot-assisted augmented customer experience ensures less waiting time for consumers, thereby increasing overall self-service adoption, which is critical to digital transformation.
Once chatbots start handling the more mundane and repetitive customer support tasks, human agents can focus on developing their skill sets and concentrate on high-value tasks which will lead to increased overall agent satisfaction and positively impact customer retention. It’s a learning curve for the agent and the bot.
In this new world, chatbots learn from human agents as well. Every time the chatbot transfers to a human, the human tags the interaction so that the bot can learn. Not only does the chatbot learn to better interpret the consumer’s questions and comments, but it also learns to take a more educated guess at what the right response might be. Over time, the bot learns to emulate the skills of a company’s best human agent. This turns agents into “super agents,” supported by a great team of bots behind them.
The right blend of rvi and human chat agents can, not only lead customers to a happier path, but can also yield significant cost savings, and even increase sales. This is just the beginning of a collaborative and symbiotic customer experience ecosystem that will witness humans and AI working side-by-side.
Companies are increasingly embracing the concept that humans can work hand-in-hand with artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots to improve the customer service experience.
Digital transformation remains a top priority for businesses, and consumer-facing companies are deploying AI chatbots to personalize the customer service experience. They are doing so by deciphering huge amounts of customer data, comparing on-domain and off-domain data, and running that data through algorithms to determine consumer intent. Once they do, they can personalize the customer-facing experience.
Only by using artificial intelligence can companies process this immense amount of data. It’s simply not possible to apply enough humans to do this kind of analysis.
But companies can’t live by AI alone. By itself, it cannot succeed. A simulation of human intelligence by machines, designed to perform human-like tasks, ironically requires a lot of support from humans. A critical criterion for digital self-service is to maintain the quality of the interaction.
Failed digital self-service leads consumers down an unhappy path, and ultimately to abandonment of self-service channels. For the business, this results in increased call volumes, which defeats the purpose of automation. Customer service is about serving the customer in the manner in which they want to be served. By empowering chatbots to join the journey, the path to successfully customer service is better paved.
There is no greater truth than the fact that people just want to be heard and understood. No one wants to talk to a person, let alone a piece of technology that portends to understand them, and not be understood. It adds a layer of frustration that is a sure-fire way to upset and annoy customers.
By understanding the value AI chatbots provide, while also recognizing that humans are a vital component of their success, these bots will bring your customer service to the next level – together.
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