Chatbots and Customer Service

Chatbots and customer service seem to be a perfect match, as these “bots” maybe the customer service tools of the future. They aren’t only for the future but have already been incorporated by several high-profile brands, including KLM and Sephora. They are set to become the next big thing as far as customer service is concerned.

What are chatbots

Chatbots are similar to Apple’s Siri. They are fast becoming the new “voice” of customer services. These computer programs are designed to respond to digital chats or texts, carrying on virtual conversations with human customers. The advances that have taken place in NLP (Natural Language Processing) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) have allowed chatbots to become more fluent in conversations than ever before.

What chatbots are used for

Chatbots can serve many purposes. One key purpose is answering customers’ (or potential customers’) questions, things like the password to the Wi-Fi, directions to reach the venue, the time of an event and so on. Chatbots are scalable solutions compared to traditional methods like phone and email; they can attend simultaneously to hundreds of people.

Chatbots can additionally deliver agenda information to participants at an event, inclusive of the sessions schedule, abstracts of the talks, and profiles of speakers, all delivered straight to the customers’ most favored messaging apps.

Chatbots can also be used to deliver notifications, informing those interested in schedule changes, cancellations or room switches. They can also be used to send personal reminders.

Lastly, chatbots can be used to gather feedback from consumers.

Chatbots won’t replace human agents…yet

Far from replacing human agents, chatbots improve customer-agent conversations. There has been a longstanding fear in some quarters that chatbots will replace agents on phone support, the implication being that chatbots will dominate the call center industry, but these fears have never amounted to anything substantial. The reasons that chatbots will never replace human agents are two-fold, firstly, that chatbots, unlike human beings, lack empathy, and secondly, that they are incapable of problem-solving.

If you take into consideration your own interactions with chatbots, you will realize that you would never trust them to solve the issues most pressing to you. As of now, Chatbots are still primitive, useful only for pre-defined, simple processes, lacking in intelligence, creativity, and flexibility.

Chatbots can assist human agents

One of the possibilities that the world at large is only now starting to consider is using chatbots to help the human agents at call centers, delivering world-class customer support. Call centers can pair chatbots with voice analytics, enabling them to identify keywords, presenting the human agent in real time with options and assets. It makes the best of both worlds, the technology analyzing the customer’s speech, and the human using context and logic to make decisions. Chatbots may be used to assist humans in the future.

Chatbots in the immediate future

Chatbots are expected to blow up in the near future, exploding on to the scene more emphatically than ever before. The communications platforms that don’t support chatbots, like Snapchat and WhatsApp, are expected to open up to them. They will become all-pervasive.

Check out some other industries integrating speech recognition.

Speech Recognition in Grocery Shopping      Speech Recognition in Cars

Speech Recognition in Customer Service        The Future of Speech Recognition Technology

Pet Translators                                                       Speech Recognition in Travel

Speech Recognition in Blockchain                     Speech Recognition in Video Games

Speech Recognition in Advertising                     Speech Recognition in Health Care