With the availability of advanced systems powered by automated solutions, users can now make reservations in restaurants, place orders for snacks, book a movie ticket, hotel room and even make a clinic appointment. In order to make a transformation in customer service interactions, AI-powered digital solutions now improve every aspect of business including online customer experience, brand reputation, loyalty, preventive assistance and even generation of revenue streams.
The most interesting aspect of AI draws from its two major capabilities, which are:
- Natural language processing (NLP) – Natural language processing encourages and supports your daily interactions with AI software using its ability to process and interpret written/spoken messages.
- Machine Learning-Machine learning is assigned to a powerful computing system that churns a large amount of data to learn from it, request suggestions, Facebook messenger and spam folders are everyday examples of AI machine learning process.
AI for customer service will not only enable self-service interfaces more intuitive and economical, but also its intelligence will help anticipate specific customer needs learning from their contexts, previous history, chat, and preferences.
Let us take a quick rundown on what we call CHATBOTS
Chabot-This has to do with a computer program designed to simulate a conversation with human users, especially over the Internet. They are becoming more and more pervasive both online and mobile customer service and the acceptance of them is constantly growing rapidly. Currently, Chabot is being used to handle lower-level questions and requests, like a change in billing address or credit card. Some of the bots are “smart enough” to detect when their answers are wrong based on the customer’s response. They will then switch the chat to a support agent seamlessly.
THE QUESTION WOULD BE WILL CHATBOTS EVER REPLACE CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVES IN THE FUTURE.
Yes, for routine and semi-routine activities, Chabot will be the way forward. Today they tend to handle basic routine tasks; in my experience, they are good if limited. As developers/providers become more comfortable with programming them and consumers become more accepting, the Chabot will move up the service value chain. Adding techniques such as emotional feedback from the Chabot within the vocal range and visual avatars will also help increase the acceptance.
In the last two years several banks and e-commerce sites within sub-Saharan Africa particularly Nigeria have embraced the use of Chabot in managing customer interactions online.
More and more consumers are welcoming AI-driven Chabot in customer service for the following reasons:
- To cut down on the time it takes to explain an issue to an agent
- To reduce the time, it takes to get through to an agent on the phone
- To make the entire customer service process more efficient and fast
- To resolve the problem via chat and eliminate the whole process of calling customer support
Chabot can provide quick information to customers. They will solve the mundane problems without a problem, however, it will take a long time before a Chatbot can figure out every question from anybody (including from those who do not express themselves properly) and be of any use. However, as time passes by, Chabot will become more programmed and efficient and consumers will not need a human touch.
In today’s digital market, pundits have projected that by 2020 more than 85% of all customer support communications will be conducted without having to engage any customer service representatives. The main purpose of this blog delves into the subject a little more to convey how AI-powered customer service can possibly help customer support agents online. No doubt whatsoever that today forward thinkers consider Artificial Intelligence technology as a solution that will open the doors for real-time self-service for customer service platforms.
Written by
Odey Pauline.
