Automating customer service using hybrid AI chatbots
Hybrid AI chatbots has a huge potential to enhance the overall customer experience and reduce operational costs at the same time.
Good customer service is one of the most critical factors that determines the success of a brand and the business attached to it. From a customer’s perspective, what defines good customer service is the following three elements.
- Speedy resolution of their grievances.
- Resolution for problems within a single interaction.
- Friendly customer service agent.
This article will provide an insight into the challenges faced in customer service and how hybrid AI chatbots can help you overcome this hurdle.
Challenges in customer service
For a majority of businesses, customer service is provided through call centers manned by several agents. This was the model everyone followed for a long time now, but it isn’t very efficient in meeting the demands of today’s customers.
The primary challenge is that the number of customer enquiries, complaints, suggestions etc, has increased drastically as the number of customers increased. Due to that reason, customers would need to stay in line, on queue, on hold etc to get connected to a customer service agent to discuss their problem. Alternative options like email, call back requests are least preferred as customers want immediate resolutions.
What AI can do to improve customer service?
Today, we have good NLP (Natural Language processing) and NLU (Natural Language Understanding) algorithms that can understand what a person is talking about. This is a great opportunity to automate the customer service part. Customer service automation came with plenty of benefits like 24*7 care, comprehensive user analytics and statistics, personalized attention and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Despite this, there are some drawbacks associated with AI adoption. For instance, if a customer phrases a question in a way that the system has not been primed with or they ask complicated questions, the chatbot or the voice assistant would not be able to answer and that could affect the customer’s satisfaction level. This is where human intelligence becomes relevant again.
To learn about how to leverage AI for better customer retention, read this article:
Hybrid AI chatbots
Hybrid AI chatbots have their advantages as we’ve seen above. So do humans. Put them together and we have something that can revolutionize the way we’ve been providing support to customers. Here’s how it would work.
The chatbot would “chat” with the customer and address their queries until it is asked something it might find something that it can’t answer. The information gathered in the process would facilitate assessing and assigning the right customer service agent to address complex queries that require human intervention. The chatbot will learn from this human to human interaction and equip itself with that knowledge to respond to any similar queries in the future.
Benefits of hybrid AI chatbots
- Improved customer engagement.
- Chatbots are smart but they lack human instinct. Customers, at times, prefer human intervention because it can fulfill their need for expediency. Bots can start the customers off by dealing with and assessing their queries quickly and then as needed, transfer it to an agent.
- The number of human representatives that need to be hired and trained is much fewer when you use chatbots.
- Most importantly, chatbots learn from every interaction and it gets smarter and more capable each time.
How to get started?
Setting up a conversational assistant can be done in multiple ways. For example, if your business has a lot of materials like product brochures, business documents etc, you can simply upload these documents to an AI based conversational tool and the tool would learn the contents from the documents and respond to customer queries related to the contents available in the documents. We built a solution for one of our clients that provided personalized experiences and interactions to every customer. Our client was able to reduce the number of staff assigned as sales concierges and was able to use them for more challenging tasks.
By adopting such intelligent hybrid AI chatbots and conversational tools in your business, you can create a much more rewarding experience for your customers. From increased speed and efficiency to personalized customer support, it can make a real difference to how your business operates.
A simple guide on how to automate customer service effectively could be done with this article:
