Chatbots: The pros and cons of automated customer service

Learn what key factors to consider before introducing chatbots to your customer service strategy.

Originally published on www.telusinternational.com. 

Key takeaways:

• The popularity of chatbots is increasing, but they often straddle a fine line between helpful tool and clunky distraction in the customer experience.
• While growing in sophistication, chatbots remain only as good as their programmers.
• Chatbots should be used as a supplement to human agents, not as a replacement.

“How may I help you today?”

Ten years ago, that message might have come from a human customer service agent on the other end of a phone line. Today, it could appear in a pop-up chat box as a consumer browses a website — and increasingly, that message might originate with a programmable chatbot.

Considered artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots are software that can be programmed to respond to people’s queries. TechWorld characterizes the chatbot as “a user interface which can be plugged into a number of data sources via APIs so it can deliver information or services on demand, such as weather forecasts or breaking news.”

Chatbots, however, have a distinct advantage: They let brands be — or at least appear to be — more proactive in addressing potential customer questions and concerns by acting as an integrated part of the shopping/browsing experience. The chatbot is right there, waiting to answer your questions, and then to connect you to a real person for more complex queries if necessary. There’s no 1-800 number to dial, and there’s no waiting on hold.

This is the promise of chatbots and the reason why companies are investing heavily in the technology. According to a recent MarketsandMarkets report, the smart advisors/chatbots market was estimated to be worth $703.3 million in 2016 and is projected to reach $3.2 billion by 2021 thanks to “the strong need to understand consumer behavior, adoption of cloud-based technology and proliferating demand of intelligent customer engagement.”

Learning valuable chatbot lessons from Clippy

If chatbots feel familiar, that could be because of the pioneering paperclip known as Clippy, the pop-up users used to encounter when drafting a document in Microsoft Word. The frequency of the software interruptions, and the questionable helpfulness, turned Clippy into a symbol of derision. Still, Clippy lived 10 long years, from 1997 to 2007, before the software company decided to lay him to rest.

Even if his constant interruptions were annoying, Clippy did teach us a couple of valuable lessons — namely, that chatbots are there to serve customers, not the other way around. And, as Clippy demonstrated, the line between useful and disruptive, or supportive and stiff, can be difficult to straddle. Mastering that delicate balance, though, is vital to the success of chatbots.

The pros of chatbots as contact center assistants

For Gam Dias, a principal at bot-design firm 1080Bots.com, having chatbots answer customer questions can help ensure a satisfactory customer experience, while adding a “sizzle” that shows the brand is up on the latest consumer tech trends. As Dias notes, chatbots are a great way to clear easy-to-answer questions off the plates of customer service agents, so that they may focus on more complex queries.

For example, Dias points out that around the holiday period, upwards of 70 percent of inbound contact center customer service calls are simply order status inquiries. This is where chatbots can excel.

A chatbot could take an order number, cross-reference that order with delivery status and provide the customer with an answer within seconds — faster than any agent on the phone could act. “If an AI agent can help 25 percent of those customers, that’s a huge savings for the retailer,” Dias says. “For those customers who are helped, it means they haven’t spent 15 minutes waiting on the phone for a status update.”

Chatbots are only as good as they’re programmed to be

Despite chatbots’ promise, not everyone has jumped onto the bandwagon. Scott Sachs, customer service consultant and president of SJS Solutions, likens the chatbot revolution to the advent of automated voice systems back in the day. “Everyone thought [voice systems] would solve everything and they wouldn’t need people,” he says.

In fact, he continues, automated voice systems — and chatbots, by extension — have generated an unintended consequence: “The easier issues are cherry-picked out, creating a more challenging environment within the customer-service organization, so they’re only getting the harder questions.” That means a higher skill set is required for frontline agents.

Read the entire article here.

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