“Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold” Does this sound familiar? Imagine the frustration at the other end of the line your customers have to go through while the query might be as simple as “what is my credit score ”?
In this new digital world if a customer has to wait for 15–30 mins to speak to an agent there is something fundamentally wrong with the way an Enterprise operates. Throwing more agents to respond to queries or moving your call center to a developing country is definitely not the way you want to scale and reduce your call time to few seconds. How do we solve this problem? We need an intelligent virtual assistant or a chatbot that can understand the natural language, process the query, talk to one or more systems in the background, aggregate the information from these systems and provide a response instantly so that the customer can easily digest.
How does a customer interact with this virtual assistant aka chatbot? With the plethora of digital channels available today as an enterprise, you want to make sure your BOT can serve responses from any channel of interaction whether it is Facebook or a Website or a Mobile App or voice channels available on the mobile device like Siri or Google Voice or for that matter Alexa/Google Home. As an enterprise, you want to choose a strategy that allows your chatbots to solve the fundamental problem of scaling your agents and responding to queries instantly with the right information.
So why do we need these Bots? With the latest advancement in the digital technologies and the improvements in Machine Learning and AI, enterprises have the need to look at investing in tools that can help their customers, employees or any other relevant stakeholders who engage with them through any channel. We have already seen in the public domain the number of users using channels like Twitter or Facebook or Slack is only growing exponentially.
With AI coming into mainstream and technology that powers AI being cheaper we can change the way enterprises operate and address this core issue of ensuring instant responses to customer queries and improve the overall customer satisfaction that helps improve companies their revenue.
Further Chatbots can deliver a personalised communication by assessing the customer interaction patterns. As interactive platforms, they can manage many basic functions that are generally managed by humans. This will free up precious time for support agents, allowing them to apply their minds to more important functions. Or for that matter, your customer would be re-directed seamlessly to the real Agent only when BOT has run out of options. BOTS that have AI and Machine learning capability inherently can streamline customer support by analyzing patterns and deliver human-like responses which are a win-win situation for customers as well as the customer support staff.
Automating most processes through bots also gives a company an image of being innovative and forward-looking. Chatbots can also provide immense scope for companies to improvise and learn consistently about their own customers with the analytics data that these BOTS make available.
About 5 years ago it was being discussed that AI was around the corner, now it has arrived and it’s up to us to take advantage of this new paradigm of engaging with our customers. Oracle has just announced the new BOT service available as part of its Mobile Enterprise Cloud Platform that is powered by AI and Machine Learning. It is worthwhile to check out how leveraging this BOT technology, enterprises can be innovative and take their customer experience to the next level.
RedThunder.Blog 