Are Chatbots your weakest link?
When we think about ‘customers’ what do we think of? Shoppers walking down high streets, market traders haggling about prices, smooth-talking salesmen taking customers into bargains? Perhaps not. Today all of these activities increasingly take place online.
Whether we are Googling a fantastically aspirational experience, or comparing the prices of boring everyday purchases, we are likely to be served by the online assistance known as the chatbot. Invented in 1996, four decades later chatbots are everywhere.
To date, 67% of online shoppers have used them and 1.4 billion people regularly use them. They guide us through the early stages of research, making sure we complete purchases with a checkout and even popping back on to make sure we do not abandon our online shopping cart.
The right chatbot can make or break a business. Customers generally loathe brands with poor chatbots. On the other hand, the improvement from a smart chatbot implementation can increase upsells, cross-sells and the ultimate business win, brand loyalty.
The weakest link but no goodbye
When you think about the impact of chatbots in this light, it begs the question why so many of them are so very, very poor. Whether it is slow response times, or questions so generic, they seem insulting, for many organisations, chatbots are their weakest link. But in today’s online frontline, nobody is saying goodbye to the chatbot.
So why is the status quo so poor and what can be done about it? The answer is data: in two ways. Specifically, whether the chatbot has enough to service a visiting customer's needs and beyond that whether it can intelligently collect and collate the data it receives during a session.
Most early adopters of chatbots are now realising what was state-of-the-art the first time around cannot keep up with the expectations of today’s digital-native customers. The new generation of chatbot users want instant response, the ability to scan submitted documents to extract data and the intelligence to anticipate queries. While nothing compares to a human expert, today’s chatbots should not be limited by yesterday’s tech.
Strength through intelligence
No amount of hard coding can make yesterday’s chatbots fit for purpose today. What is required is intelligent automation, the ability to adapt to changes in real time requires Artificial Intelligence (AI) to be built in from the start. Luckily our founders know this from the start. In fact, they conceived chatbots as the ‘new ingestion point’ for AI.
Chatbots with AI at their heart change everything. They can respond to changes in customer behaviours and adapt processes to speed up responses. They can scan documents intelligently to measurably improve the customer experience for those applying for credit, loans, mortgages or just buying and inquiring online.
But even more impressively, enterprises can set up and empower chatbots to make decisions and even take calculated business risks. There is a lot relying on the accuracy of this decision-making. With intelligent automation at their heart, chatbots can be the difference between turning the right customers off or making a smart bet on tomorrow’s customers, who a previous chatbot generation would robotically reject.
Chatbots should be far from an afterthought, left to the last minute of a web-build. They offer a way for brands to differentiate themselves at the time it matters most; the ‘moment of truth’ when one swipe of a thumb could make the difference between a sale and a pass. They cannot be the weakest link for customer service, because they truly are the new frontline for customer service.
