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Customer experience is the new battleground
for ecommerce. It's the key differentiator that most brands are looking at to
separate them from their competitors. If you have a premium quality customer
experience, users will be willing to pay more for your product.
According to a PWC
study, convenience and efficiency are two of the most important
aspects of a positive experience. That's why many online businesses have turned
to chatbots to provide instant, round-the-clock, service.
The Role of Chatbots in Online
Business
Traditional chatbots have been around for
quite some time. These are rules-based programs that can respond with pre-set
phrases. They can also perform simple automated tasks. These kinds of bots have
proven useful for streamlining simple customer service functions.
Businesses using CPaaS (communications
platform as a service) software can integrate chatbots into multiple channels.
A CPaaS system lets you use APIs to customize your communications pipeline.
There are online resources for more on cpaas
meaning.
How Can Chatbots Enhance the
Customer Experience?
Even a simple chatbot has some clear
advantages over using contact forms or human agents.
1.
24/7 Service
Chatbots work 24 hours a day, giving your
customers support whenever they need it. For answers to frequently asked
questions or simple transactions, they're a more cost-effective option than
staffing a contact center.
2.
Lead Qualifying
If you're using chatbots on a retail website,
they can pre-qualify customers for you. They can ask questions to gauge the
customers' level of interest and engagement. Your sales team will get
pre-qualified leads to act on from these interactions.
3.
Faster Resolutions
Any simple query can be resolved almost
instantaneously by a chatbot. There's no delay in looking up information with cloud-enabled data management. This can have a
positive effect on customer satisfaction when combined with good service.
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The Rise of Chatbot AI
Yet, these bots have clear limitations. After
convenience and efficiency, the most important factors of a customer experience
are friendly and knowledgeable service. That creates a problem, how do we
combine the speed and efficiency of a bot with these human traits?
That's where AI-driven chatbots are attempting
to bridge the gap. These more advanced chatbots use machine learning
and natural language processing. This means they are capable of interpreting
customer queries with more nuance.
This is an important step in more human
communication. A rules-based bot can't deviate from its set patterns. It can't
appreciate the context and it can't provide customized responses. A
well-trained AI bot works with data in real-time to do all these things.
Chatbot AI has developed to a point where it
can be integrated with your mainframe modernization software to support
users.
This doesn't necessarily mean they can provide
human agent levels of interaction, though. Making a chatbot seem more human
isn't just a one-sided process. How the user feels about their interaction will
ultimately determine how "human" the chatbot feels.
Why Does Humanizing Chatbots
Matter?
Personalization is important to customers. Recent studies have shown that up to 60% of
customers will become repeat buyers after receiving a personalized experience.
If a customer has to converse with an automated assistant, that sense of
personalization is lost.
Using modern database
warehouse storage and CRM software
integration, AI chatbots can see existing customer information. This
allows for a seamless transition into the personalized service a user would
expect from other channels.
A positive user experience also requires
friendly service. You can work a friendly tone into an automated bot's
messaging but it's much harder to make a conversation with a bot seem natural.
There's a bit of a contradiction in what
customers want here. Efficiency and convenience are best facilitated by bots.
Friendly and knowledgeable service is best provided by humans. AI chatbots are
helping to reduce the differences but they have some way to go.
You can use related metrics like customer
satisfaction scores to optimize your chatbot. But, if you really want
to make interactions with your chatbots more human-like, then some human
intervention is needed.
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How to Add Human Characteristics
to Your Chatbots
It's important to remember that it's not just
how the bot acts and converses that matters. It's also down to the psychology
of the user and how they perceive the bot. Just like with human advisors,
optics, tone, and message are all equally important for bots.
Match Your Brand Image and Tone
When you think of the most iconic chatbots,
it's unlikely that some automated online assistant comes to mind. You're
probably going to think of an AI-assisted virtual assistant like Siri or Alexa.
That's because these bots have personality.
They don't just give pre-programmed responses, they converse with the user.
They're capable of interpreting the context of speech as well as the content.
They can even tell jokes and have spontaneous interactions.
When you make a chatbot a part of your business's digital transformation,
you need a clear picture of what you want your bot to be. The personality
should match your brand image to avoid clashes in tone.
You need to know how customers view your brand
and what personality types you attract. Many businesses build psychological
profiles based on the 12 archetypes of psychoanalyst Carl Jung as a model.
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These characteristics can go a long way in
determining how your bot should converse. These archetypes have different
values, likes, and dislikes. The bots' tone and character aren't the only
factors in conveying a personality, though.
A Face and A Name
Image is important, if your customers can put
a face to your bot it will lead to more positive interactions. Some businesses
have swapped out text-based chatbots for digital humans. These are AI assistants with a
computer-generated digital presence.
It's long been established that most of our
communication as humans happens non-verbally. Our body language, tone, and
facial expressions are more important to conversations than our actual words.
That gives these bots the advantage as they
can use body language and facial expressions to assist in conversations. Using
an omnichannel AI chatbot with a digital presence
is, in theory, the best of all worlds.
They have access to the same integration of
customer information as an AI bot. They also have the advantage of seamless
operation across multiple channels. Then, they have the human traits conveyed
by a digital human presence.
Of course, the costs of implementing a
solution this advanced would be significant. Simply giving your AI bot a
friendly avatar and a human name can be an effective way to connect with
customers.
Speech Patterns & Filler
Words
Humans aren't perfect, we hesitate, we say
words like "um" and "err" and we use slang and jargon. Bots don't need any of
this but, sometimes, having a few of these human traits can make them more
endearing.
Simple gestures like input delays with
"(chatbot) is typing" messages can make a conversation flow more naturally.
From the way your bot constructs sentences to how many contractions it uses,
there are a lot of variables to consider.
That's why it's more effective to have a bot
that can make contextual choices. An AI can match its speech patterns to the
situation or to a customer profile. This is important no matter whether you're
using a text-based assistant or voiced chatbot for your internet
based phone service.
Emotional Processing
New technological innovations are helping
chatbot AI to get more sophisticated. Thanks to technologies like Microsoft's Azure cognitive services, AI can
now recognize emotions both from images and text.
This kind of sentiment analysis is important.
When we converse with each other, we naturally show empathy. This is something
that AI struggles to account for. With emotional recognition, AI's can respond
to how a customer is feeling with more natural empathy.
If you integrate enterprise
grade software with your existing infrastructure, you can use it to
improve your customer experience. Think of how much more effective your IVR
would be if you could recognize the emotion in a customer's voice.
Seamless Handovers
Just as there may be situations that your
current system can't handle and it may require ibm i modernization software to provide a
better experience. Similarly, there will always be situations that chatbots,
even advanced ones, can't handle without additional support. If your chatbot
gets stuck in a loop and can't progress a customer's query, then any semblance
of human interaction is broken.
It's important to build your chatbot with this
in mind. The whole purpose of having these advanced chatbots is to create a
consistent customer experience. Whether a user is talking to a human or an AI,
they should be getting the same great service.
That means you need to ensure that when your
chatbot encounters something it can't handle, it can recognize that. Then, you
need to build a seamless handover process to an appropriate human agent.
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Final Thoughts: AI & Human
Intervention
Even the best AI needs human input to reach
their potential. The progress of an AI-assisted bot doesn't end at
implementation, it can learn and refine its behavior. As you work with your
bot, you can guide it to the correct outcomes.
There are web app testing tools that will help you test
the functionality of your bots. Yet, only a person can tell you how interacting
with your bot feels. Use feedback from your staff and customers to help your
chatbot build connections.
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ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Richard Conn -
Senior Director, Demand Generation, 8x8
Richard Conn is the Senior Director for Demand
Generation at 8x8, a leading communication platform with integrated contact
center, hosted phone solutions, voice, video, and chat
functionality. Richard is an analytical & results-driven digital marketing
leader with a track record of achieving major ROI improvements in fast-paced, competitive
B2B environments. Richard has also written for other domains such as Kustomer and involve.me. Check out his LinkedIn.