Improving Customer Service: Human Agents & AI Chatbots Together
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, improving customer service is paramount. Companies are increasingly blending AI chatbots with human expertise to revolutionize customer interactions.
This synergy promises quicker, more personalized support, transforming customer experiences from mundane to memorable, and setting new standards in service excellence.
While providing fast service is indeed a key component in delivering exceptional customer experiences, what all organizations must know is that modern-day customers expect far more from businesses than just quick resolutions to their problems. In addition to instant answers to support requests, today’s customers demand enhanced personalization and seamless self-service experiences across all channels and devices, which is where Customer Service AI Chatbots come into play.
Because most traditional chatbots are cold, rigid technologies and are limited in the types of responses they can give to users, customers often prefer speaking to a live, human agent when seeking answers to their queries over a chatbot. Due to this preference and dependency on human support agents, chatbots are often left in the dark, causing agents to become swamped with repetitive tasks and customer interactions.
To position chatbots as a preferred line of defense to improve customer service and release service agents from the mundane, organizations must implement Conversational AI and deploy Customer Service AI Chatbots to deliver seamless, personalized self-service experiences to customers.
Rule-Based Chatbots: Wrong Choice to Improve Customer Service
Traditional chatbots, also known as rule-based chatbots, use predefined, “canned” responses when interacting with customers. Human agents create these responses based on what they anticipate a customer might ask and map them in a flow chart for chatbots to use. Because rule-based chatbots rely on such strict, scripted guidelines, they can only handle customer requests that follow a specific path and are incapable of holding conversations that take unexpected turns.
This downside is frustrating to many customers, especially those who have unfamiliar or complex queries. If a customer were to ask a question that chatbots were not programmed to answer, the chatbot would either respond with an error message or pass the customer along to a support agent.
Rule-based chatbots are also ill-equipped to learn and grow autonomously over time. For a chatbot to expand its flow chart with new responses, a human agent would have to continuously update it, giving it less time to focus on higher-value tasks.
Storing and updating customer data is a manual process as well. Because chatbots cannot learn and retain information about a user autonomously, customers have to repeat themselves continually when starting a new conversation or switching between channels.
A rule-based chatbot’s limitations also irritate customers because natural human language is vast, ambiguous, and constantly evolving. There are countless ways to phrase a question, and a single word can have multiple meanings.
Due to their scripted guideline and lack of intent classification, a chatbot may not understand what a customer is trying to fulfill if their sentence structure does not precisely match what is pre-defined in their systems. In this case, customers are either put on hold to speak to a human agent or become so frustrated that they abandon the conversation and brand entirely.
Introducing Customer Service AI Chatbots
Customer Service AI Chatbots are more advanced and sophisticated than rule-based chatbots. With Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities, Customer Service AI Chatbots can understand the intent behind a user’s query to appropriately respond to the customer.
Unlike rule-based chatbots that are confined by a strict set of rules, Customer Service AI Chatbots can improve customer service and experience by responding to queries with precision and flexibility, regardless of how customers phrase their questions, all while doing so in a natural, human-like manner. By providing immediate answers to support requests, these advanced solutions make self-service more streamlined and appealing to customers.
Instead of worrying about long wait times, being misunderstood, or departing from interactions with unresolved issues, customers feel empowered and at ease when conversing with Customer Service AI Chatbots. They not only have the freedom to communicate with Customer Service AI Chatbots as they would with people, but they also have the confidence that their issues will be resolved fuss-free.
By providing customers with an easy, convenient, and enjoyable way to find answers, Customer Service AI Chatbots enable them to self-serve when they want, where they want, resulting in higher customer satisfaction, engagement, and retention.
A Customer Support Agent’s Best Friend
While many assume and fear that Customer Service AI Chatbots will ultimately replace human agents, these advanced technologies complement and assist them by radically transforming their work experience from mundane to meaningful.
By taking all the repetitive, monotonous tasks off the agent’s plate, Customer Service AI Chatbots enable them to focus on priorities that require human creativity and ingenuity — qualities these solutions cannot replace. As more and more customers help themselves, service agents are less overwhelmed with repetitive queries and can focus more on higher priorities.
The intelligence of a Customer Service AI Chatbot is also beneficial to a support agent. Rather than having agents manually import data and knowledge articles into its system, Customer Service AI Chatbots learn autonomously from every interaction, eliminating the need for agent intervention.
Because support agents no longer have to waste valuable time programming and updating Customer Service AI Chatbots, they can focus on challenging projects and issues that require more attention.
The key to meeting and exceeding modern-day user demands is to provide customers with the answers they need when they need them in a personalized, seamless manner. By deploying Customer Service AI Chatbots for customer service improvement, organizations can deliver these frictionless, personalized self-service experiences to every customer while taking the burden off their support teams.
Aisera offers the most feature-comprehensive self-service automation solution on the market, which blends Conversational AI and Conversational automation into one SaaS cloud for IT Service Desks and Customer Services.
Leveraging these advanced capabilities, Aisera proactively auto-resolves requests to meet ever-growing user demands for quick responses, immediate resolution, and personalized interactions across all channels. With this scalable, easy-to-deploy solution, your organization can improve service team productivity, reduce operating costs, and enhance user and employee experiences.