Why Customer Service is not Ready for Fully Integrated AI

When we think of AI, robots with human-like characteristics come to mind – Terminator, Chappie, and Bicentennial Man etc. But AI is already being integrated more subtly – Google’s search algorithms, Apple’s Siri, and IBM’s Watson.

2017 saw a big focus on implementing AI into customer service, however the results were unimpressive. Facebook reached a 70% failure rate with their chatbots, who diverted away from the script and continued communicating, trying to imitate human speech.

Our Experience of Existing Chatbots

Our team also tested out a provider offering a chatbot service. Individually, for different questions we all got the same results – the chatbot did not have the answer or provide a correct reply when it offered one, resulting in being asked whether we wanted to send a message to the company, try again with the chatbot or select a knowledge base topic to read more.

Whichever option a customer chooses the interaction oozes frustration, as they would have to wait to be contacted defeating the object of them starting a chat session, go round in circles with the bot that couldn’t answer the enquiry the first time, or have to spend time reading a lot of information when they just want a direct reply.

It can reflect badly for the company, as they are meant to be showing off what their technology can do, however it is just displaying that it doesn’t work as expected and has to rely on other tactics as back up. This creates more opportunity for enquiries to be answered by a secondary method/channel rather than on first contact, a metric that is taken very seriously within contact centres!

Our Work on AI Technology

According to Gartner, the Technology Research Company, only 11% of customer interactions involved emerging technology such as chatbots in 2017, this is set to a more substantial amount within 5 years. Click4Assistance will continue to research and work on this type of technology, however as it is currently in an immature state and not completely reliable we are not rushing to have AI fully in control of customer engagement.

We have recently released our new enhanced version of the solution; ‘Experiences’ by Click4Assistance. This variant includes technology that focuses on automating suggestions for operators to select from whilst in chat.

When a visitor is typing their message the solution can display this to the operator in real time, whilst our algorithm measures whether the message contains at least a certain percentage of text that is already stored in the system’s knowledge base. It will also check for whether any part of the message matches any keywords assigned to the replies.

The system will order these in terms of relevance, allowing the operator to select an answer and edit it before sending if necessary, or completely ignore the suggestion and write their own response. By having a human representative fully in control of chat, they can ensure that they are replying appropriately to the visitor’s enquiry and can help to increase first contact rate. Having some automation involved is beneficial to helping speed up the operator’s response rate, ensuring the visitor is receiving a speedy and accurate reply, helping to meet their expectations.

Click4Assistance invests in research and development and will continue enhancing communication technology as the concepts become reliable and proven to improve the customer journey. For more information on ‘Experiences’ by Click4Assistance contact our team on 01268 524628 or email theteam@click4assistance.co.uk.