Emotionless Chatbots Are Taking Over Customer Service. Good News for Customers?

“These days it’s really not easy to talk to a real person on a customer service line”

With the rise of self-service, most of the time when you have a question for your bank or hospital, or need some other service, you hear automated messages first, as if the company were afraid you might disturb its actual service staff. With the rise of chatbots, customers may feel even worse about this.

Chatbots are a product of AI. They usually appear in the customer service channels where customers contact a business, and the point is to answer customers’ questions in human-like conversation rather than in the traditional search-engine style. Uber, for example, already uses this technology to book rides for customers and provide other services. It replaces traditional self-service, which often can’t even recognize a customer’s basic needs, let alone provide good service or truly solve the customer’s problem.

With chatbots, though, it is hard for customers to have a real conversation with the business. From the business’s point of view, chatbots certainly cut costs. They also spare employees many unpleasant customer service tasks and filter out trivial questions, so agents can focus on customers with complex needs. What’s not to like? But if a chatbot can’t recognize problems perfectly, does it help or hinder? In reality, despite many impressive technical advances, chatbots still can’t solve overly complex problems.

“AI is great, but not good enough”
The value of human agents lies in handling angry customers’ emotions and unusual or unexpected cases. Businesses usually expect every issue to pass through the chatbot first and reach a human agent only if it can’t be solved. But along the way, customers may fail to find a solution because the chatbot isn’t smart enough, become angry, and even switch to a business that can solve their problem. When customers react this way, human agents can’t step in to rescue the situation in time, and a customer is quietly lost.

“Sometimes customers just want to vent, not have the problem solved”
Sometimes truly good customer service depends on an agent’s empathy, which can’t be codified into rules and copied into a chatbot. Understanding context is a hard challenge for AI, now and in the future. Even so, the cost savings and other benefits of automation look very attractive, and chat and other customer service bots will keep expanding. But for now, the result is often less flexibility and more complaints. Businesses should think carefully about the point at which a chatbot should hand off, so customers don’t get stuck in a loop with no answer. After all, emotional connection between people is something machines can never replace!

Source: abc.net.au