Are Chatbots the future of efficient customer service?
Listen to this articleChatbots have come a long way since the days of SmarterChild, launched in 2001. For those who don’t remember, SmarterChild was a chatbot that didn’t serve much purpose other than to entertain the youth of AOL IM and MSN Messenger. Fast forward 17 years and we can see countless companies using chatbots for beneficial purposes, to support their brands and provide quality customer service.
Through entrepreneurs like Tej Kohli, Rewired investor, times have greatly changed since SmarterChild first ‘LOLed’. With the support of AI technology, new ventures are improving the quality of life for people every day – and through exciting developments, sophisticated chatbots now promise to transform the way we interact with businesses and each other.
Chatbots and Customer Service
The introduction of chatbots into the forces of customer services have been seen as a blessing by many because of the convenience they bring with them. Consumers no longer have to wait for business hours to have their questions answered, with chatbots available 24/7. Gone too are the days of waiting on hold, as there are no limits to how many customers can talk to a chatbot at once, delivering the instant gratification that we all crave.
While it is clearly evident when you are speaking to a chatbot versus a human due to immediate response times and robotic answers, chatbots are relatively intuitive to our needs because of their ability to recognize keywords and find the correct answers to questions in their extensive databases. For businesses, chatbots have the potential to save them money they would have spent on employing extra customer service agents, as these online conversations with chatbots minimize the need for human interactions.
They Know It All and Remember It All, Too – Even the Little Things
What chatbots have that humans lack is the ability to store expansive amounts of data. Through chatbots, companies are able to store their consumers’ data to be used in the future – from remembering what color shirt a customer usually buys to when their birthday is, companies now have access to data that a live customer service agent may not always be able or remember to collect. They can now send out targeted messages to their consumers using information the chatbots have gathered through their interactions.
The Downfalls of Artificial Customer Service and Why Humans Are Not Out of a Job
While there are many benefits of chatbots with their seemingly limitless capabilities, they are not humans. When conflicts arise, chatbots don’t have the compassion or the authority to provide customers with the response they’re looking for. It is for this reason that, at least for now, human customer service agents are indispensable in order to support their online counterparts and be able to step in when necessary. Furthermore, to respond to this need for human contact and prove that AI is not taking away the jobs of humans, many companies hire agents all around the world to keep their customers happy.
Views of AI vary widely across the board: while Tesla CEO Elon Musk fears a future of AI, supporters like Tej Kohli, AI enthusiast, are placing great emphasis on its ability to transform our society for the better – and these customer service chatbots seem to provide an unexpected case for the latter argument.
