Month: July 2021

AI has been revolutionizing the face of customer service globally- more so during the pandemic- with AI-powered chatbots and other virtual agents taking the center stage. An increasing need to offer streamlined end-to-end customer experience is the primary reason why more and more firms are aggressively investing in modern technology to improve their customer support. However, traditional ways of providing customer service- which was solely based on humans- proved to be tedious both from the employee as well as from the customers’ perspectives.

While customers (especially the millennials and gen-z users) were tired of pressing buttons to avail themselves different kinds of services, service reps also considered that answering the same questions repeatedly was monotonous. This is why most organizations in recent times have decided to switch to virtual agents, which use AI, ML and other tools to frame and deliver customized responses to different types of customer requests and queries.

However, total dependence on such virtual agents is not feasible yet, and recent surveys have revealed that most customers are not quite happy with their overall experience with bots.

There are two major problems that customers face when dealing with chatbots:

1.Before making critical decisions (for example, buying a high-involvement product), customers often seek answers to complex questions from the brands, which usually involve several follow-up questions. This category of questions- which take longer periods for resolution based on the level of complexity or amount of information involved- are not handled well by bots.

The virtual agents either give up and redirect the customer to human service reps or display links that the customers can wade through to resolve their queries by themselves, something that they might have already tried. Hence, it can be inferred that bots do not have the capability to identify tasks that customers have already performed via other channels on the website, and this is one of the reasons why bots might fail in handling complex customer issues.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

2. Another area where virtual customer service agents are not performing adequately is in understanding human emotions accurately. We cannot ignore the fact that even the most sophisticated AI tools will not be able to replicate the complex range of human emotions. With the recent integration of sentiment analysis, companies have been able to solve this issue up to a certain extent. Conversational chatbots backed by sentiment analysis technology can determine the emotions and tonalities that are hidden behind a customer’s message (voice or text), and accordingly frame and deliver the right responses.

Nevertheless, sentiments are highly subjective in nature and vary from person to person, which often reduces the accuracy of sentiment analysis. Emotions like irony, sarcasm, humour etc. cannot be comprehended by this tool, which results in higher detachment of the customer from the organization and creates a negative impression about the brand. Case in point: Indigo’s (unintentionally) hilarious response to a dissatisfied customer’s tweet which was laden with sarcasm. (For the uninitiated, you can read about the fiasco here).

Problems like these necessitate the need for employing a combination of human and virtual customer service agents by organizations. While most of them would prefer talking to chatbots to get their issues resolved fast, customers also need to know that there are human agents available if their queries are too complex for the chatbots to resolve. There should be a logical escalation from bots to human agents. Handoff should be timed in a manner so that it occurs as soon as the bot fails to resolve the customer’s issue the second time.

The human service rep should also get a summary of all the tasks that the user has already performed when it was conversing with the chatbot so that he is updated and takes off from there. This will avoid repetition and thereby save time. Such practice will reassure the customers that the company or the brand actually cares for them. An example of an efficient chatbot would be one whose problem-solving capability is clearly specified to the customer before he starts using it. If the chatbot makes it clear to the customer right in the beginning that in case it is unable to resolve his/her issue, he/she would automatically be redirected to human service reps, it will be able to earn the customer’s trust. Therefore, through proper expectation setting, the customer is less likely to get disappointed.

Customer support is the section over which a company has more control in framing a positive brand perception in the minds of the customers. By designing efficient bots and by training service reps to communicate with users in a manner that perfectly aligns with the overall brand value proposition, the company will be able to retain happy customers and convince them to keep using its services.

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The Winning Combination of Humans and Bots for a Seamless Customer Experience was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The future of marketing is here, and it’s not just the robots that will be writing content for you. It’s artificial intelligence, or ai. You may think that this isn’t possible because robots can’t do things like emotional resonance and creativity but ai has been around for a while now. I’m talking about chatbots– computer programs designed to simulate conversation with human beings through text or speech interfaces to solve problems, answer questions, or fulfill customer requests via various digital channels like social media platforms. This article will explore how Chatbots and Ai are the future of marketing and why they’re crucial for your business.

How it all began…

The history of artificial intelligence dates back to ancient times when Greek philosopher Aristotle purportedly created the first known written dialogue for artificial intelligence. Then, in 1950, Alan Turing published a paper on computing machinery and intelligence. He proposed what is now called the ‘Turing test’ -a way of measuring how ‘intelligent’ a computer is by communicating with it over a text-based channel.

In 1991, IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer chess-playing system to beat a reigning world champion (Garry Kasparov). Since then, several other world champions have lost against computers such as Watson, built by IBM. In addition, the appearance of artificial intelligence applications has changed our lives in ways that are hard to imagine; self-driving cars and humanoid robots are just two examples within the scope of AI.

Looking at the past, we see that artificial intelligence helps us solve complicated problems by sharing our knowledge with an ai application. In general, these applications can do more than just one thing. A good example is myJarvis (an AI-powered personal assistant), which combines chatbot technology with Google Assistant to become a powerful virtual companion for anyone who needs help organizing their work and life. With MyJarvis, you can request information on anything from calories to currency conversions, send messages or emails, create reminders, set alarms, and access skills like language translation and local weather updates. It’s also great for business because it cuts down time spent opening multiple apps to answer questions.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a significant shift in how businesses interact with customers. Automation tools like chatbots are becoming increasingly popular as they make our lives easier, provide solutions to problems that seem unsolvable, and free up human resources so business owners can focus on more important tasks than answering simple questions. Relying too heavily on automation can lead to feelings of anxiety or rejection when bots fail-but it’s better to get this right before your competitors do! Some naysayers claim chatbots aren’t intelligent enough to replace humans. Still, luckily new technologies like machine learning can work hand in hand with artificial intelligence to give users the perfect balance of automated systems and human interaction.

Chatbots are helpful in so many ways, and you can create one with software like ManyChat. ManyChat is a tool that makes it easy to design a chatbot for your own business. Currently, ManyChat allows you to build chatbots for Facebook Messenger and Instagram Private Message (both for business pages), and it even integrates with many other platforms.

Remember that when it comes to chatbots, they are only as good as the people who build them. But luckily, tools like ManyChat help make building chatbots easier, and with the use of ai, you can even make them smarter. Automated chatbots are a welcome addition to any business, and they come in handy by helping us filter through unnecessary information and giving us instant answers.

There are plenty of people who think that chatbots are here to stay, but others say this is just another fad. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle-chatbots aren’t going anywhere, especially if you consider how many daily questions can be solved easily with an ai application.

Facebook’s Chatbots Index reported that over 90% of users feel “truly engaged” by bots, and this technology is only going to get more intelligent and more helpful in the future.

Artificial intelligence has been around for decades, but recently its use has exploded because businesses can see its apparent benefits. AI helps companies perform faster and be smarter with their customers’ data without wasting valuable human resources. Facebook’s Chatbots Index reported that over 90% of users feel “truly engaged” by bots, and this technology is only going to get more intelligent and more helpful in the future. Businesses have to be patient.

Undoubtedly, AI changed the world of business over the years, but let’s examine how it can work for you: Automation with ManyChat saves companies 50% time on their customer service department to focus on building relationships with their clients. Creating chatbots using ManyChat does not require any experience or complicated programming language; they’ve already helped thousands of people succeed with this technology. Automating your business gives you a clear advantage, and it allows you to serve more customers than ever before, all while getting an important task out of the way so that you can concentrate on other things.

You can get started using ManyChat to build man-made (not ai) built chatbots for free and even take my free ManyChat Foundations course at https://stellar.tips/Foundations.

Try ManyChat for yourself https://stellar.tips/ManyChat

And if you want to make your ManyChat chatbot even more innovative, you can do that by integrating ai tools like Watson Assistant and DialogFlow.

Automation is not only here to stay, but it’s going to grow even stronger in the future as AI gets smarter. Businesses of all sizes worldwide have already used ManyChat, and now they’re focusing their efforts on creating chat automation for Instagram! This opens up many new possibilities for small businesses that want to reach larger audiences without spending a fortune on marketing campaigns. In addition, automated solutions are great at doing repetitive tasks or answering simple questions like “how much does shipping cost?”

In conclusion, ai is changing the way companies do business for the better. It helps businesses get smarter, be faster and develop stronger relationships with their clients. Creating chatbots will soon become second nature to companies worldwide because it makes sense to leverage technology to become more efficient and effective than ever before. Automation will always be necessary for our quickly evolving society. Still, luckily there are ways we can use technology to make things better for everyone involved without taking away or replacing human jobs entirely. Are you ready for a bright future? Let’s build chatbots with ManyChat so that we can all lighten up our workload and get down to the business of making money!

Sources:

A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence. https://askthecandidates2012.com/a-brief-history-of-artificial-intelligence/

Fun Fact: 90% of this blog post was written by ai! Can you believe that. I used a tool called Conversion.ai to save a ton of time by using the power of Jarvis and machine learning to help write this article. Sure I needed to tweak it a bit but what a HUGE time saver. If you want to try Convesion.ai out for yourself give it a whirl for 7 days free and if you sign up you can get 10,000 credits on me! https://stellar.tips/ai

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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The Future of Business and Chatbots was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.