Of late, chatbots are the rage, and their use has been proposed in various business scenarios. Sales, Marketing, Retail, Banking—you name it. In our mind, one of the best use cases for chatbots is in Customer Service. Here are some ways chatbots can enhance customer service and make agents more productive:
- Simpler Interface: The chatbot interface simplifies work for the over-worked agent. There is no need for training. The interface works across channels—web and mobile.
- Increased Productivity: Agents can access Cases/Incidents; create new ones, update, and escalate. Manual data entry can be eliminated as chatbots do the work. Agents can receive notifications if a case is escalated. Reports related to service management like number of tickets, resolution time and more can be viewed.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): Agents can, for example, create a new Case using text or speech. Work becomes more intuitive.
- Integration with Service Management systems: Chatbots need to integrate with the leading Service Management systems to make them truly useful.
- Integration with Knowledge Management systems/Artificial Intelligence (AI): This is critical as chatbots can then search the existing database, and provide automated answers, thus freeing up the time agents have to interact with customers. This sets the foundation for AI, and offer increasing levels of automated interaction as machine learning becomes more advanced.
- Hybrid: Chatbots will not replace human agents. In more complex situations, there will be a need to understand the context, and handover the conversation to a human agent.
- Omnipresent: Chatbots need to be able to work on any popular messaging platform—be it Microsoft Skype, Slack, Facebook, or others. Service needs to be delivered wherever customers are present.
Chatbots need to deliver Value in the end—either to customers, employees, or partners. If you are thinking of deploying bots for your enterprise, be they for customer service or for other areas, pl. let me know. Unvired has built over 200 bots, and we would love to share our experience with you as well as learn from you.