Chatbot AI has spun the way we sell to and support customers on its head. The basic premise–you build a content repository, tag it, and that content is used to support your chatbot interacting with customers. In businesses where customers always ask the same set of questions this is extremely effective and has been seen to almost eliminate the need for human support in those sales transactions.
While Chatbot AI is obvious for support, some sales leaders are afraid sales will be lost through incorporating a bot into the process. Not so. AI bots have evolved to provide conversational responses to customer interactions, accessing content related to the question from one or more databases to deliver answers. Sensitive to the tone and emotion of the customer, AI bots can change the course of action to direct a frustrated customer directly to a live agent. AI bots can even learn and evolve over time to improve their accuracy of response.
AI bots will also pull only the most relevant answer from an article to avoid long involved responses to simple questions. It may be configured to provide a link to the full content should the user want further information. Their responses will mirror the customer’s question in their response.
For example, “What are your business hours?” may be answered with “Our business hours are…” Or, if the customer asks, “Are you open on Saturday?” this could be answered with “Our Saturday hours are…” even though the article may simply list the hours.
Depending on the AI tool, AI bots may also provide another channel for communicating time sensitive messages such as service interruptions, sales, or changes in terms, providing the ability to build in prompts. These prompts may also be used to direct certain enquiries to different sources. For example, while a general question may source the data, product interest enquiries could be directed to a live sales agent.
The quality of answer delivered by an AI bot is greatly dependent on the content it accesses and its ability to relate that content to the question posed. For this reason, content should be written using terms a customer would use. It Is recommended that the knowledge-based tool used to gather the content accessed by the AI bot should provide the ability to tag articles with common user words or phrases. One way to improve the accuracy of your bot is to review common help centre searches and questions raised by customers and incorporate them into articles.
Knowledge content should be stored separately from client records to protect private data from being shared on the Internet. AI bots should not have access to client tickets, account information, or other sensitive information.
It is important to know that AI bots can hallucinate. These are answers that are completely wrong but are stated in a factual way. For example, it could state that Michael Jackson was a renowned scientist. Working with a reputable technology organization with the resources to build safeguards into their AI bot programs can greatly minimize the possibility of this type of response from occurring.
Consider that once an AI bot answer is delivered, it may be available on the Internet. For this reason, AI bots should not be configured to access sensitive or private data. This includes client tickets and account profiles. It is important to understand from the technology provider what data the AI bot will access, what happens with the data when an answer is delivered and if/where data will be stored. Established AI bot providers should have a data usage policy that describes this. You also play a role in ensuring the safety of your data by ensuring any content your AI Bot will access is for public consumption.
This service channel offers 24/7 support to customers in a timely and convenient manner. Instead of waiting in a phone queue or hunting through self help articles, customers simply ask the question, and the AI bot does the rest.
Chatbot AI can do a lot to support you scaling up with a fraction of added new workforce but, even better, it can improve sales, support, and the customer onboarding process.
Interested in Chatbot AI? We can support everything from content, to planning, mapping, configuration, testing and more. Reach out today to find out how: 416-477-1862.