Chatbots and virtual agents

- Chatbots and virtual agents, which serve as automated customer service tools, may not be new to customer service functions, yet they are growing wildly in sophistication. Everyone seems to define them a bit differently and these terms are used widely, so let's think of them as replacements for humans in customer service interactions. Any place you chat with a human might actually be a machine. You may have been annoyed with them in the past and yet, now you're enlightened and surprised or may not even know you're talking to one. Chatbots are commonly used as messaging tools from within an app or on a website to provide help, assistance, and customer service. They and their synonymous virtual agents are not just text-based, they can use voice, too. The use of natural language processing adds on to speech recognition, voice technologies, and natural language generation by mimicking human-like tones in speech, and many times, machine learning is used as well to find patterns and mimic talking to a human. Previous generations of chatbots used templated responses based on rules and key words, and advanced ones is where there's a virtual agent term that comes into play. They can adapt and analyze to respond more accurately to less structured situations with a human tone. Imagine you're interacting via message or voice with an organization and you can't tell if it's a human or not, and mid-stream, it might even change without you noticing. Now, to build requirements for this, as you can imagine, it would be really hard to ask business stakeholders what their exact detailed requirements are. So, think about the focus on the user goal and decompose it into scenarios then experiments so that we can train the machine and escalate to a human when needed. So, simulations and scenarios would be the focus here. In a call center, for example, we might see a chatbot or virtual agent on a website before connecting the call to the call center, seamlessly handing off the interaction or from an app, connecting to the call center transferring a chat to a call, answering the phone first and escalating without the caller knowing once there's a confidence level broken or a caller tone might signal frustration. All of this makes me want to experiment with so many cool ideas on how to improve the operations and customer experience. Let's look at how to identify where chatbots or virtual agents might be useful in the processes you support. Anywhere there's an opportunity to instantly connect with users or customers and help them solve problems or enhance their experience with some assistance, and responding to emails customers send in and need a reply, a chatbot could anwser them more quickly. Also, calls that customers or internal users make. And next, places where a user or customer sends a text or chat message and waits for a reply. And last, places where your users could use more support and access to an assistant of sorts to help them with their transactions or questions. Chatbots and virtual agents provide a great opportunity to speed up responses to customers and save operationally for organizations of all kinds. Are you ready to discuss this with your team? Ready to define and build an experiment to try it out? As you are considering these questions, focus on the customer's end goal to select the right place to make the interaction as positive as possible.