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It’s no secret that automation is changing how we work and live. From self-driving cars, to buying groceries through Alexa, artificial intelligence solutions help us to automate our lives. AI holds the promise to not only cut down on things we don’t like doing, but also to allow us to focus more time on the things we really care about.
AI in customer experience is no different, and if anything, it holds more exciting potential – because while there’s still a long way to go before consumer automation solutions are widely adopted, the opportunity to save time and cost in customer interactions has finally arrived.
While 2017 was touted as the year of the chatbot, it’s taken a little while longer for technology to mature to the level that it delivers on cost and time savings with no hit to customer experience. That level of service requires AI to be truly intelligent, using a sophisticated knowledge of language and context to deliver truly helpful responses to customer queries. It also requires bots to work in concert with human operators, helping to make human jobs easier as well as saving time and money.
Today, Comm100 are delighted to announce the next generation of our Chatbot, which ticks all of these boxes. This marks a major step forward in our Chatbot roadmap, and underlines our commitment to delivering AI-assisted customer engagement solutions that will help you to adapt to changing customer demands, both now and in the future.
Let’s explore the changes included with this upcoming release.
Chatbots don’t have a great track record with understanding the intent, or context, behind certain words or phrases. Typically, if you’d programmed a chatbot to respond to a question like “When will my order arrive?” the bot would only understand the question asked when it’s worded in exactly the same way.
In our older version Chatbot, we got around this by adding the ability for synonyms to be assigned to any word in a chatbot’s vocabulary – so that instead of Chatbot only understanding the word “order”, it would also understand a selection of similar words, such as “parcel”, “shipment” or “delivery.”
We’ve now gone one better, through infusing our bot with a better knowledge of how humans use language. Natural Language Processing (or NLP) allows chatbots to better understand the meaning and intent of a word or phrase, meaning there’s no need to program in synonyms – your Chatbot will be able to work out the intent of a word or phrase, and deliver appropriate responses based on this.
Of course, if you use any business-specific jargon in your industry, you can still help Chatbot to understand these words or phrases by adding them into Chatbot’s Glossary.
Every business is different – with unique processes, language and ways of getting things done. Now, you can create a Chatbot which understands the intricacies of your service at the touch of a button, harnessing machine learning to build your bot from your past chat logs, infusing it with a goldmine of contextual knowledge even before it begins to talk to your customers.
From a quality perspective, that knowledge of real-life customer scenarios means your bot can approach customer interactions with context that’s personalized to your business. It’s also a huge time-saver, meaning your bot can be effective sooner, rather than needing a long ‘training’ process to help it get up to speed. Partnered with the integration of the bot engine in Comm100 chat, this functionality represents a uniquely easy way for organizations to get their own personalized chatbot.
For our clients who do business in languages other than English, getting a chatbot that understands their language plays a huge part in developing an automated service that helps rather than hinders. And while the above changes are huge steps in making your Chatbot more contextually-aware, language also plays a significant part. After all, contextual awareness isn’t much unless your bot has a good understanding of the language being spoken by your customer.
Our Chatbot now supports 30 different languages — Cantonese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Ukrainian.
We’ve tested Chatbot’s understanding of different intents alongside the supported language sets, and our bot can easily handle conversations in all of these languages.
Chatbot is now available to act as a support agent to help customers while the rest of your agent team are offline. This allows you to operate a 24/7 service, helping you be there for your customers even while your agent team are offline or asleep.
It’s common for chatbots to be used as a gatekeeper, or triage service for queries coming in through chat – an automated first tier service can significantly reduce query counts and time to resolution by providing answers to simple questions, providing the cost savings that contact center leaders are looking for.
Our Chatbot can now accommodate bulk import of your common Q&As or FAQs. Partnered with the ability for Chatbot to learn from your past chat logs, this makes it quick and easy to give your bot the information it needs to become effective very quickly.
As well as answering common visitor queries, our Chatbot can also perform business functions such as booking tickets and making payments, as well as referencing information from your customer’s database to confirm account-specific information. All of this adds up to a Chatbot that’s ready to take on the same role as that of a newer team member – someone who’s ready to help customers with simple queries, leaving your wider team to handle only the more complex questions.
Your agents use a variety of tools at their disposal to help them respond to customers in a way that’s clear and easy to understand – so why should your Chatbot be any different? Images and video are fantastic ways to convey information in a richer way than just text, and our Chatbot now supports both in helping customers find better answers to their queries.
Responding to feedback from our customers, we’ve added the ability for you to monitor or take over Chatbot’s chats – helping you to see, in real time, what your Chatbot is doing. We’ve also added the ability for agents to be notified about certain categories of visitor questions, helping your team to keep tabs on the visitor questions which matter most. Finally, we’ve also added the ability for Chatbot’s ratings to be viewed through our reporting suite. These features work together to help you build a robust quality control framework for your Chatbot, helping you to keep making improvements based on real-time information.
We’ve also added some new reports. One new perspective shows you the average cost per Chatbot chat. We’ve also included the ability for you to compare how your human agents compare with Chatbot, helping you to gain a better understanding of the productivity differences between both groups. The new comparison reports include:
This side-by-side visibility helps you to make better resourcing and management decisions, and helps you to ensure you’re getting the best value from both your Chatbot and human teams.
Building industry-leading customer experiences means that leaders need to select the best technology, data, and practices to build a service that meets the demands of current and future customers. That’s often a big ask, as customer expectations represent a constantly moving target, requiring businesses to adapt to trends with flexibility and agility.
That’s why we’re committed to building an industry-leading chatbot, integrated within our customer engagement platform, that will grow with you as your needs change. This release represents the second update to our Chatbot’s functionality, and you can click the following links to view past release information for the initial release and first iteration.
While we’re really excited about the potential of this new release to create a chatbot that feels and acts like one of your agent team, we’re also excited about the upcoming partnerships and integrations on our roadmap that will help you harness the cutting-edge benefits of AI, without the headaches.
We’d love to share more about Chatbot and show you what yours could do! Book a demo/contact our sales team to see how our Chatbot could help you.
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