Building a Virtual Assistant that Your Customers Want to Talk to (Part 2)
By: Adam Benvie
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, Wa Announcement, AI, Watson Assistant

Building a Virtual Assistant that Your Customers Want to Talk to (Part 2) Adam Benvie Follow Nov 6 · 4 min read

Ensure your customers don’t hit frustrating dead ends with your virtual assistant

Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash

Intro

Here’s Part II of the Watson Assistant blog series on Building a Virtual Assistant Your Customers Want to Talk To. In this three part series we show how Watson Assistant’s web chat UI and service desk integrations help you build a virtual assistant that your customers actually want to talk to resolve their problems.

In part one we discussed how to build customer trust and drive engagement. In part two we demonstrate how to ensure your customers don’t hit frustrating dead ends.

Virtual Assistant Dead Ends

Most people have little faith that virtual assistants will resolve their problems. Why? Because virtual assistants that they’ve tried in the past lead them to dead ends. Maybe you can relate. Hitting a dead end looks like this:

Or this:

Or this:

If you’ve had one of these experiences, best case scenario you got annoyed before picking up the phone to call and wait for a live agent on phone. Worst case scenario you took a screen shot and posted it to social media where the New York Times used it as an example in a column on what’s wrong with customers service in the digital age.

Okay, maybe that’s a dramatic worst case — but chances are you lost faith in the virtual assistant and did not return the next time you had a problem to resolve.

No More Dead Ends

The problem is that virtual assistants, like humans, can’t understand everything, but unlike humans, we expect them to. We train virtual assistants with data, but we don’t teach them to seek clarification, provide alternatives, or get help when they are having a hard time resolving a customer’s problem — until now.

With Watson Assistant’s web chat user interface and service desk integrations, you can ensure your customers never hit a dead end by teaching your assistant to behave more like a human would when they’re having a hard time helping your customers.

Clarify When Confused

When people aren’t sure what someone else is asking them, they ask the other person to clarify their meaning before responding. Watson Assistant’s disambiguation feature teaches your assistant to do the same.

With disambiguation your assistant acknowledges when it is confused between similar meanings and will prompt your customers to clarify. This way your assistant does not risk responding incorrectly with a dead end.

Provide Alternatives When Wrong

A common curtesy in customer service is to provide alternative options when the initial option does not seem to be what the customers is looking for. Watson Assistant suggestions feature now fills this role.

If your assistant provides the wrong response, suggestions provides your customers with alternative paths forward. This way, even when your assistant responds incorrectly, your customers can find the response they’re looking for.

Suggestions are always there for when your customers to access when they are not getting the response they want. As well, your assistant will nudge your customers to consider suggestions when it detects that it’s not providing the right response.

Seek Help When All Else Fails

Even the best customer service representatives can’t solve every customer problem on their own. Sometimes it’s necessary to get help. When it’s clear the customer is losing patience, good customer service representatives will find someone else who has the expertise to help.

With Watson Assistant if your assistant can’t find what your customers need by clarifying with disambiguation or by providing alternative options with suggestions, it will connect them to a live agent who can. Your assistant will detect when it doesn’t seem to be getting your customers what they want, and before your customers give up, it will connect them to a live agent. Once again — dead end avoided.