Should Chatbots ‘Grow Up’ in the age of advancing Customer Experiences?
By: Sarba Basu
Tags: Experience Design, Customer Experience, Technology, Chatbots

Recently, we saw Benedict Cumberbatch talking to his car in the new MG Hector advertisement. With a more human touch to their AI-powered voice assist that claims to understand the user better, MG intends to increase customer engagement. This growing technology poses the question if virtual assistants should evolve to scale up customer experience.

A while back chatbots were destined to be the next big thing in the world of customer care. A bevy of frustrated customers later, this form of conversational AI is still in the growing phase and is still predicted to change the course of technology and be the future of customer service!

On the other hand, and on the other end of the spectrum, lies the opinion that an artificial touch can never replace human interaction, and AI won’t be taking over the world anytime soon. ‘Bot revolution’ is probably best to look at only on silver screens. However, that doesn’t negate the fact that more and more companies are looking to elevate their experience through chatbots. An Oracle survey reveals that 80% of businesses are looking to invest in chatbots by 2020 as reported by BI.

The current scenario, however, looks bleak going by the results of a recent report by Forrester on why chatbots have been failing today. One of the primary reasons for customer frustration is that bots are more time consuming than helpful. The burning question, now, is what are brands, invested in customer experience, looking to do when it comes to stepping up their game for customers?

A chat with a few creative minds at Moonraft Innovation Labs, who drive experience design, led to differing notions on chatbots and customer experience.

Creative director, Konark Ashara is of the opinion that chatbots can leverage several other areas apart from only query resolution, thus further elevating customer experience. Especially when it comes to banking, a chatbot can be all-encompassing and not remain isolated only to customer care. With a wider perspective, the bot can retain customers and not lose them mid-way due to ineffective problem-solving. Banks can use bots to connect with users, increasing engagement. Instances such as nudges toward online bill payments, where the user only has to authenticate the payment, and the actual transaction is automated, show that chatbots can go beyond mere reminders and notifications to an actual conversation with the user to perform the said banking activity. Travel and finance reimbursements, also, dealt in a hassle-free manner taking banking customer experience to the desired level. A survey by Juniper research predicting that banks can automate 90% of their customer interactions through chatbots by 2022 validates Konark’s thoughts on ‘bot’ evolution.

Brands can explore several options as long as they figure out a way to channel virtual assistants through data-driven organized insights to make an intuitive and actually useful customer experience.

Bots should provide assistance when and where users need it as opposed to the unnecessary and inconvenient pop-ups.

With AI and machine learning, a vast potential can be tapped into not just for banking but for most industries such as e-commerce and media channels as well. The conversational approach can add an element of surprise, further engaging customers with higher powers of personalization and recommendation.

Meet Jill Watson: Advocates of chatbot development would look at cases such as Jill Watson, a bot designed to be a teaching assistant answering myriads of student questions transitioning some of the training load of online course instructors of Georgia tech professors ensuring personal attention given to each and every student.

When bots are your life companions: A Russian technology company, Endurance, specializes in developing companion chatbots for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. It not only provides a tireless stream of conversation, but the records help in detecting deviations and conversational patterns enabling physicians to identify potential degradation of memory function.

It’s probably cases such as these that help build predictions about chatbots being the future of customer experience. But, when it comes to looking at how far we’ve come, the verdict isn’t really tilted toward bots.

Forbes studied the CGS survey about consumer preferences for customer service engagements, and according to them, chatbots are basically killing customer service.

The results of most surveys come out with very low percentages of positive feedback on chatbots interaction. Last year, Opinium Research found that 43% of global consumers have engaged with chatbots, and only 38% of them have responded to successful query resolution.

Consumers still prefer human interaction over chatbots. That’s probably because of the trend of chatbots failing to answer complex technical customer questions. Brands lack in creating an exhaustive database which reflects their inability to understand the customer. Customer frustration is caused mostly by misaligned messaging and conversational dead-ends, which happen when bots exist without any specific strategy.

Brands have been using bots just for the sake of having bots. Jumping on the ‘bot wagon’ is merely a fad which has fallen flat with the innumerable customer complaints on inadequate service received. A survey by Digitas reports that 73% of customers never want to interact with bots again. So much for the predictions on expanded bot usage when people are still preferring to order food online themselves or book cabs or even buy clothes online without heightened technological intervention!

Which brings us to the prime question: do chatbots need to grow or should they be dismissed completely?

Creative director at Moonraft Innovation Labs, Sanjay Nair, feels that brands need to really decide whether the investment on chatbot technology is worth going the mile. Relevance should be the key when it comes to chatbots. Do all brands need a chatbot for their website/application to cater to customer queries? It is great to hear of stories where bots have evolved to become more than just customer care executives — helping insomniacs get through the night or becoming stylists by picking up the right outfits. However, it is important to figure out if your business needs a chatbot or if you should ignore the hoopla and continue to focus on other areas of customer-care improvement.

There are certain complex decisions where a customer will definitely need human assistance. For instance, a car salesman always finds a way to connect emotionally with the customer for better conversions, or companies who sell insurance will definitely not be able to survive with virtual artificial agents. The art of selling anything needs a thorough understanding of consumer psychology, which, let’s face it, can be quite complicated!

Perhaps, what’s most important for organizations is not to build castles in the air, and fix basic issues first. Before delving into NLP and AI, the basic rules engine has room for improvement. Back in 2017, Facebook learned it the hard way when their AI-led experiments with bots on Messenger hit a wall with 70% of requests leading to human intervention.

Socially Awkward — Microsoft Tay

When Microsoft launched an AI-powered conversational agent in an attempt to understand social behavior, the research project backfired massively due to the inability of the bot to filter out socially offensive or sensitive concepts.

When ‘Weather’ plays spoilsport — Poncho, Weather bot

When ‘Poncho’ the bot, designed to report the weather for a requested location, failed to recognize words such as ‘weekend’, people got tired of never really getting their questions answered. The programming lacked an exhaustive understanding of ways and patterns of consumer queries.

If customers only ever had binary questions, chatbots would have thrived providing the best customer experience. The need to push further was born out of the growing demand of customers for continuous human interaction — the expectation of empathy and emotional understanding. The handful of successful machine learning bots are a testament to this fact. The Google Homes, Siris, and Alexas of the world are constantly developing to provide a better experience performing everyday tasks for the user. The day, probably, won’t be far when the movie Her comes true!

People who grew up reading science fiction would definitely be in favor of chatbots evolving to a more prominent position in the world of customers. Artificial intelligence making customer-life easier would probably sound something straight out of an Asimov book. However, the point of chatbots taking up more human-like activities is not only far but still seems a fantasy just like a Black mirror episode. When it comes to customer experience, chatbots should evolve as long as it makes a significant difference to a business. In a progressive world of automation, manipulating the matrix for cost-reduction and happy customers adjusting the right balance of machine learning could lead to the desired level of futurism and consumerism.