Just yesterday someone was complaining on LinkedIn about poor service he had received from his ISP. It seemed well justified. They had taken ages to respond to him. The thread though was about how bad AI and automation was.
In this case the ISP was NOT using AI or automation. They have a LIVE CHAT feature on their website, whereby you click on an icon and send an message to a person, who will receive it instantly and should reply with the correct answer instantly. Many websites have such a chat feature.
In some cases the chat works quite well. A dedicated call centre agent is waiting on your query and they reply almost instantly.
The downside is call centre agents do not work 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. They also get busy so it can take 5 to 15 minutes for an one agent to respond while you are sitting on their website doing nothing. As a result most visitors to the website close the page in annoyance. This is what happened to the poster referred to above.
His complaint while justified is not an issue of an AI chatbot. An AI chatbot that looks similar to the live chat will always respond within 10 seconds, day and night. A well designed and implemented AI chatbot will successfully answer 90% of all inquiries within 10 seconds.
Let me repeat that: A well designed and implemented AI chatbot will successfully answer 90% of all inquiries within 10 seconds.
The person was complaining about AI when the real problem was a poor quality live chat.
What about the remaining 10% of inquiries? There are two scenarios: A well managed AI chatbot can be adjusted and improved to solve most of the remaining issues. Even solutions around orders, deliveries and stock control can be implemented via an AI chatbot. This leaves 5% of all inquiries that definitely need human intervention, but at a higher level to be escalated to a manager.
Therefore up to 95% of all inquiries can be solved (as the AI chatbot is given more training) automatically and faster than any live chat or telephone call or email or form etc.
Not only is it a cheaper solution, but better for the customer because it gives faster and better responses 95% of the time.
At the same time I recognize that people/your customers are confused. They don’t know the difference between LIVE CHAT and AI chat and are wary of AI. It means that initially only 10% of your customers are likely to use an AI Chatbot. This number is going to increase, but at least customer service to those customers will be excellent.
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