Guest Blog: How Companies are Using Bots to Enhance Customer Experience
This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post my colleague, Manuel Grenacher, writes about how using bots can help manage and improve the customer experience. Used properly, I believe bots can be an customer service excellent tool. – Shep Hyken
Booking an appointment—say, a plane ticket—used to be so easy. Just pick up the phone, dial a number, and speak to a friendly person on the other end to arrange everything. Then the internet arrived with its promise of increasing efficiency. Suddenly, each airline had its own website, with its own esoteric booking system, full of opaque requirements and mandatory fields. Add in the confusing multitude of airline ticket aggregators and obscure credit card rules, and you have a recipe for a headache. Have you ever wondered what it would take to get back to the old days?
You aren’t the only one. Over the past year or so, company after company have launched new, super-intelligent chatbots to manage some of their processes. Companies like Dominos Pizza and Mila, an on-demand tech support startup, have seen great success integrating chatbots into their business models. Want a pizza? Chat up Dominos on their Facebook page. Need some tech support? Send a message to Mila and they’ll sort you out with a technician in no time. So, how’s it work?
Kind of like it used to. When a user wants to accomplish something, they now have the option of skipping the tedious forms. I mean, how many times do you need to select “pepperoni” from a drop-down list to get sick of it, right?
Now, the process is much the same as it used to be—it starts with a message.
“Hello, how can I help you today?”
When a customer gets in touch, the bot replies instantly. This alone is a huge step forward, especially for smaller companies that can’t afford to keep someone on staff 24/7. This constant availability can help your company keep users engaged and interested.
But simply an automatic answering machine does not make a bot. What sets these apart is their intelligence. The bot’s advanced programming allows it to semantically parse the user’s chats, identify missing information about the request, and ask clarifying questions about exactly what the user needs. It can also collect other important data points like location, time, and payment details—all semantically, in the context of a naturally flowing conversation. At the end, the bot presents the user with the request it’s formulated for confirmation.
“So, that will be a large combo pizza with a side of medium-spicy hot wings delivered to 123 Fake St., Chicago, Illinois. Did I get all that right?”
That’s it. Just like in the good old days, the customer has arranged an appointment with an actual conversation, not by filling out a series of annoying forms. The only difference is that they never spoke to anyone—rather to an intelligent computer program, capable of parsing the complex semantics of human speech. What a time to be alive.
Bots as the future of booking
In a way, it makes sense to go back to semantic booking. The new generation of Facebook and app-based bots combine the human feeling of just talking to someone to explain what you want with the fantastic improvements in efficiency and processing made possible by computerization. One only needs to look at the recent strides made by Google, Apple, and Amazon in the field of digital personal assistants to see that semantic interaction with our devices is way of the future
As digital voice technology continues to improve, it’s not that outlandish to imagine that one day, most of our customer service issues could be solved once again simply by picking up the phone and speaking to a customer service representative. Only this time, they’re a robot.
Written by Manuel Grenacher, founder of Coresystems and Mila.
For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.
Read Shep’s latest Forbes Article: Seven Lessons From A Moving Company: How Service Leads To Sales
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