Artificial Intelligence

Incorporating artificial intelligence in customer service has had its share of benefits for businesses. Companies have been saving considerable human effort and time spent in mundane and routine tasks day-in and day-out. AI helps businesses to give their customers that they are dealing with real humans while chatting with virtual assistants.

So shouldn’t businesses be transparent with its customers while engaging with them through chatbots? If not, businesses will face a potential backlash and its best to avoid it to increase trust and customer satisfaction. We list out the benefits of being honest about interactions with bots here.

  • First things first, you will see a considerable increase in customer satisfaction. When the customers know beforehand that they will be interacting with chatbots rather than humans, they spend more time customizing their selection. And with better customization, expect a spike in customer satisfaction too.
  • AI or chatbots help customers to be better informed. Since people know that the AI is programmed to suit customer’s needs, the customer can get the information he/she needs from the chatbot not worrying about wasting the chatbot’s time.
  • Chatbots enabled with AI ensures that the customer interactions are faster. The usual pleasantries involved in a human chat are negated and the customers too know that they are interacting with a machine.
  • Customers may be more honest. When the customer realizes that he is interacting with a machine, he could be more honest as he is not driven by social responsibility response bias.

Given all these benefits mentioned above, why are companies or businesses considering the duplicitous option?  For a simple reason. It is to see if a machine can mimic a human’s intelligent behavior also known as the Turing test.

For science, machines passing the Turing test is a goal but for businesses, it is much more than that. For computers to imitate or mimic humans is a short-sighted goal. If not humanlike, what should AI’s objectives be? In this context, they could be:

  • Using artificial intelligence to learn from previous customer calls and avoid them entirely. The possibility of the customer not finding the information they need is great with chatbots, due to the back and forth encoding and decoding of requests. Customer satisfaction might increase with a clearer online appointment system, that avoids the interaction in the first place. The ongoing analysis of call logs using AI could be apart of overall improvement.
  • Businesses, by analyzing the call content, can use the information to improve security and service. These are the aspects that machines do better than humans.
  • Using AI to anticipate calls and plan staffing. Businesses can let AI better anticipate call volumes and improve both organizational and customer efficiency.

All said artificial intelligence can certainly be a marvelous tool to specifically improve business and customer service. But then, there are better ways to use the AI or chatbot or virtual assistant technology than mimicking humans.