Call Center Management Featured Article
AI or Human: Quality Care & Empathy Are Key
When it comes to customer service, it’s not so very important whether the entity dealing with the individual is a human, a bot, or a lamppost. What matters is that the person, the AI assistant, (or the street furniture) treats the customer with dignity, empathy, and personalized care.
Virtual assistants are arriving on the scene. They’re getting pretty good at helping with repeatable processes. But that’s just the beginnig.
With technology like Google Duplex, they can be – uh, um – difficult to discern over the phone from actual humans. Not only can they fool us by pausing in conversation and using common verbal crutches, they can also be built to have their own personalities, and to understand and respond appropriately to sentiment.
That’s a good thing.
It can help people get stuff done more efficiently. It creates the potential for better customer service and less frustration. And there’s the side benefit that seeing what AI can do from a customer service standpoint is good clean fun.
Beyond simply helping with simple inquiries by providing canned response, chatbots are interesting because they are always available, can allow a business to be more proactive with its customer outreach, and can serve up the right information and content at the right time.
“Generally, companies engage in passive customer interactions,” this article notes. “That is, they only respond to inquiries but don’t start chats. AI bots can begin the conversation and inform customers about sales and promotions. Moreover, virtual assistants can offer product pages, images, blog entries, and video tutorials. Suppose a customer finds a nice pair of jeans on your website. In this case, a chatbot can send them a link to a page with T-shirts that go well with them.”
Edited by Maurice Nagle