Workforce Management Featured Article
Leveraging the Human Chat-Bot Dynamic in the Call Center
The idea of automating the contact center isn’t a new one. It’s been under discussion since the earliest days of automation technologies, starting with the interactive voice response (IVR) unit in the early 1970s. At the time, it was imagined that robots would interact with humans, wielding their superior capabilities for disseminating information over human customers.
It hasn’t worked out like that. For starters, automation has its limitations. It can’t pick up on nuance, mood and communication quirks. It doesn’t have empathy. For that, the human touch is required. This doesn’t mean that automation doesn’t have a significant role to play, however, particularly when it’s combined with the efforts.
The Human-Chat Bot Dynamic
Chat bots are becoming the favored choice of artificial intelligence- (AI) led automation. Using bots, a call center can form a kind of tiered customer support model in which the AI can identify the nature of the chat and either deliver basic information or escalate the contact to the right agent in the right department. It’s important, however, that the customer always has a path to a human agent, however, according to CMS Wire’s Patrick Nguyen, and that the human agent receive the context of the customer’s interaction with the bot.
“For an acceptable customer experience, any escalation should be offered in the same channel as the bot: forcing a web or mobile user to call into the contact center for additional help is like teaching the customer to bypass the chatbot the next time,” wrote Nguyen. “To make it worthwhile for customers to engage with the bot, any escalation should also pass the context of the conversation, so the agent does not start from scratch but rather is aware of the problem and knows what the customer has already tried.”
Finding the Right Blend
There are several ways that contact centers can blend the interactions of humans and bots. They can, for example, turn the initiation of customer contact entirely over to the bot, and then make a hand-off with a human agent once the contact is escalated. This is an “either/or” approach that switches control of the customer’s query from one (non-human) resource to an agent. Increasingly, however, companies are combing the human and AI element in a far more subtle way.
The agent, for example, can set the bot to collecting routine information (account number, etc.) and handle the higher-level functions herself, turning the conversation back over to the bot for closing with follow-up information. (“Thank you for contacting us. Here are some resources you can use to enhance your experience.”)
Ultimately, the mix that works the best will depend on your business, your customers and your customer support technology. Before choosing an AI-driven contact center solution, ensure that it will support the type of human-bot interactions that will work best for your customers and agents.
Edited by Maurice Nagle