Workforce Management Featured Article
Chatbots Enhance, Rather Than Replace, Human Call Center Agent Performance
There’s a rather cynical cycle with new technology: futurists present a vision of the technology to the media, the media overhypes it, consumers get cynical when it fails to appear on their desktops the next day, and most people lose interest. In the earliest days of artificial intelligence (AI) for customer support, the world imagined robot call center agents who could entirely replace humans. When they failed to appear, chatbots were written off as overhyped.
“Building a real virtual assistant capable of understanding context and responding to unclear queries proved to be much more challenging than building a simple chatbot,” wrote CB Insights.
The truth is that no one is looking for automated agents to replace humans (or if they are, they shouldn’t be). Chatbots, or programmed, AI-driven personalities, are great at handling low-level inquiries, or directing higher-level questions to the right person or department. They can disseminate information “pushed” to them by human agents, or get the details from a caller so the human agent has more context when they pick up the calls.
There are a variety of prepackaged chat bots out there, many of which can be customized for different vertical industries, including healthcare, financial, hospitality and retail. Some are even built into cloud-based contact center platforms. Now that their utility has been demonstrated, organizations are adopting chatbots and their close cousins, virtual assistants, in droves. Research from Gartner has predicted that 25 percent of customer service and support operations will integrate virtual customer assistant (VCA) or chatbot technology across engagement channels by 2020, up from less than two percent in 2017. In addition, 47 percent of organizations will be using the applications for customer care, and 40 percent will implement virtual assistant technology.
"A great VCA [virtual customer assistant] offers more than just information," said Gene Alvarez, managing vice president at Gartner (News - Alert). "It should enrich the customer experience, help the customer throughout the interaction and process transactions on behalf of the customer."
To learn more about how VCA technology can enhance your call center operations, plan on attending the Future of Work Expo in Miami, Florida from February 9th through 12th, 2021. For more information and to register, visit www.futureofworkexpo.com.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
