The idea of customer service through robots is not new. There are too many bots that are used in digital marketing, social media marketing mostly people use the best bots for social media for promoting their business and for many other reasons. It is true that going from the automated telephone systems, inflexible and unfriendly for the clients devised in the 70s of the 20th century to the “animated conversational agents” of the last decade meant a huge technological and philosophical change, but the bots are something completely new. On the one hand, their costs make them accessible to all users (there are even free versions), and on the other thanks to the advances in Artificial Intelligence, they can maintain a natural dialogue with the client … learning a little more in each conversation!
Disturbing, is not it? As any technological advance has its pros and cons, which we invite you to analyze together.
Bots for all tastes:
Let us start by the beginning. What are bots? . Robotization has been gaining more and more space in practically all activities (even in surgery!) Performing the tasks with greater speed and precision, fewer risks and costs.
The bots are in synthesis services based on the text. It can be said that they took real momentum when Telegram , a messaging application with more than 100 million users, launched a bot platform and a “bot store” that currently has thousands of bots. Currently, designers are concerned with creating bots that are easy to use, installed in seconds, that can be easily passed from one bot to another and that is attractive to talk to them.
However, the robots in computer science were not very well seen, since they gave place to unwanted publicity, creation of false profiles, automated contents, threats to the security and even cybercrimes. But users learned how to defend themselves from these “botnets” and the developers created a new generation of much more useful computer robots that simplify the lives of both entrepreneurs and customers.
A simple search on the Internet takes us to a “bot shop” where we are informed that bots exist today for all tastes and budgets:
- Brands
- Business Tools
- Customer Support
- Education
- Entertainment / Fun
- Games
- Lifestyle
- News / Sports / Broadcast
- Social
- Utilities
And also, that these bots work in different platforms like:
- Slack
- Telegram
- SMS
- Who
- Skype
- Viber
- Line
What do bots do?
Basically, any automated task that was previously performed by humans or by other systems already outdated. Just to name a few of the tasks that can be automated (many specialists say that after applications, bots are the next frontier and bot-commerce is already mentioned):
- Send notifications
- Mentoring
- Marketing account management
- Application integration
- Virtual assistance
- Obtaining and updating metrics and statistics
- Automation of tasks
- Job search management
- Integration of bank accounts
- Connection of several applications
- Payment and collection management
- Simple surveys and comments
- Project following
- Monitoring of services in the cloud
- Customer service (conversation automation, messaging, answering frequently asked questions)
- Manage bank accounts and find ways to save money;
Travel agencies that can receive text messages and convert them into reservations;
Corporate messaging service
In health services: treat routine problems and send difficult cases to a doctor;
In restaurants: take orders through instant messages (they already do it in China);
Make purchases
To play
Send money
Attract users and thus increase sales.
Present and future of the bots:
The most enthusiastic supporters of the bots say that this technology goes hand in hand with the rise of smartphones and instant messaging services such as Messenger or WhatsApp, to the detriment of the very popular applications that, according to specialists, will fall on disuse; In fact, designing, implementing and promoting applications is expensive, and for users it is a hassle to search and download applications. In addition, it has been shown that 25% of all downloaded applications are abandoned after a single use.
In contrast, instant messaging is on the rise: more than 2.5 billion people have at least one messaging application installed, such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp (which is also owned by Facebook) and it is estimated that soon it will reach 3,600 million … half of the world population!
Other data: adolescents prefer to use their smartphones to send instant messages before being on social networks and users of WhatsApp use 3.33 hours per week to send messages.
In any case, there is still a lack of experimentation and improvement, since artificial intelligence can lead to unpredictable results. For example, Microsoft had to take out of circulation a bot named Tay, designed with the personality of a “millennial”, because … began to use racist language learned from Twitter users!
Another case is that of Slack, a bot that had to be fed with more than two thousand different phrases created by writers and writers, simply to be able to handle a meeting request.
Customer service bots:
Maybe the future is already here … and customers are being served by bots practically without realizing it!
What is expected from a customer service bot is, first of all, as a robot, that performs the most routine tasks of humans faster and better, with fewer errors and greater efficiency. Specifically from the point of view of customer service, which serves to increase the productivity of the brand representatives or the customer service team, allowing them to devote themselves to more complex tasks and improve the service.
It is also expected that the bot “learn” from the interaction with customers and other elements that should be provided as frequently asked questions, problem resolutions, company database and customized event data in the application, and improve your answers from the technique of NLP (Natural Language Processing).
A good bot platform must allow the bot to quickly derive complex situations from humans and both function as a “hybrid” since it must be able to detect when a human being should take control and derive the case.
