Lately, Facebook has acquired an Israelian start-up, Servicefriend. This start-up builds “hybrid” chatbots based on artificial intelligence, imitating key traits of human beings, namely intelligence, empathy and understanding. Hybrid chatbots are often integrated with an existing user-to-agent communication process, which can be social media, webchat services or email. The hybrid chatbot will manage the conversation when it understands the user’s request, preventing annoying messages like: “I cannot follow your request” from popping up on the screens of users. Servicefriend has cooperated with Facebook in the past, building bots for the messaging platform Messenger. The bots developed for this platform, allow companies to complement teams of humans and increase the scale of their customer services on messaging platforms.
There are vast potential benefits to sophisticated AI powered chatbots and AI-based assistants. Smart Home assistants, such as Alexa and Google Home, have been extremely important in shaping the public’s perception of bots. These sophisticated bots are able to have extensive conversations with humans, and are able to present information to humans. However, the general consensus around the use of bots in an organisational context seems to be shifting these days.
Many organisations are specifically looking to make their customer service teams more efficient, by speeding up their service delivery processes. Also, chatbots can help in reducing customer service costs. Therefore, there is a huge interest from organisations in chatbots, Oracle surveyed over 800 professionals in different business disciplines on the adaptation of chatbots. The results speak to themselves: 80% of the surveyed brands plan on adopting chatbots for customer service efforts by 2020.
In 2018, Spicework announced the results of a survey they conducted among organisations. There were vast differences between the expected implementation of chatbots between large businesses and medium or small sized businesses. Of the large organisations, 40% indicated that they were expecting to implement one or more AI chatbots or intelligent assistants. Of the medium and small sized organisations, only respectively 25% and 27% of the organisation indicated that they are expecting to implement these technologies.
For the small to medium sized organisations in particular, the implementation of sophisticated chatbots comes with higher costs and a lot of difficulties during implementation. 25% of the organisations that Spicework surveyed, indicate that the high costs of implementing chatbots and intellectual AI assistants keep them from implementing these technologies. Next to this, only 20% of IT professionals that were surveyed in the study, think that the organisation they work for has the proper skills, talent, and resources to implement and support AI technology. Therefore, you could conclude that complementing customer service teams with bots is the practical way forward for these organisations, replacing these teams is not.
References:
Business Insider (2019). 80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020. Retrieved from
https://www.businessinsider.com/80-of-businesses-want-chatbots-by-2020-2016-12?international=true&r=US&IR=T
Lunden, I. (2019). Facebook has acquired Servicefriend, which builds ‘hybrid’ chatbots, for Calibre customer service. Retrieved from
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/21/facebook-servicefriend/
Reddy, T. (2017). How chatbots can help reduce customer service costs by 30%. Retrieved from
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/watson/2017/10/how-chatbots-reduce-customer-service-costs-by-30-percent/
Spiceworks (2018). Spice works study reveals 40 percent of large businesses will implement intelligent assistants or chatbots by 2019. Retrieved from
https://www.spiceworks.com/press/releases/spiceworks-study-reveals-40-percent-large-businesses-will-implement-intelligent-assistants-chatbots-2019/
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash.
Personally, I still prefer human agents over chatbots. What I find most frustrating is when a chatbot misunderstands my request or question. However, as a technology enthusiast, I am curious to find out what the future will bring. I do believe that an AI chatbot, taking advantage of available data, can reduce the time it would take to get an answer and has the potential to offer a personalised experience tailored to my preferences.
What I find very interesting, from a business perspective, is that chatbots can help reduce customer service costs, handle a high volume of requests, can offer 24/7 communication, can increase the first time resolution, and – if done right – can improve the customer experience and create stronger customer relationships.
Thank you for your interesting blog regarding the future of customer service.
I believe that in addition to the fact that small companies can not afford the high implementation costs of chatbots, it is also of great importance that these companies gain customer trust. Since trust is necessary to grow and develop customer loyalty. I think that companies will gain more trust due to personal contact as opposed to chatbots based on AI. I, therefore, believe that this will be an additional reason that keeps these companies from investing and implementing this technology.