The labor market has lately been intrigued by the idea of Artificial Intelligence (AI). One of the fields that is rapidly adopting AI is customer service as it is much more cost-efficient and effective than hiring actual employees. But have such ‘chat-bots’ already gained the customers trust?
Earlier research had pointed out that chat-bots outdid inexperienced human employees when it comes to the amount of sales (4x more) they make. However, new research shows that when customers are aware that they are talking to computer programs that simulate human interaction, sales decreased by almost 80 percent (liberator, 2019). This is grounded by the idea that the AI-controlled chat-bots are less knowledgeable are not able to comprehend their needs.
So why are chat-bots still so popular for companies such as Sephora, Amazon and Dominos pizza? There are multiple reasons. First of all, chat-bots are available 24 hours a day, which significantly increases convenience and accessibility for the customer. Second, chat-bots cut costs by up to 30% and save companies a total of 2.5 billion hours that are normally spend on customer service and training by 2023.
Yet, there are also some pitfalls associated with these chat-bots. These chat-bots are self-training machines which utilize information and feedback to update their system continuously. While this sounds wonderful, it is in fact a very time-consuming, risky and costly activity. For example, a chat-bot created by Microsoft started quoting racists slurs it had learned on Twitter (Vincent, 2016). Mistakes like this can severely harm a company’s reputation and are hard to resolve. Another option is to only make the chat-bot capable of answering specific pre-defined questions from a pool. This indeed takes away the risk aspect, however, fixed chat-bots easily get stuck and can’t assist customers properly which hinders sales.
So what can we expect to see in the future? I personally think that AI will definitely stay in the field of customer service. Especially since this is a field where employees need quite some training and the availability hours have to be high. My expectation is that AI service providers will become so human like that customers won’t be able to realize they are in fact not conversing with another human. A team in Beijing that works together with the University of Illinois is already developing an Emotional Chatting Machine (ECM). The goal of this chat-bot is to be able to read a customer’s emotional status and reply with emotionally appropriate reactions. Currently, the customers still have to select their mood (on a 5 point scale) before starting a conversation with the chat-bot. However, in the future they chat-bot will be able to do this without prior knowledge. Already 61% of the tested customer preferred this AI over the standard chat-bots (correspondent, 2017). Hence, I expect that this will be the next generation of intelligence to be seen in daily situations, sooner rather than later.
references
correspondent, H.D.S. (2017). Human-robot interactions take step forward with “emotional” chatbot. The Guardian. [online] 5 May. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/05/human-robot-interactions-take-step-forward-with-emotional-chatting-machine-chatbot
Liberatore, S. (2019). Would YOU buy from a chatbot? Most won’t make a purchase from a bot. [online] Mail Online. Available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7499657/Chatbots-rake-sales-companies-fall-short-consumers-know-AI.html
Vincent, J. (2016). Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day. [online] The Verge. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist.
Dear Marloes,
This makes me think about the last trip I had. I was trying to connect myself to the internet of the train and was actually only able to do so through a chat-bots. It was very efficient and made me realize how in such little time, everything was adapting to the new technologies. I do however believe there are still a lot of improvement to make. As you mentioned discrimination and inequality can be increased due to the information they use to learn. Bad algorithmic decision threatening human right and safety and thins should be solved before chat-box giving life threatening advices, like online doctor appointments. Even though they are some issues, I believe this should not stop us from innovating and using technology and trying to create the best version possible.
Hi Marloes!
This was a very interesting read, I especially liked the ECM part, and find it really interesting that Universities are starting to look at also this aspect and not only the “helping aspect” of customer service.
My personal experience with chatbots is rather poor I have to admit, and I tend to get really annoyed at the companies who use them, because the bots always have to redirect me to a human person who can help me with my specific request in the end, which lowers my “service” feeling since I then have to explain the problem again. Thus, I think the bots should become better before companies decide to use them as part of their customer service team. But as you correctly highlighted, these algorithms are trained, so before they get sufficient real life training, I guess they won’t be any better, so its almost like an “evil loop”.
Hi Marloes,
I find your topic very interesting and suitable for this blog. Even though many people have discussed the role of AI in customer service it keeps on being a popular topic for discussion. Like you say Artificial Intelligence can outdo inexperienced employees but often they do not reach the quality of a ‘real’ customer service employee. I do have to admit that over the past years the development of AI in the customer service segment is moving into the right direction. A while back when these chat bots where just new, they seemed pretty useless. A customer would have a question that is more complex and the chatbot would respond with an answer somewhat related to the topic. As we are collecting more and more data the chats-bots have been improving. From personal experience I have encountered one positive and one negative example. First, I was positively surprised when I contacted Norton about problems with my subscription. It was obvious that I was talking to a chat-bot and even though it took slightly longer than expected I was able to achieve the desired outcome. Second, the less positive experience that I had was actually with Coolblue. I asked a simple Bluetooth related question about the Galaxy Buds+. However, I kept getting different answers online and also instore. This led me to ask the same question at Coolblue Germany and US, surprisingly I received exactly the same answer from both locations. In the end I just ended up buying the product and I found out that the AI answer was the correct one all along and the human one was wrong. Maybe this is a case of unexperienced employees but at the same time it also shows how these chat bots have been developing. Hence, I completely agree with you this will be the next generation of customer service, I believe that eventually the chat bots will outperform human customer service.