Saheed O.

How to integrate Chatbots into your Customer Service flow without losing customers Emotional Intelligence is the key Artificial intelligence is one aspect of technology that has come a very long way in the past decade. With increasingly diverse applications being discovered every day, nearly all industries around the world are finding one or two aspects of their operations in which artificial intelligence can be implemented. Some applications of artificial intelligence span across several industries and it is in this category that chatbots are found. The ability to program bots that can converse with people within specific limits is one that nearly every industry finds useful in one way or another. This is most evident in the way lots of businesses across the world have adopted this ingenious piece of AI into their customer service programs enabling them to provide untiring 24-hour support to their customers without the risk of inattention or absence or even tiredness posed by humans. So it is probably a safe bet to say that you as a business owner have probably been considering taking this step and taking out a few more error-prone humans from your service chain, optimizing and improving the quality of your services. However, if you have done your research properly and I’m sure you have, then you have probably found out that it’s not all rosy. A lot of companies that have implemented chatbots into their customer service chain have ended up losing customers and getting bad reviews, quite the opposite of what they aimed to achieve. Some have gone back to their all-human customer service and probably vowed never to try using chatbots again. The reason for this is quite simple; chatbots are still bots, despite the high level of sophistication that allows them to simulate conversations. Let’s take a look at how exactly chatbots work. HOW DO CHATBOTS WORK? Chatbots are a piece of AI that works by recording patterns in conversations and texts and they use these patterns to generate responses to inquiries, basically carrying on a conversation. Some chatbots have pre-programmed responses to particular queries and generate others based on patterns. These patterns are mapped by the software and compared to existing patterns to find similarities that allow responses to be generated. As ingenious as this technology is, however, it has one very jarring blindspot. It cannot understand conversational nuances. In attempting to map patterns, the software takes all text literally. So word usages such as idioms and figures of speech are completely lost in translation. Chatbots don’t understand sarcasm. They have no idea what irony is. While this may be manageable in theory and in some applications, when faced with customers looking for a person to hold their hands on their customer journey or looking to make complaints, these chatbots become inadequate. Basically, this means chatbots are unable to replace humans in the customer service department, which is what a lot of business owners aim for when they choose to integrate chatbots into their service chain. Not realizing they were conversing with bots, a lot of customers promptly declare the business as having poor customer service, a death sentence for any business. The cost of operating chatbots alongside human customer service providers coupled with the pressure of frustrated customers who have not been properly attended to by the bots, usually sends a lot of business owners scrambling to remove the bots from their service chain entirely. So now that we know exactly how chatbots work and the problems encountered, how do you avoid these same problems? How do you make use of chatbots without making your customers hate you for a lack of proper attention? There is only one answer to this: emotional intelligence in AI. WHAT IS EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE? As humans, emotions are one of our most defining qualities. We are basically a bundle of emotions with a few moments of clarity every now and then. So how can a cold, logical, inhuman AI successfully relate with humans in all their emotional irrationality? Simple, we give the AI emotions. Or at least, we enable it to identify and respond to emotions. This is the basis of emotional intelligence in AI. Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify, analyze, and classify emotions based on certain parameters. Enabling emotional intelligence in chatbots, therefore, entails creating a set of parameters by which the bot can identify the tone and state of mind of the customer and reply accordingly. Emotional intelligence is more easily implemented in chatbots with audio and visual capacity. This is due to the fact that emotion is more easily expressed facially and through speech than through text. Visual AI can infer emotion by analyzing facial expressions and patterns, audio AI can analyze the tone and intensity of voice, all to determine the emotional condition of the speaker. This is much harder with text-based chatbots, but not impossible. A number of emotional indicators can be found in a text such as the use of punctuations, capitalization, text bolding, etc. each of these can be mapped by the chatbot software to identify and classify emotions and respond accordingly. Implementing emotional intelligence in chatbots opens up the possibility for the bots to be used for a lot more than just talking to customers. Giving product reviews, generating leads, following up on leads, these are some of the few things a chatbot with emotional intelligence can be used for. It remains an inexact science for now though. INTEGRATING EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE INTO YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE CHATBOTS A lot of companies have pulled ahead in the AI game and more are joining them every day, creating and refining the chatbot software and slowly implementing and improving on emotional intelligence for chatbots. With the myriad applications available for an AI that can converse with humans, read moods and understand emotions, it won’t be long before the technology is perfected. Integrating the chatbot into your platform will then be only a matter of choosing the best platform available and you can finally automate your customer service without fear of inadequacy. Once your customer service chatbots are configured with emotional intelligence, you can take automation of your service chain to a level that will take you far ahead in your industry.