Companies in South Africa and other countries are increasingly aiming to provide their clients with much improved self-service.
By Clevva co-CEO Ryan Falkenberg
Many have attempted to create a chatbot that can perform tasks beyond simply responding to informational or transactional questions, but they have all been unsuccessful. A live representative is quickly contacted when a customer has a more complicated question, problem, or complaint.
The potential of chatbot technology was enormous. You believed that with low-code teams, you could quickly create an intelligent virtual agent that can behave and speak like a human agent. Actually, it’s not that easy.
Although chatbot technology has advanced significantly in terms of natural language understanding, the brain component still falls short. This is so because chatbots are built to pick up knowledge from a knowledge base, which is the same general content we use to teach and support our human agents before they spend months ‘joining the missing dots’.
Additionally, while chatbots are capable of learning, they lack humans’ ability to rely on years of social experience. Customers are expected to respond with knowledge, but they rarely have the time to provide it.
Software providers are eager to place the blame on chatbot creators or the quality of the knowledge base’s information. When demonstrating their chatbots in a well created and controlled demo environment, they emphasise the almost mystical superpowers they can display.
The fact is that creating, deploying, and managing a virtual agent that can behave like a human expert and answer a large number of complex questions in a consistent, legal, and hyper-personalized manner is difficult. Without a doubt, you can’t achieve that with chatbot logic as it is.
What you require is technology that can record and automate thought at the highest level. Additionally, there are specialised teams who can create a digital brain that can interact at the level of a human expert. Magic actually happens when you do that. When your customers genuinely embrace your digital self-service, call volumes decline, customer satisfaction levels rise, and your overall cost of service goes down.
Simple solutions are delivered through simple software.
Prior to delving into the benefits a Solution as a Service model offers, it is important to understand some of the problems with the majority of chatbot software.
As was already mentioned, the first problem is that chatbot logic is by nature constrained. Don’t hold your breath in hopes that your chatbot will eventually learn on its own and become an expert. They’ll probably never be able to provide more than basic tier 1 support for your clients.
The majority of CX systems include chatbot modules, which is the second problem. They can now guarantee a multi-channel offering because of this. However, the fundamental purpose of each of these platforms is to support human agents. The majority of their licence is dependent on human agents.
Why then would they try to provide a chatbot that can answer more questions successfully without using a real agent? Wouldn’t it be preferable to have a constrained chatbot that keeps a lot of live workers employed? What motivation would they have to consume their own source of income?
Why it makes sense to use a solution-as-a-service model
Wouldn’t it be better to approach your digital self-service channels the same way many people approach their human aided channels when faced with a crowded landscape of chatbot technologies that all use different phrases to explain the same things?
Numerous businesses have performed the math and determined the benefits of contracting with specialised Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firms to manage their call centres. The intricate realm of contact centre administration is what these customer service specialists live, breathe, and dream.
They are experts in navigating the complexities involved in integrating technology with company operations and human capacity. They reassure the client of important service goals while stressing over achieving these results – the noise of hiring, training, managing, retraining, coaching, and ensuring the quality of many human agents spread across several places.
The same holds true for online self-service. You need specialised expertise in addition to specialised technologies (not just CX platform extensions). Giving this problem to a specialised partner makes sense given the scarcity of senior AI skills, which is a significant issue in South Africa, as well as the difficulty of ensuring that your virtual agent efficiently resolves significant query volumes without assistance in a consistent and compliant manner.
You can be guaranteed that more of your customer inquiries will be successfully handled via any digital channel at a lower cost than your present unassisted and assisted channels by outsourcing the creation, implementation, and continuing administration of your virtual agent.
What software they use or what version it is on are unimportant details. Or how to maintain it current across various channels when the regulations are always changing. Your knowledgeable partner handles it. You simply concentrate on your company.
Companies may increasingly look to partner with experts who can guarantee them of their desired service outcome without them having to experience the pain required to deliver it as they become more aware of the severe limitations of their “cheap as chips” chatbot technology. These companies are also forced to acknowledge that automating complex, regulated queries is much more complicated than initially thought.
