A chatbot is a software component interacting with its users through a conversation. The chatbots are used as “Personal Business Assistant” in the business. Here we will see a detailed picture of that.
Getting Rid of Easy Problems
Finding Products or Areas
A lot of time in the customer service area is simply wasted on directing customers towards the area of a website or landmass or towards a product they can’t find. Normally, it’s usually due to a layout issue of that area that they are looking at that causes this problem.
Artificial intelligence can pick up on keywords like “can you help me find” and then find the product page or area they are trying to find. This is a very simple interaction that takes time from the customer service and that can easily be handled by artificial intelligence. A customer simply logs in to a website, starts searching around a website, and then reads about a product that sounds awesome, but they can’t find it.
That’s when they usually reach out to customer service to help them find it. While you are fixing common issues so that it doesn’t happen again, you can have artificial intelligence do the redirecting across all your websites and project pages so that the issue is immediately resolved, and this can be logged into a database of queries.
Simple Changes with Billing
In companies like Comcast, electrical, AT&t, and other companies that require a subscription on a monthly basis, a user is likely going to need to change information about their billing arrangements. Simple billing changes would be a change of address where the individual can’t find the location to do that themselves or changing the bank account that the account is associated to. These simple changes can be handled by artificial intelligence because they happen in a predictable manner.
Customer service answers the phone and unless there is a specific template set up, a lot of the time the agent winds up wasting is time figuring out the wants of the customer. Once they can find out the wants of the customer, they then spend time figuring out how to do it for the customer themselves. Normally, this interaction takes anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes while putting an additional wait time for the customer at around 10 to 20 minutes. By using artificial intelligence, one can essentially save around half an hour per phone call.
Providing Remedies to Complaints
Another portion of time that is wasted on customer service is customer complaints. Let me use a Comcast example of how to find out whether your internet is currently down or not. If you were to rewind by around 5 years and called Comcast to see if your internet in the area was down, you would call the customer service line and ask why your internet is not working. If you’re a little bit tech-savvy, you would have done the rudimentary steps beforehand. However, most people simply just say that their internet is not working, and so half an hour of their time would be wasted on diagnosing the issue.
We don’t think we have to inform you that waiting an hour to just find out that you have an internet shortage in the area is somewhat frustrating and definitely agitating. Now, if you call Comcast, they have artificial intelligence handling the problem. The artificial intelligence takes your phone number and compares it to the billing arrangements that are attached to that phone number.
They then check the address of where you’re located to a database that has a listing of current outages as well as repair times. The artificial intelligence then informs you that you have an internet outage in your area and gives you a specific time at which the problem will be fixed. A call that was previously taking an hour per customer was reduced to artificial intelligence providing an answer in as little as 10 minutes from when you first make the call to customer service. When you are dealing with millions of customers, going from 60 minutes to 10 minutes drastically changes the amount of time available.
Noting Easy Answers that Don’t Work
As we alluded to before, sometimes simple answers don’t work and need to be refined. The problem is usually that the customer is not adequately providing answers to the artificial intelligence and the remedy to such a problem is to refine the question that you’re asking. It’s as simple as an interview. You will get as good information as you want provided you have questions that specifically target that information.
Therefore, if someone says, “I can’t find the about page” and you link them to the about page via artificial intelligence, but it doesn’t actually have the mission statement that they were looking for, you have a dissatisfied customer and an algorithm that gave them the wrong answer according to their opinion.
At this point, the algorithm should point the user to an actual customer representative to help them and then note that what they were really looking for wasn’t on the about page. Then you go into artificial intelligence and create a condition where the artificial intelligence asks the user if they are looking for the mission statement. Now the artificial intelligence can handle all further customers looking for just the mission statement of your company because the customer usually thinks all mission statements are in the about page.
Personalized Attention
A lot of customer service time is wasted because they are trying to gather information on the customer that they are talking to. They are trying to find what the original problem was and being introduced to a stranger, the customer service representative has no idea what they really want. By having an artificial intelligence begin asking questions, the customer service representative can move past figuring out what the customer wants or, at the very least, they are able to shorten the discussion to an incredibly small length so that they can get to the solution much faster than they would have.
Autobots Defending from Autobots
Chat System Security
A lot of people conceptually do not understand web security because they think of web security in terms of their credentials used to sign in to the website. Web security specialists look at far more than just trying to get to the credentials. They look for any security hole and possible exploits, which some of them use and some of them don’t.
The chat system is a dangerous connection because you are directly connecting the customer to someone that may be inside of your business. Usually, a customer of Comcast would be contacting someone with the ability to make account changes in that customer’s account. Knowing that the chat system is a direct line from a person of unknown origin to a person that has control over a segment of a company, we think you can begin to see why chat system security has become a prevailing security issue for experts around the world and artificial intelligence is helping in that endeavor.
Predicting Human Behavior
The first thing that artificial intelligence does is try to predict what the other thing on the other end will be doing. Human behavior is, sadly, incredibly well-predicted psychology that is easily exploitable and there are a range of job opportunities in exploiting human behavior. Martial arts (not a crime or bad), thievery, scams, Nigerian princes that don’t exist, and all the like were all based off of human behavior. Artificial intelligence is able to tell the difference between a bot and a human and the most recognizable to us is in the CAPTCHA that most websites have you click on.
This little box actually predicts human behavior in click patterns to determine whether the person is a human or not. You, as a human, cannot see in infrared so if there is an object in an image that’s hidden, that only a computer could see, then it is a very easy way to catch computers trying to get access. You may think that that is a silly way of explaining it, but computers only see binary bits and so if it recognizes the shape of a car in those binary bits then it will recognize it and try to click on it.
In addition to this, we have irregular mouse movements as human beings where has computers will take a more linear approach. This is just one way that artificial intelligence tries to prevent other artificial intelligence bots from gaining access to the system. The chatbot system is a window into the company and as such, such artificial intelligence helps to secure that hole.
Customer Provocation Detection
Sometimes the customer is overly irritated at something that currently happened, and they are ready to go ahead and try to start a fight with a customer representative. You might think that the fight will happen, a bad review will be posted, and that will generally be the end of that.
The problem is that we live in a society where the online image is impacted by everything we do both inside work and outside work. Therefore, if a representative of your company starts a fight with a customer and begins name-calling, this is posted on social media and suddenly that representative is now affecting sales.
You can fire that representative but it’s not going to achieve anything and it’s not going to prevent incidents like that from happening down the road. Instead, you can use artificial intelligence to begin looking at the language that the customer is using and handoff that customer to someone who is able to control their emotions such as a sales manager or someone higher up the customer will likely ask for it anyway.
In such a situation, you have prevented a possibly horrible interaction and you may even be able to retain that customer because artificial intelligence pointed that customer towards someone who could handle that customer.
As previously mentioned, chatbot security is quite the issue on the internet nowadays but there’s one aspect of chatbots that most people don’t think about in business. Otherwise known as a distributed denial-of-service attack, a DDoS attack on chatbots is usually not very well defended against in business. This is because companies have not caught on that if you cannot DDoS a website, customers will still try to DDoS sections of the website to hamper business.
You can now utilize artificial intelligence to determine whether a DDoS attack is happening and how to shut off that DDOS attack by delaying connections to those addresses. The artificial intelligence could see that connections were coming in vast numbers and then leaving only to find that new connections were being made.
Artificial intelligence could react to this situation much faster than a system administrator could and would likely prevent the chatbot system from collapsing from a DDoS attack and may even prevent a website from collapsing if the chat is handled by the same server as the website. After all, the only thing that a DDOS attack achieves is tying up the CPU of a server while actual customers are trying to request access.
Defense Against Reengineering
Sometimes companies don’t want to do their own work and so an effective chatbot system is actually somewhat expensive to design and implement. These companies will look at your chatbots that’s doing really well and begin plugging it with questions that look a lot like code in business. Artificial intelligence has been able to recognize code for a long time now and so artificial intelligence can quickly assess whether the user is trying to ask a question or if the user is attempting to break into the source code.
Unlike most companies that just detect the most common code patterns used, some companies have gone about this by asking every possible question they can to gather the responses that your chatbots will use in business. Such combinations will generally be misspelt questions or different sayings of the same question, which is just them trying to get all the strings that you paid your team to write as responses so that they don’t have to spend the time writing themselves.
After all, once you create an artificial intelligence system, most of the work is down to tedious response writing and so if they can collect the responses from your chatbots in business, they don’t have to spend time developing it on their chat because you gave them phrases that will work. Artificial intelligence is able to detect whether a user is trying to ask the same question repeatedly and analyze the behavior of customers connecting from that area. This effectively stops reengineering of your chatbots in business.
Reduce Customer Service Workloads
Get Rid of Basic Problems
As we said, most of the customer services problems lie in solving basic, common issues. if a customer is looking in laundry products for a scent ball that they can throw into the laundry basket, but they are not finding it because you put it in the beauty products section, they will likely contact customer service to try and find it.
This wastes an extremely high amount of time on customer service because if one customer is going to ask it then you likely have a hundred more customers that are going to try to ask it and they will try to ask it in 10 different ways. This means customer service agents are just trying to find products for a customer and unless that customer is particularly website or store savvy, they are not likely going to be able to find it without the customer service agent breaking it down into English that elementary students could understand.
That isn’t to say that customers are dumb, it’s just that sometimes things like accents and the way you say things will interfere with the message that’s coming across. Artificial intelligence can be set up to handle general requests for products so if they are looking for a specific type of product then the artificial intelligence is able to provide them with a link to where they can find that product or a description of different places they could find that on your website. This ultimately saves time for both the customer and the customer service agent.
Get Rid of Redirection Issues
Sometimes you have customers that want to do more than what’s available on the website itself. For instance, 90% of the reason why a person looks at an about page is because they are looking to do more than the basic customer service and are looking to do business to business service. These are companies that are trying to find out what type of company you are and what type of products you will likely be providing in the future along with what morals you hold your company to.
The problem is that most of these types of individuals do the same thing but in different ways. For instance, one customer might look at an about page and then travel off-site to look at LinkedIn pages of employees working there. Another customer might look at the affiliated links to find out where the connections to your company are and how big of a reach you have. In both situations, the customer is trying to figure out who you are as a business and artificial intelligence can pick up on that.
These can be handled in various different ways such as flagging them in a database so that you know that this particular customer is doing this or you could start up a chat in artificial intelligence and ask if you if the customer is interested in investing in the business. This really is an opinion-based approach because while one could just be cool knowledge to have, the other could be seen as an intrusive way of business.
Specialized Issues Are Faster
Sometimes websites don’t work the way that we want them to and so when a customer tries to reach out to customer service to resolve the issue, they used to have to wait for customer service to be done with all the basic stuff and all the redirecting. Artificial intelligence can find out information the customer wants to provide and usually, it can pick up on things like a bug or “this didn’t go the way it was supposed to”.
These would be based off of the words in the sentence such as “I think you have a bug in the website”, “something went wrong when I try to do this”, or such similar phrasing and this can be redirected to a technical support line. This would allow developers to react to situations more quickly than if the user had gone through a customer service representative and then customer service representative figures out that there was a bug and that the customer was really just wasting the time of the customer service agent simply because the customer can’t connect to anyone else.
Reduced Time Spent
As a Result Every phone call that is wasted on basic problems, redirecting, or issuing bug reports is a phone call that costs money. Customer service representatives often work by the hour, which means that you are paying them to solve your customer’s problems as fast as possible. By getting rid of the majority of the basic problems and issues that your website has by turning this over to a chatbot system, you alternatively save how much time the customer service agency uses in day-to-day problem-solving.
While you are likely not going to reduce the amount of time that the customer service area is open, customers who would come back and tie up the lines the next day because customer service agents were offline can now be handled by artificial intelligence if they have a problem while customer service agents are not available. This saves even more time because customers that have to call the next day will cause customers that are calling that day to call the next day and so the issue becomes a compounded algorithmic catastrophe that whines up wasting a lot of time.
Solving Easy IT Issues
Turn it On and Off
Another issue that chatbot systems that have artificial intelligence in them can do is solve very easy IT problems. If you have an internal chatbot system that an employee can bring up at any time, the chatbot system can then walk them through basic steps of it to save time on the part of the IT staff. That isn’t to say that IT staff will simply be replaced, but the IT staff’s majority issue is dealing with basic troubleshooting problems.
For instance, one of the most basic troubleshooting problems is to just have a user turn their computer on after having turned their computer off. This resets the memory registers and usually gets rid of some of the most basic problems that the user might have such as a logo sticking on the screen when they’re not supposed to. Operating systems, while they are definitely better than they used to be, still have common bugs that are simply solved by turning the machine off and on again. These issues can be handled by a chat system because odds are, if there is a problem then usually there’s an IT article that will help them and this brings us to 3-step solutions.
3-step Solutions
Anyone that does not work in IT usually cannot process what they’ve done after the third step. It’s not really a scientific rule but it is a common experience shared by many in the tech industry. Knowing this, you can solve most basic issues by simply providing 3 step solutions that may or may not work.
If the said solution doesn’t work, then you can always use the artificial intelligence to submit an IT tech problem into a database that doesn’t require the IT staff to be on the phone. The IT staff would then be able to log issues into the database to see if there are common problems or not and find ways to prevent problems that are common.
Reducing IT Confusion
By being able to log issues into a database and have basic issues handled by artificial intelligence, IT confusion can be reduced as a result. Instead of the user calling the IT department and telling them “my email won’t work” when, once the IT professional gets there, the IT professional finds out that this phrase meant that the user’s computer was not on, the confusion can be cleared up quickly.
All they need to be able to do is talk to a company chat system that will begin asking standard, scripted questions that will help narrow down the problem. It takes time for an IT professional to walk to an individual computer in the business and if you multiply that by every user that’s currently in that business, you can see how much time is wasted by just travelling to a user’s station to figure out the problem for themselves.
More Secure Credential Exchange
Sometimes individuals need elevated access, it should be a rare occurrence but it’s actually a somewhat common occurrence in businesses. The only problem is that in the real world, people will leave their phones and computers unlocked in public places so that they can go do something really quick.
During that time, the entire world has visible access to your system. If you hand over databases as well as where to find them as a result, obviously your entire backend database just got exposed. However, this is different in an artificially intelligent backed system. In such a chat system, the user will be in front of their chat system or off the network. You can detect when a signal is no longer inside of a building that would provide the normal security you would want around such credentials.
In such a case, before that device disconnects from the network or rather when that network is no longer in access, the chatbot system can then encrypt and obfuscate the information shared on that computer. This will help prevent outside leaks to inside information because humans would not be able to make such a quick decision and so artificial intelligence, which can keep track of hundreds of computers, would be able to send that signal or notice when it was off the network or not used for a given time.
Handling Customer Retention
Immediate Gratification
It’s important to handle customer service quickly because the longer that a customer has to wait, the unhappier they are. The unhappier a customer is, the more defensive of their wallet they will be.
Artificial intelligence that can handle basic requests and ensure that they get the solutions to their problems releases something known as immediate gratification. Social media websites take advantage of immediate gratification to create addicts of their users so that that user will continue to come back to that website.
It is addictive to watch the amount of likes on a video go up, it is addictive to be recognized by YouTubers by simply paying them a bit of money to say some words. These interactions are addictive. Having a positive customer experience that causes immediate gratification creates a reward for that user to continue engaging in that activity. Therefore, having immediate gratification come from customer service is more likely to result in a sale from a new user.
Track Failing Areas in Products
Most of the reason why products fail is because they fail to provide what the customer needs. The problem with companies is that for a very long time you had to rely on, essentially, common sense to tell you what a company would be able to sell to a customer. Now, with tracking and statistics, you can effectively analyze what areas of the website are failing or areas of a product that are not being used to justify their purpose.
A product’s value is determined by how much time they save the customer so if your product saves customers time, but the customer does not think that the amount of time saved justifies the product, the customer will leave. The way that companies currently handle this is they usually provide the customer with tons of tools that can help them save time but the problem with tools is how often and how useful those tools are.
You can open up Photoshop and use Photoshop for years down the line, but you may only use Photoshop for the ability to mix two photos together and that’s it. Most people don’t know that you can use Photoshop to go through video clips and get a picture-perfect moment or that you can take a photo and change the perspective of the photo based on what’s in the photo. These are features that are totally alien to the average user menus and other features, which means they are rarely used but are useful in themselves.
Provide Feature Additions
Knowing the features of your product are failing and getting feedback as to why people might not be using it can actually lead to adding to features so that people use it more often. The more features that your product incurs usage in is equivalent to the amount of investment the customer is willing to spend with you.
The average user does not understand that you can go buy a 12-terabyte hard drive and then proceed to connect that hard drive to the internet so that you can connect to it whenever you want a cloud drive. You can do this and save money from ever needing to have a cloud drive but knowing that your cloud drive has backups and that items can be recovered in the possibility of a storm and that your cloud drive will likely still be online make the investment of having a cloud drive not controlled by you a good investment.
The added features of having redundancy and an always online capability means that a cloud drive offers more than just storage. On top of that, remember that the more that the user uses of your product, the more addicted they become to it. Therefore, you see companies like Microsoft and Google attaching their versions of cloud drive to their regular products. Therefore, you can open up a Google document inside of your cloud drive and you don’t ever have to waste the space on your computer for work that you might just store on Google Drive and you can access that work even if you’re not at your computer and you just have your phone.
Increased Customer Interaction
As we already said, the more customers interact with you on a positive note or on a note of necessity, the more they are likely to contribute to your wallet. Customers are both a form of income and advertisement. For instance, Evernote is a company that one might support but it’s a relatively unknown company because it’s primarily for people who take notes. However, given the features of Evernote, it’s quite easy to say that if you’re doing anything that requires you to keep track of something you can usually use Evernote for it.
As a result, someone who constantly uses it to take pictures of sick notes for their kid so that they can share them with his teachers is likely going to suggest this tool to other individuals because of how easy it is to take and ensure you have a backup of copies. The more this individual uses the service, the more they become addicted to it and they want to share their feelings for that service. They become an advertisement.
Understanding The Audience Better
Understanding what customers a hard time have searching for, what product features they tend to use more, knowing the complaints they have, and having statistics on what parts of the website are more visited helps you understand your audience. Understanding your audience helps you understand their needs and leads to more profitable products that are based on this knowledge. All of the company is an entity that recognizes time that can be saved for the customer and provides the solution that saves that time.
