In the past, using chatbots to automate customer interactions was more of a cool trend than an urging necessity. However, today, the perception of this valuable technology has changed quite a bit, for various reasons.
First, there's also the need to keep up with the significant increase in workload on human agents created by Covid, making many companies turn to conversational automation, too.
In addition, there's the growing understanding that live agents, no matter how well-trained, can always have a bad day, hold outdated information, or simply forget the answer. Those things can result in the loss of a customer or a sale and can be easily resolved by automating a large portion of the traffic.
As chatbots have become more of a commodity for businesses rather than a mere trend, new challenges arise. Especially in the omni-channel era, managing to use conversational automation to its fullest extent while remaining consistent across all the different channels is no simple undertaking.
How do you tackle it, then?
A More Mature Mindset
"The modern way is definitely to automate the customer service across all channels. But now, the mindset has to mature a bit," notes Arman van Lieshout, Product Owner at CM.com.
According to van Lieshout, companies need to understand that even though they're automating their conversations, there's still a level of complexity involved, even though it isn't necessarily on the human side of things.
"It's no longer a matter of hiring more live agents, handling opening hours, etc.," he explains.
"There's a new set of challenges for companies: optimizing operations in the automated environment, updating in a timely manner, and understanding what it is exactly that they're trying to achieve."
For example, while it's relatively easy to sense a customer's frustration in a natural conversation, automated conversations pose a challenge in this area. When you automate interactions using chatbots, you can no longer rely on the intuition of your live agents, which makes it more challenging for to identify the customer's underlying problem or request.
"That's where we see a lot of difficulty for our enterprise customers," van Lieshout says.
"Enterprises start off their automation journey with certain topics in mind, believing they know what their customers are asking for; but once they go live, all of a sudden the analytics show something entirely different."
As a conversational automation solution provider, CM.com's main challenge is helping enterprises understand their customers' needs and the ways to achieve them while automating.
