AI Can Transform How Companies Interact With Customers

April 5, 2018  |  Mark Hillary
IBA Group
Mark Hillary

Chatbots have faced quite a challenge. Initially they were embraced, especially when Facebook championed how they could allow small companies to be available to customers 24/7 without the need for a contact centre. However, many customers and companies have also complained that they often fail to live up to the promise. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are just not good enough to replicate interactions with a real person.

But a recent feature in Financial Review magazine explores how chatbots are really just the beginning of a long journey into AI. Perhaps we should review our expectations and remember that we are only just starting to use these technologies for real business solutions. Mistakes will be made, but when the technology is effectively deployed it really does work.

Take a look at the National Australia Bank deployment of a chatbot to answer customer questions. The bank focused on the most common 200 questions that customers ask and the bot can recognise all these and another 13,000 variations of the same questions. Commonwealth Bank launched a chatbot in January of this year and by the end of the year they predict that it will understand 500,000 different ways to ask about 500 different banking processes.

The bots are learning. They are applying Machine Learning principles so that every interaction with a customer becomes an opportunity to learn and improve. This is very important, because many of the executives who have been critical of AI systems have not allowed the system long enough to learn how it needs to behave.

Organisations that need to interact with their customers often, like banks, will find that an enormous amount of basic enquiries can be handled by bots and customers will prefer interacting with bots because they get immediate – and accurate – service. AI has proven beyond doubt that it is more than just a fad. The smart use of a chatbot system is the first step on a path to creating a much more automated customer experience – an experience that most customers will prefer because of the immediacy of service.

Click here to learn about IBA Group’s EmailBot Solution.

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