Human-Bot Hybrid Is The Future Of Customer Service
Chatbots will not replace humans entirely and vice versa, but a mix of the two can enhance customer service
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Do you need a bellwether for a hybrid future? Look no further than your office, where on-site and remote work is the new normal. Do you need another indicator? Customer service. The human-AI collaboration is disruptive.
A Deloitte study found that 75 per cent of executives surveyed want to invest more in hybrid customer service. Many executives are looking to hybrid to increase personalisation (43 per cent), innovation (43 per cent), customer connection (40 per cent), and inclusion (38 per cent).
Over the last few years, businesses have been investing time and money in automation – chatbots and virtual support tools – to create personal connections with customers, reach out to more customers over more channels, and answer more inquiries in multiple languages.
Is all-digital the best way for brands? Studies suggest that 63 per cent of customers feel that customer services aren’t as fast or easy as expected. This has caused businesses to look for ways to optimise their customer service interactions.
Taking it up a notch, Soul Machines designed user interfaces with human faces and emotional expressions to make engagement more natural. So when you’re talking to one of their digital humans and smile at it, it recognises that you’re smiling; it smiles back.
This could disrupt the banking, finance, or automotive industries, where customers expect more customised experiences.
But is there a match to a live agent? While a chatbot has a better response time, humans can make changes and efficiently handle angry or disappointed customers. The flexibility in response and the empathy humans offer are second to none.
According to a PWC survey, around 64 per cent of consumers and 59 per cent of all consumers think that companies today lack the human element of customer experience. About 71 per cent prefer to interact with a human than a chatbot or any other automated process. However, human-team needs extensive training, and it comes with significantly higher costs than doing so with AI-chatbots.
Better together
So, what can businesses do?
Over the past few years, companies have attempted to cut down on live agents and engineered AI-enabled mechanisms, but customers want to talk to a human agent who understands their problems and delivers a solution that fulfils their expectations.
To maximise growth while delivering personalised experiences to customers, brands increasingly realise that choosing one or the other is not an option. Chatbots will not replace humans entirely, and vice versa, but a mix of the two can enhance customer service. The answer is hybrid. A great example of hybrid customer service is self-service, which is a win-win for business and customers. The customer can resolve their problems by themselves and at their own pace, while agents can direct their attention toward issues that require direct intervention.
Businesses need to put humans at the forefront, and human needs at the centre, and make customer service as agile and flexible as consumers expect, albeit with the help of AI-powered technology.
Humans and bots have different skills. While human agents easily recognise when a customer is upset and can respond with empathy, AI-powered virtual agents can assemble data from disparate systems to render a judgement instantly.
The initial interaction can be automated across all touchpoints to allow the customer to choose their language of choice. This response can then direct the query to the most appropriate agent and the most suitable medium of communication, depending on the query’s circumstances.
In the primary interaction with the AI-powered bot, it can collect all the necessary user information and answer common questions efficiently, execute routine tasks like resetting passwords – at InterContinental Hotels Group, virtual agents solve technical problems for employees who call the IT help desk, handling 85 per cent of the volume of questions coming in, while the human agents deal with the high-stakes issues that don’t fit the usual pattern. For the BFSI sector, complex tasks such as KYC authentication and compliance issues can be done by human agents via a video conversation, while chatbots can handle simple queries and resolutions. This leads businesses to effectively utilise their human resources, boost productivity, and save costs.
A chatbot can work endlessly, and customers can access the service round the clock, as customers expect businesses to answer their queries anytime, which is a major benefit.
It frees human agents from the drudgery and instead concentrates on the exceptions.
There are bots equipped with advanced analytics that help human agents to figure out the best things to say to the customer, providing specific information. For example, when there’s a new discount or an out-of-stock product, the bot will bring it to the agent’s attention . Chatbots can be powerful allies to human agents.
However, hybrid customer service is more than humans tackling certain types of requests and AI handling others, with an occasional hand-off. To make AI-human collaboration work, it’s critical not merely to flag the system when a virtual assistant answers a question incorrectly but to create experts who can review the AI’s output. Secondly, make expert knowledge available and create support content that improves AI performance. Finally, the most effective virtual agents are just one part of a comprehensive customer service strategy. Businesses have to create a defined escalation path so that the AI can seamlessly hand off to human support as needed.
The story of hybrid customer service is still being written, but businesses should bear in mind that the technology should fit human needs and not the other way around. Re-humanising customer service, including contact centre operations, is underway. Hybrid customer service is an opportunity for companies to step up their game.
Now that brands have become adept at digital delivery, the next challenge is to deliver the best integrated human-AI service. And those who do it well will thrive.
