You don’t need to dive deep into complex AI to enhance your customer experience. Instead, start with a well-designed chatbot for your customers, frontline employees, or both. Done right – and working hand-in-hand with people – it’s a low-cost, high-impact way to bring AI into your CX strategy.
About sixty years ago, MIT Professor Joseph Weizenbaum built a chatbot, named ELIZA, that could act like a psychotherapist. It was programmed to look for key words and phrases typed by a person and reflect their words back to them in its responses. He named ELIZA after Eliza Doolittle, from the play Pygmalion (and the musical My Fair Lady, based on the play and popular at the time) because it could be trained to improve its conversation.
Despite its simplicity, many people were so taken by it they started treating it like a real doctor. On one occasion, Weizenbaum’s secretary asked him to leave the room so she could have a private conversation with ELIZA!
My first experience with them was more than thirty years ago, when studying AI at university and we had ELIZA on our university computers. I remember once, one of my uni friends, who intensely disliked one of our lecturers, spent hours on ELIZA taking out his anger and frustration in fake conversations with it (her?). Little did he know all the ELIZA conversations where saved on the university servers! He spent the next few days frantically running around looking for an IT person to delete those chats.
Oh, how we laughed!
Anyway …
Sixty years on from the first ELIZA, chatbots have come a long way. And if you want to use AI to enhance your customer experience, a chatbot is one of the fastest ways to do it.
You still need to do it with appropriate guardrails to make sure it works correctly. But in terms of technology, it’s one of the easiest things to do.
And, surprisingly, many people actually like talking to chatbots.
Or maybe not so surprisingly, if the alternative is waiting on hold for hours or being passed around to different people and having to start from scratch each time.
Ideally, many happy customers don’t want to engage with you at all – because it’s usually because they have a problem, complaint, or issue they can’t resolve any other way. But if they do, many prefer using a chatbot.
A chatbot, if it’s deployed well, can handle initial enquiries, answer common questions, and solve routine issues – instantly and around the clock.
Unlike ELIZA sixty years ago, which was pre-programmed with a set of responses, the AI-based chatbots now are much more powerful. They are better at interpreting the customer’s problem, and even assessing the sentiment and urgency behind the question. And of course, if they can’t respond appropriately, they know to escalate that to a person in the call centre.
For more complex issues, sure, they might prefer speaking with a person. But even in these cases, customer service agents might use chatbots themselves to improve their responses.
For example, Telstra uses two chatbots in its call centres for their customer service agents.
One, called “One Sentence Summary”, quickly gives the agent a summary about the customer, based on their history, products, and past interactinos.
The other, called “Ask Telstra”, lets an agent quickly search the internal Telstra knowledge database so they can respond more quickly to the customer.
So, whether it’s customer-facing or agent-assisting, a chatbot is one of the best things you can do to enhance your customer experience.
I’ll be talking about this – and more – in my online presentation, coming up soon, about AI for customer experience. We’ll explore these and other CX tools, and also look at some of the guardrails you need to put in place for good governance.
It’s free, public, and open to all, so register here and invite others in your team as well.
