Chatbots: AI and Empathy
Among the several opportunities that AI offers to businesses, one of the most promising is chatbots development. Nowadays, customers are demanding round-the-clock service for assistance and nearly 40% of internet users worldwide choose to interact with chatbots rather than virtual agents. Indeed, the AI market has been rapidly growing, from 190,8 million dollars in 2016 to around 1,25 billion estimated in 2025.
At Flowe, the development of our AI interactive assistant WAI ensures efficient customer experience and simplifies staff work, by providing immediate 24/7 assistance with customized and engaging messages.
One of the most valuable characteristics of WAI is its ability to acquire new information every day, ensuring not only the correct execution of tasks but also an improvement of its support capabilities.
The synergy between customer care and chatbot design
At Flowe, the same people that answer customers’ requests are those who design the chatbot. This helps us to know the target, and its needs and to keep the chatbot updated. WAI does not only assist customers, but it serves as a knowledge base to access information even within our team.
In 2020, only eight people were working on customer care and chatbot design, now we are double this number. We come from different backgrounds (communications, psychology, economics, and law), and experiences and WAI has become a melting pot of our knowledge.
How does a chatbot understand our language?
Our chatbot understands natural language by acquiring information regarding intents and entities. To make it simple, intent can be described as the intention behind users’ utterances, while entities are the objects (names, time, prices, etc.) of the request. For instance, the intention of the sentence: “I can’t do a bank transfer” is to report a problem, while the object is the bank transfer. As conversational designers, we combine words, verbs, and expressions with the right intent to ensure that users’ utterances will be correctly interpreted. Up to now, WAI recognizes almost 20 different intents and around 60 entities, each one with its synonyms. It knows all the nuances of language!
Each utterance has only one intent, but it can combine more objects that suggest a specific interpretation of the sentence. This means that identifying the correct combination of intents and entities is the secret behind the chatbot’s performance.
Although most of us have interacted with a Chatbot at least once, we still use mechanical language, as if we unconsciously believe we need to adapt how we speak to it. For this reason, we use simple keywords, sentences without subject or verb, and we do not express our intention. By doing so, AI will struggle in understanding our questions. One of our goals is to teach users to interact with WAI in the best possible way, by giving them writing tips, and corrections and creating interactive tutorials.
How to humanize chatbots?
Users want to feel like they’re speaking to a real person when they interact with chatbots. How do you ensure human touch and empathy?
Empathy means to “put yourself in other people’s shoes”, and to understand other people’s emotions, feelings, and real needs. By understanding these elements, the chatbot will be able to provide users with more natural and satisfying communication. WAI is already able to identify users’ needs, thanks to its system of entities and intents, but it also needs to answer in a way that will enhance those feelings of human connection.
In a Conversational System, the chatbot’s words will influence how users perceive the customer experience. For this purpose, we are working on its language, emotions, and personality. Being the first touchpoint for customers, WAI needs to express Flowe’s values of neutrality, inclusiveness, and sustainability. In addition, we have been designing customized conversations to adapt chatbot messages to users’ characteristics thanks to the use of variables. Such variables help us to get information on users’ demographics, actions, and choices.
At Flowe we are not only looking to improve customer service with chatbot automation but also to connect this automation with human emotions. For this reason, WAI is becoming more efficient, funny, and empathetic to make the person feel like: “I’ve been heard”.
Would you like to learn more about WAI? Don’t hesitate to leave a comment and tag me. I will be happy to reply to your questions!
If you like what we do and how we approach new problems and challenges, check out flowe’s website and open positions!
