Those 22:03 mins. Bots, where are you?
How bots in customer care service can end customer frustration.
“Nothing can replace humans!” 🤓
I had always held onto this belief; that is, until the day I had to contact the customer care service of one of the most reputed banks to know the complaint status of an unauthorised transaction.
The call lasted for around 22:03 minutes, out of which, for approximately 17 minutes, I was forced to listen to one of the most annoying hold tones in the world. For 3 minutes, my call was tossed between multiple executives. Apparently, they have different departments for different queries.
What really put me off after all this, was the answer I received to the query I finally managed to convey after the long wait. As the reply to my questions about the transaction and complain status, came the million-dollar reply:
‘Ma’am your request is under process…’.
The result: My crucial ⏰ 22:03 minutes and my phone balance 💰 were spent in vain.
It is not that this was my first time facing such a situation. But, considering that we are in 2018, and we have technologies which make things more approachable, interactive and efficient, why are we not using them? 🤷🏼
It is high time that we let our human minds be occupied with important tasks and replace the basic level customer service with the AI-driven bots 🤖 .
My suggestion probably led you to come up with some of these responses:
1. What are Bots 🤔 ?
2. Are they powerful enough to replace humans?
3. If yes, then this will cause unemployment.
4. Oh, cm’on!🙄 Nothing can replace humans.
To sum things up:
My definition of bots is:
Bots enable humans to converse with a device 🤳 (computer/mobiles) and get instant replies.
If you want to dive in and explore more on this, do check out What Are Chatbots.
To allay the remaining confusion, let us talk facts. The facts say:
Yes, bots are 💪🏽 powerful:
Gartner projects that more than 85 percent of customer interactions will be managed without a human by 2020.
Not unemployment; but enabling humans to apply their brains towards better solutions for the remaining 2/3 crucial tasks:
Gartner believes that by 2017, only one-third of customer service interactions will require human support.
The last fact pertains to the NOTHING in ‘Nothing can replace humans’:
Twenty-two percent of consumers claim to have used chat apps to interact with banks for services such as account activation and balance check.
‘Answers to customer’s trivial queries should be managed by bots’
Let us see how a bot solves a user query in seconds:
A bot like a BankBot can easily reside on Facebook Messenger, your website, slack or any other medium to solve your customer’s query.
The user is simply required to send the complaint number.
With a high level of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP), the bot studies the user’s text and sends the query to hit an API request whose response can be fetched within seconds, thus saving the user’s time.
Still wondering what your employees will do?
Well, they will focus their efforts and knowledge towards solving the customer’s problem, rather than just answering 😎
