Chatbots save lives
Together, we are in the midst of a public health crisis and all we can do is wait and stay home. We’re slowing down, giving services time to prepare, but while the world waits for a cure, time is our treatment.
We’re moving online more and more. Services we use every day, government, health, finance, insurance, communications are trying to cope with us requesting them remotely. Customer enquiry surges are reaching critical heights, overwhelming customer support, leading to dangerous wait times.
So chatbots save time, chatbots save lives.
Saving time and lives
Our lives are still going on at home, living the same (socially distant) lives we lived before isolation.
We’re waiting longer for our services, and sometimes we’re unable to even use them.
My internet provider told me to not call unless it’s an emergency. (You’re an internet provider I’m not calling for an ambulance)
Kmart’s website made me queue for their website, waiting 30 minutes in a virtual lobby to buy some socks.
Welfare services have been unable to provide answers or services completely.
Not saying we replace customer service with chatbots, I’m saying we hold the hold music.
There are real issues with virtual customer service.
Press 1 to speak to a human, tell your entire issue to a phone line. Your call is transferred to a customer service department that needs a number to send you to someone who asks you the same questions you answered at step 1 and also confirms your mobile number.
And let’s not get started on the sh*t hold music Centrelink plays. ( 7 minutes of Mozart on repeat).
Our craft as writers, and my job as a conversational designer (chatbot builder), helps ease these moments we all hate.
“How can I help?” Is the obvious question, we need to work with organisations and people to find the answers.
Questions & answers for customers
New information becomes available every day. We surge websites, hotlines, customer support teams. Millions of people make enquiries sparked by the same events and source.
Companies are letting customers down, governments are unable to give people answers.
If you design a conversation around a service or set of answers, it can answer 80% of customer queries. But automation doesn’t replace staff, it supports them, answering the questions that can be answered without a human. This frees up vital resources to answer the questions only a human can.
I’ve done customer service in a call-centre myself. The feeling of reading from a script someone else wrote, unable to help a customer who asks a question you can’t answer cause it’s ‘off script’.
I’ve even been asked if I was a robot.
Customer service jobs will become more empowered with automation — encouraging more individual agency for staff to focus on complex or unique queries.
How much life does a chatbot save?
Let’s see how conversational automation can save customer, company and staff time.
Centrelink’s recently been inundated with COVID-19 related applications for the same benefit, all being asked the same eligibility questions.
In 2020, the average wait time for Centrelink’s customer service team is 15 minutes and 44 seconds. In March 2020, there were 250,000 enquiries made in one day. Automating some questions for customers, or answers for customers questions would save 15 minutes on every single call.
So let’s ask the bot;
7 years of time.
250,000 people’s 15 minutes.
The funny thing is, creating a bot that could respond well or efficiently to 50 specific & frequent customer questions only takes 72hrs to build.
The art of listening well
Clever conversational automation does more than just answer questions. Nowadays with natural language understanding in AI we can design for listening.
AI can be taught to register keywords, sentiment, intents while a customer is speaking to a customer service staff member. This information can then be used to feed into services, transcripts or data.
This example is a prototype from McDonald's America. It’s live transcribing an order through a drive-through and formatting the customers' voice transcription into McDonald’s’ Ordering Structure.
With AI listening to conversations, customer service agents can really listen to their customer — rather than recording.
This removes the dangerous possibility of human error, especially in a crisis where misinformation could mean negative financial or health implications. Not sweet n sour sauce.
Although, we are human. We aren’t perfect. Conversational automation and bots are designed and built by humans. Human error will always exist.
Our words mean more right now
Conversational logic, automation and AI is showing how our craft can be used to really help and augment people and services in our world. We are essential workers. Our words mean more than anything right now.
If someone is stranded in a foreign country and needs help from their insurance company to get home, we can help with our words.
If our internet goes out and we have to wait 3 hours to speak to someone who can only reset our net remotely.
When a website has an online queue we can be there to help customers find what they need sooner.
Next time I’m on hold to Centrelink I won’t have to hear that bloody violin.
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We’re all writers who can save time with our words. Whether we’re paid to do it or not.
We choose what we mean through our voices, keyboards, touchpads. Conversations we have every day.
Which means it should be easier to create helpful customer experiences which reflect our conversations naturally.
We’re seeing companies invest more than ever in virtualising services. This will continue to rise as we see our services and industries changing in the new normal.
Let’s start using conversation, the thing we’ve done for thousands of years as a new power source for our technology. Bringing in the first form of human communication into our newest services. Let’s use our words, social cues, and our humanity to help us access and use the digital products, services and information we are seeking.
Check out the WHO approach to a chatbot for the world. They’ve balanced length of content and amount of questions really well with natural language. Ask to hear “your questions answered❓”
If I can leave you with something. It’s as writers, our words really do matter.
It’s our responsibility as digital writers, providing info to the world through chat to keep automated conversations as human and helpful as humanly possible.
Save time save lives ✌️
If you’ve got questions about how to implement this, or want to chat about chat, say g’day at Finn Astle, or see some of our work at Versa Agency
