The 3 Must-Have’s for Intelligent, Intuitive, Human-like Chatbots
The Age of Bots Is Here
Chatbots these days are all the hype. With consumers primarily opting for messaging platforms for engaging with brands, and with the ongoing advancements in artificial intelligence – enabling bots to understand customer requests – we can confidently conclude that bots are here to stay.
From the consumer’s perspective, chatbots can provide friction-free, always-on support on their preferred channel of interaction. For service providers, this self-service option is both cost efficient and more delightful for today’s impatient consumer on-the-go.
The Bot Challenge
Yet, we find – that often, bots are faced with certain (potentially show-stopping) challenges. Namely, they frequently can get stuck with complex requests that are not pre-scripted, or with those that require complicated backend workflows. Furthermore, when the bot doesn’t understand the specific industry context of the interaction, the bot is often unable to provide the requisite information and support. For, clearly – a telco-centric conversation vs. a banking-centric conversation, for example, will have a very different lexicon and business scenario.
Furthermore, the organization’s bot should be available on all channels – to ensure that customers can engage on their channel of choice. However, this is not always the case.
And, when these engagement lacunae occur – clearly, the result is consumer frustration.
Overcoming the Bot Challenge
Accordingly, following extensive experience in supporting the world’s leading communications and media providers, below is our list of the three must-have’s for an intelligent, intuitive, human-like, chatbot that overcomes the above challenges:
Advanced Cognitive Capabilities
For a truly intuitive engagement, the bot should be endowed with natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, natural language understanding (NLU), and name entity recognition (NER) – such as provided by Microsoft Cognitive Services, as well as sentiment and speech analysis.
This powerful combination of advanced cognitive capabilities will enable the bot to intuitively identify the intent of the customer, understand the context, and engage in a very human-like, conversational manner.
Furthermore, if it is integrated with back-end customer centric systems, such as CRM, the bot will be able to receive the complete customer picture – to leverage past behaviors and preferences – for a supremely personalized and contextualized experience.
Available on All Possible Channels of Choice
The bot should be able to leverage an open source framework, such as the Microsoft Bot Framework, where it can be offered on all the possible bot interaction channels, including text channels such as Facebook Messenger, Skype, and Webchat; voice channels such as IVR; and native channels such as Alexa and Google Home.
Pre-Built for Industry-specific Care & Commerce
For service providers, for example, the telco context is quite distinct from the banking or insurance context. Accordingly, an effective service provider’s bot should come with pre-built telco use cases that address key telco care and commerce scenarios.
Furthermore, it should come either pre-integrated with incumbent BSS/OSS systems such as CRM, product catalog, ordering, and billing; or be able to integrate with any open API that is exposed by existing BSS/OSS systems.
To learn about the Microsoft and Amdocs collaboration on bot cognitive capabilities, and how you can deploy the market’s only intelligent bot that is tailored for the business needs and customer expectations of service providers, we invite you to learn by clicking here.
