Stop using AI like a low level chatbot

Customers have always loved or hated chatbots depending on how their experiences were with them. And even though that many companies are implementing AI into their models, I still observe repeating the same old conversational hiccups. To the point that in some cases AI instead of delivering higher quality digital customer experiences, it’s similar to a low level chatbot. Here’s a recent chat making it evident.

Check out this conversation

Read below the excerpt of a live chat conversation between a customer and a company’s AI-virtual agent. To make things easier for you, I’ve underlined AI agent’s expressions and behaviors that have made the overall customer experience poor.

Now, let’s delve into this conversation facets through customer’s lens:

Firstly the AI agent welcomes the customer with a brief message and smartly asks an open question to engage him/her.
Then, after customer’s asking about company’s services the AI agent makes a huge mistake. In fact, instead of asking the customer to explain more precisely their need (e.g. asking ‘what specific service are you interested in?’) the AI agent provides a long-winded, generic response. Accordingly, the answer is not coherent with customer’s need because it just describes the supposedly great features of their platform. On top of that, even words and form being used are inconsistent since Ai agent starts off with ‘[name of the brand] offers…’ then after a couple of sentences shifts to a different form ‘we provide…’.
As a result, the customer wants to close rapidly the chat by replying ‘none of them’.

In a nutshell, the first response has killed overall customer experience due to lack of proactivity and empathy that are key ingredients! Related podcast 🎧 5 critical points for AI into Digital Customer Service.

Over to you

Stop using AI like a low level chatbot. To take full advantage of it, get your conversational flows optimized first, then use AI to amplify outcomes: e.g. reducing customer efforts and introducing AI in-chat solutions that previously were not available.