How to find the balance between bots and customer service agents
Consumers today have high expectations for customer service. They want service that is fast, personalized, and available wherever they are. Companies want to provide great service, but with new channels such as web chat, messaging apps, and in-app support cropping up, it’s hard for companies to know where to invest their customer service dollars.
Enter bots. In many ways, bots have been positioned as the answer. Many customer inquiries are routine and, in theory, could be easily (and inexpensively) handled by bots. Bots also have been seen as a panacea for overworked customer service teams who are struggling to scale fast enough to meet demand.
Despite this potential, some companies have reservations. Some of the earliest and most high-profile bot roll-outs have suffered mishaps that can create lasting damage for a brand. Aside from that, companies worry about whether customers will know if they’re talking to a live agent or a bot. Can they guarantee a good experience with a bot? Will bots will be able to parse sentiment like sarcasm or frustration? And how will bots work with a company’s existing call center infrastructure?
I always tell companies who are considering deploying customer service bots two things. One, we’re in the early days of bots. There are things that bots are good at and things that bots aren’t yet ready to do and, if deployed, would result in a sub-par customer experience. The best bot use cases today are simple and straightforward. Two, bots should be added to your customer service mix to help agents, not replace them. Adding bots is not a zero sum game. Deployed correctly, bots can dramatically scale your service operation and help your agents to be more productive and ultimately happier, leading to happier customers.
Simple bots are designed to handle mundane, repetitive tasks. For instance, rules-based bots can be assigned operational tasks like gathering a customer’s contact information or their reason for calling. Rules-based bots can triage initial requests before assigning cases to trained customer service agents, who can handle more advanced inquiries. Rules-based bots can process and log vast amounts of data, but human agents are still vital for resolving more complex tasks and understanding the customer’s tone and sentiment.
A similar transition happened decades ago when ATMs were introduced. Some speculated that bank tellers would quickly become a thing of the past. However, the opposite happened. ATMs have continued to exist alongside human bank tellers. The result has been that customers now have far more flexibility — such as the ability to withdraw money 24/7, something that very few banks could afford to offer if ATMs didn’t exist.
