Conversational chatbots for CX

Why chatbots matter

If you’re in the business of customer experience (“CX”), you’ll be familiar with chatbots – whether you know them as virtual assistants, virtual agents, or bots – and the conversational services they provide. You’ll also know how quickly chatbot technology has been advancing. And, as chatbot technology has been innovated, so has our contact centre software application, Syntelate XA.

The latest AI chatbot capabilities are supported by Syntelate XA through its API. A true omnichannel solution for contact centres, Syntelate XA collates your customers’ interaction history from every channel into a single source of truth that’s displayed to agents on their Syntelate XA Agent Desktop.

Broadly speaking, AI chatbot capabilities stretch beyond customer triage. They allow a business to improve multiple areas of their CX, from net promoter scores and customer ratings to administrative efficiencies that slash operating costs.

“Up to 73% of healthcare admin tasks could be automated by AI, and the adoption of chatbots could save the healthcare, banking, and retail sectors $11 billion annually by 2023.” [1]

But beware the compulsion to sign up for the latest chatbot tech. Basic chatbots still meet the needs of many use cases, and thanks to their simplicity, they even offer some advantages over their AI-powered relatives. Here’s an outline of their key differences.

Basic chatbots for triage

To detect a customer’s intent, basic chatbots typically refer to a predefined glossary of trigger phrases and a library of canned responses. So, when the customer asks: “I want to find out the status of my order”, the chatbot searches the glossary and matches phrases in the customer’s query, which triggers the chatbot to send the library’s canned response of: “Let me look into that for you.”

The limitations of this system are that the glossary and library are static. As a result, if the chatbot is asked a question that has not been already defined, they will reply with “Sorry, I do not understand.”

Despite that limitation, basic chatbots still remain popular because they are no-code solutions, easy to set up, and appropriate for many use cases. So long as someone takes ownership of maintaining the glossary and library, the chatbot can add value to CX operations for a long time.

But for businesses looking for something more advanced, there is a new breed of chatbot out there that can perform more than triage.

Self-improving conversations and advanced process automation

The new chatbots on the market are conversational. Developed using linguistics and psychographic technologies such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), a conversational AI chatbot understands natural language and user intent. This means that the chatbot can learn by itself to improve its conversation with customers. As well as the CX benefits that come with more personable conversation flows, the latest chatbots enable advanced process automation. Those efficiencies offer you the potential to realise substantial cost and quality improvements across your CX offering, and wider business too.

Benefits

• Improve customer satisfaction
• Improve the agent experience
• Reduce response times
• Reduce operational costs
• Automate handling of routine requests
• Allow human agents to focus on higher value work
• Comprehensive data gathering
• 24/7 availability

Integrating with contact centre software

You’ll find many conversational AI platforms and chatbot services available on the market. It’s easy to integrate them with contact centre applications, including Syntelate XA. A true omnichannel, web-based customer engagement platform, Syntelate XA supports voice, email, social media messaging, SMS and web chat. Adding a chatbot to Syntelate XA is straightforward and cost effective.

Syntelate XA is valued by our clients for its flexibility and agent-centred user design. We believe that when you look after your agents’ productivity, they look after yours. So, if you’re not already using Syntelate XA, why not?

Sources

[1] Meaghan Yuen, ‘Chatbot market in 2022’, 15 April 2022, Insider Intelligence, available online at: <https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/chatbot-market-stats-trends/>, accessed: 9 September 2022.