While the winter holiday season may represent many things: a focus on family, comfort food, and self reflection. It also highlights just how important excellent customer experience is. Whether you’re buying gifts for extended family, booking holidays abroad, or reevaluating your subscriptions, the common takeaway is that current customer experiences of chatbots are frustrating, ineffective and outdated.
Chatbots were introduced as a way to try to streamline and alleviate the stress of humans on the other side of the phone. Most are deterministic, hard-coded machines that offer users a few buttons, which are often maddeningly broad, with no option to actually type what you want. Leaving customers at best annoyed and at worst, once they’ve actually reached a human, ready to withdraw their support of a company completely. The future of customer experience requires us to think outside of these static boxes and move towards something more secure, convenient, real-time and personalised
The Difference in Service
Before we can properly dive into the solution, it’s imperative to understand the difference between chatbots and AI agents. These are two different tools that solve different problems. Chatbots are hard-coded, they deliver specific messages when prompted and are best thought of as handling predefined questions and tasks. When a customer’s problem is more complex and doesn’t follow the rails of a pre-planned conversation tree, that’s when you need an AI agent to step in.
Both play a role. Chatbots thrive at handling the most common questions and provide easy troubleshooting, ultimately reducing wait times and bottlenecks. AI agents work best when a customer’s request is tricky, needs personal context, or requires pulling data and actions from different systems, so the issue gets solved right away instead of being passed to a human.
Consider this: your less tech-savvy grandfather is having issues with his movie subscription service. If he logs on to see that the Help chat only offers the options: upgrade your subscription, pay your bill, or a hyperlink to an FAQ. His first impression of this tool might be that it is frustrating and unhelpful, and his takeaway might be that ‘it would just be easier to speak to someone’. What’s missing is personalisation.
Moving from Bots to Butlers
The gap between what solutions a chatbot can offer and what a human can offer is still large. While chatbots can help answer very routine questions, they don’t exactly elevate stress for the humans behind the screen to the level we once thought they would.
Adapting AI agents that act more as a “concierge” than a vending machine will allow for a reimagining of what the customer experience could look like. By using CRM data, agents would be able to understand a customer’s history and greet them with a personalised, relevant opening, rather than a list of often unhelpful options. It would also allow for a deeper understanding of the customer’s unique needs and behaviours.
With this in mind, there is a threshold where a customer query becomes too complex for a predefined chatbot, and an AI agent needs to step in. To make sure that this handover is seamless, a well-designed chatbot will have a prompt that’s labelled something to the effect of “none of these options are correct”, which should then trigger the AI agent and seamlessly share any collected context.
So when your less tech-savvy grandfather is having issues, he’ll have the option to select ‘none of these options’, and therefore move him into a conversation with a more intelligent, adaptive AI agent that can help get to the root of the problem. Still evaluating whether the problem warrants human intervention, and if not, being able to provide a solution.
The Future of CX
The future of CX is bright. It goes without saying that the more personalised an experience is, the more likely you are to walk away feeling satisfied. And the first rule in building brand loyalty is keeping your customers happy. The next evolution of this is AI agents that understand the unique needs and behaviour of customers and address them accordingly.
The agent should identify that your less tech-savvy grandfather is, in fact, not tech-savvy, and should therefore approach the situation with more patience and explanation. Just like a real human would. Ultimately, the results are the same, but further personalising the experience means the customers are walking away feeling heard and valued, just as if they got their problem solved by a person who knew them.
Another obvious benefit for businesses is that by making the shift from chatbot to AI agent, you’re keeping dedicated CS professionals out of mundane interactions and allowing customers with the most complex and sensitive cases to be handled promptly. Being tasked with meaningful work helps to keep employees satisfied as well. It’s a win-win from both sides.
Hopefully, as more companies start to embed this technology, this busy time of year for customers will feel more streamlined, sophisticated and ultimately more rewarding.
