Why is it that consumers seem to be much less forgiving with service provider chatbots than with a witty personal assistant like Siri?
According to a recent global research study by analyst firm Forrester, commissioned by Amdocs, a third of service provider customers say they will take their business elsewhere due to poor experience with AI. In comparison, I don’t imagine many consumers leaving their iPhones behind due to a sometimes poor experience with Siri.
I believe part of the reason for this is due to consumers being able to choose to use Siri when they want to for assistance, versus a chatbot scenario in which they often don’t have a choice. According to analyst firm, Ovum, with a current install base of 800 million Apple devices, only 375 million of those use Siri monthly. However, that’s still an incredibly large number for a digital assistant that is still seen by many as just a novelty as it takes continued steps with each major iOS release to be something bigger.
For the moment, according to the Forrester research, communications and media service provider customers still prefer the human touch. If given the option, consumers would largely prefer to speak to a human (83 percent) since human agents better understand their needs (78 percent) and can address multiple questions at once (57 percent). On top of that, consumers do not want to be forced to use a chatbot if they don’t have to.
But given there is a clear advantage in the use of chatbots for communications providers – and consumers, too, if they want consistent, omni-channel and always-on customer service – how can operators improve them? The research shows consumers have a good sense of how they want service provider chatbots to service them and behave: the bots should be female (36 percent) rather than male (14 percent), polite and intelligent, yet funny.
Sound familiar? It should. Apple is certainly one of the major players that set the stage for this expectation, and the upgrades to Siri in iOS11 are raising the bar yet again. Interestingly, unlike most AI of today, almost half of consumers want their service provider’s chatbot to look human — as in have an actual face.
Despite frustrations with the current generation of chatbots, the survey did find some good news. Consumers trust communications providers to leverage AI to improve the quality of services more than industries such as banking, retail, government and insurers. This should be a wakeup call to communications providers to use this as a way to align their AI efforts with customer needs to ensure the biggest impact. It’s difficult to do this when today’s chatbots are so rule-based, and all it takes is a customer to go off script for the chatbot to lose its way. With machine learning, the experience is more like a new-employee training, noting what went wrong and how to fix it. The experience is only going to improve.
At the moment, though, there is a disconnect between what operators are doing and what consumers want. While 42 percent of the communications providers are prioritizing AI investments around privacy, speed, and security, according to a parallel survey conducted by Forrester, their end users say they want chatbots to provide a personalized experience and a wider range of information.
My advice for communications providers is to get started with small projects that leverage AI. By doing this, you’re giving the technology the chance to learn and expand over time. Apple started small with Siri in 2011, and its current version is leaps and bounds better due to superior intelligence.
If chatbots are going to increasingly become the first line of defense for customer service, it’s imperative that communications providers create a personalized virtual agent that is emotionally aware. Fine-tuning the chatbots over time as more personal data is made available will be a necessity as well. This will be a process, as even the most consumer-facing virtual agents from the likes of Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are still finding their way in this very complex environment.
