Chatbot Development

Can Chatbots Care About Customers?

The pandemic has clearly underlined the need for companies to show their caring side. Not only do customers increasingly want companies to behave in the right way, but they want this to extend into treating them with empathy and consideration. While this presents a clear challenge for companies utilizing chatbots as a key part of their customer service channels, it is a challenge that with the right approach can be met successfully.

I'm sure we can all recall a time when we were delighted by an exceptional customer experience. It was likely an experience that not only met our expectations but surpassed them, where we were made to feel important and as though the company we were dealing with truly cared about us and our happiness.

It's perhaps no surprise that Forrester Research found recently that these kinds of exceptional customer experiences were good news for companies, with those able to deliver them regularly experiencing 1.4 times more revenue growth, 1.6 times better customer lifetime value, and 1.7 times better customer retention.

For many, this comes as no surprise, and indeed Walmart's Sam Walton famously remarked that the “goal of a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary."

As a result, it's perhaps no surprise that when recruiting for customer service staff, companies look for very human qualities, such as emotional intelligence, patience, humility, and attentiveness. With chatbots taking on an ever-growing array of customer service responsibilities, is it possible to imbue the technology with such characteristics?

Digital support

The current landscape is changing rapidly, with the majority of customer interactions now starting via digital channels. Interacting with customers via channels such as chatbots offers a number of advantages, not the least of which are flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and round-the-clock coverage. But consumers have just as high expectations of their interactions with chatbots as they do with human customer service agents. When interactions are straightforward, these expectations are often met quite comfortably, but when they call for emotions or complex problem-solving, the demands placed on chatbots are that much greater.

Due to significant investments in data and analytics, chatbots are now as capable as they have ever been to deliver personalized communication with customers. One could even argue that significant strides have been made in delivering a connection with customers. There remain valid concerns, however, that amidst the surge in the use of technology in marketing and customer service, the very connections that emerge when we engage with fellow humans has been lost. Indeed, this trend has been particularly prominent online, where many e-commerce platforms now offer no human interaction at all.

This desire for human interaction has been compounded by a pandemic in which many of us have been starved of it for prolonged periods. As such, it’s vital that technologists are able to embed humanity into the digital platforms they provide for customers to interact with.

Keeping the personal touch

A sector that perhaps provides the most opportunities for learning is health care, where the use of technologies, such as chatbots, has been so strong—both before and especially during the pandemic. With social distancing regulations spreading across the world, telehealth has become the normal way of accessing health care.

Research from University College London illustrates how chatbots can be coded to exhibit empathy, with this proving to be highly effective in tackling loneliness and social exclusion. Now is the time to ensure similar care is given to customer service chatbots. This can be achieved in a number of ways.

Firstly, developers can work to ensure that chatbots are not monotonous automatons, but actually have a degree of personality. This personality should ideally match that of the brand they're representing. Personality isn't confined to the language used, but also in the appearance of the chatbot and the name given to it.

Developers can also make effective use of sentiment analysis to better understand each customer. For instance, one of the key elements of empathy is the ability to understand when someone is upset, so if a chatbot can both accurately detect this and then modify its language accordingly, it can go a long way towards building meaningful connections.

Showing a caring side

It's also vital that chatbots are able both to understand their own strengths and limitations and to swiftly pass correspondents on to humans when those limitations are exceeded. For instance, chatbots are always very good at relatively straightforward tasks, such as inventory checks or order status updates, but they can struggle with more complex tasks. A key part of exhibiting empathy for the customer is to be able to pass them on to human operators to help them rather than forcing them to stick it out with a chatbot that isn't really helping.

Lastly, chatbots can become more empathetic via the effective use of both natural language processing (NLP) and emotional artificial intelligence. This enables the bots to understand the various nuances of human language and to engage in a less robotic manner, while also understanding the relevance and urgency of messages.

The pandemic has clearly underlined the need for companies to show their caring side. Not only do customers increasingly want companies to behave in the right way, but they want this to extend into treating them with empathy and consideration. While this presents a clear challenge for companies utilizing chatbots as a key part of their customer service channels, it is a challenge that with the right approach can be met successfully.