Page 18 - EngineerIT September 2022

ICT

Why can’t your chatbot just

solve my query?

By Ryan Falkenberg, Co-CEO, CLEVVA

hatbots are, to be blunt, everywhere. It feels as if you can hardly visit a website
these days without a bot asking how they can help you. It’s not just a matter of
Cperception either. According to research from Gartner, chatbots will become a
primary customer service channel for around a quarter of organisations by 2027.
Ubiquitous as chatbots are becoming, however, they still have a significant problem:
aside from their inability to understand customer queries, many of them simply aren’t
that helpful. Many of us know all too well how frustrating it can be to type multiple
variations of a query into a chat box, only for the chatbot to keep returning irrelevant
results (especially if there are no other avenues to contact the organisation in question).
Frustrating as it is that the typical chatbot is so poor at solving queries, it’s
understandable. Fortunately, there is an approach that can make them much more
useful.
The trouble with chatbots

When it first became clear that chatbots might be useful to the world of business Ryan Falkenberg
(sometime in the mid-2010s), many organisations vastly overestimated what they’d
be capable of. In their minds, they were getting a like-for-like replacement for human
customer service agents. Chatbots, the thinking went, would be able to resolve Additionally, the resulting actions can
customer queries completely unassisted. be processed with confidence because
In reality, what they got was more like a smart librarian. That is, the they’re more likely to be right.
chatbot doesn’t know the answer itself, but knows where to fetch it from. A Gartner That in turn means that
Unfortunately, many of them are working with poorly constructed organisations are more
knowledge bases, meaning that the answers they provide tend to be customer service and willing to embrace
generic and unhelpful (much like a librarian who only has access to support (CSS) survey of 50 automation and the
out-of-date reference books). respondents conducted online benefits it brings.
It’s hardly surprising then that interactions with these chatbots in January and February 2022
can be so frustrating, especially once they go beyond simple revealed 54% of respondents are Steps in the
requests such as “buy airtime” or “milk tart recipe”. using some form of chatbot, VCA right direction
or other conversational AI While many of
The service bot solution today’s chatbots
Fortunately, there is a relatively simple solution when it comes to platform for customer-facing aren’t the customer
overcoming the limitations of chatbots. It involves adding a single applications service panacea
additional step to clarify the intent of your query. Adding this step and organisations imagined
doing so usefully requires the integration of service bots. A service bot is they would be a few years ago,
essentially a digital service expert that can help clarify your request, analyse your improvement is possible. With the help
needs, identify the root cause of your problem, and recommend a solution. of service bots, most organisations can
That’s important for two reasons. The first is that it ensures that you start in the put themselves on the path to offering
right place. So, for example, if you type “SSL Certificate” into a service bot, it can customers a Virtual Agent - one capable
clarify whether you want to update it or if you want to get one. The more of these of resolving their queries first time. n
clarifications it goes through, the better its natural language understanding (NLU) gets,
further improving its ability to answer queries. CLEVVA specialises in building, deploying
The second is that you’re adding the capability to analyse a problem and come and maintaining Virtual Agents for
up with a relevant solution. Most chatbots don’t do that. They jump to a solution regulated industries. These customer
set immediately, which is not helpful if you don’t know what your problem is. service experts drive down the cost to
With analysis, the resolutions the customer’s presented with are much more serve while improving service compliance
appropriate. and customer loyalty. www.clevva.com

EngineerIT | September 2022 | 16