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Ahh, the good ole chatbot. Always there when you need technical assistance; always a timely response. Need a link to another form? The chatbot has your back. Redirect to a help PDF with 380 pages to sort through? Chatbot to the rescue. But what if a chatbot could be more than a virtual table of contents… What if a chatbot could become your virtual confidant, anticipating then delivering solutions to your every need and desire.
Could there be a world where we’d prefer a bot over a live support desk? Could AI become your go-to after returning home alone from a long night out, finally giving Fido some reprieve from your girl drama? According to many sources, the answer is yes.
AI is developing rapidly
Machine learning is expediting AI’s processing capabilities and within the next decade it is likely to reach a level of imitating conscious responses where it is almost indecipherable from talking with a real person.
This naturally poses the question: will there still be a role for employees in customer service? A real HR team is costly and if the efficacy is the same as a software install, is it worth it?
First of all, where artificial intelligence stands now, human capacity for understanding unique queries and responding are still more accurate. Chatbots use preset automated responses. This means in order to expand their processing capability, you have to manually update their reservoir of queries and responses. However, they provide consistent service to users at all times and help businesses by automating simple but time consuming tasks. A big limitation currently with chatbots is their inability to identify nuances and respond to them properly. But their capacity for this is already greatly improving and will continue to do so.
Human limitations
A real HR team can provide personalized responses that are tailored to the user’s needs which allows them to create a genuine relationship with the customer, enhancing customer experience. But a team of employees is limited in their ability to serve customers promptly and in real-time because they can’t handle multiple users at once. When asked about the current disparities between AI and human capability, the Product Manager for our own AI, Purply, said “AI integration into customer service requires balance. While AI offers benefits like efficiency and scalability, it cannot replicate the ‘human touches’ or personalization and empathy that are so important to us and our clients. We see AI as a powerful tool to enhance and support our teams, but we also understand its limitations.”
Finding the perfect balance
Our team at Advertise Purple recognized the potential for combining AI with human management to optimize our ability to serve clients very early on. Purply was born in 2017 and has been optimizing data to generate activations and promotional opportunities for our clients to our account managers ever since. Account managers review every opportunity to select ones that align with the goals and strategic direction of the client. However, the database is accessible to clients 24/7 and works around the clock to deliver recommendations as soon as they are identified.
The idea of having robots to do your job for you sounds cool. But realistically a computer doesn’t currently, and may never be able to reach the depth of individual understanding a human team can, which is so incredibly valuable in sustaining customer relationships. If you want to be in the game for the long run, investing time and money into human connections instead of new software will pay off big time… we would know.
