How to Add Chat-bots to Contact Centers

With advances in A.I. or artificial intelligence, this is enabling companies to combine live support staff with automated bots or Chat-bots to create compelling and cost-effective chat-based interaction systems for their customers. Enterprise Chat-bots should have a few key capabilities. First, enterprise-grade Chat-bots should leverage A.I.  engine that is trainable by the enterprise. This way, the organization can easily teach the Chat-bot enterprise-specific information. Secondly, a Chat-bot with an A.I. engine that includes a natural language set of APIs relevant to the enterprise is critical. Chat-bots also need to provide a level of security and assurance with regards to the information pulled and pushed as requested, and delivered via the Chat-bot.

Chat-bots should be an essential part of your OmniChannel service approach. Call Center Pros has 6 OmniChannel Contact Center solution with A.I. and half include Chat-bot technology. Call Center Pros can also can recommend “Best-of-Breed” Chat-bots with A.I. that will also have APIs to pull info from your systems and push info to your systems. Start with the most frequently asked questions. Here are some steps to help ensure your Chat-bot plan will work smoothly:

Make sure customers can easily escalate to human-chat service without having to repeating previous questions, content and context.This is a critical necessity, because not only does it provide a smooth and seamless OmniChannel experience to the customer, but it also increases self-service adoption. In addition, email a transcript of the entire chat session to the customer.

Chat-bots can be effective in B2B customer service as well, although the technology has been traditionally used in B2C or G2C service (government-to-citizen). The company  ZipfWorks is building community centric shoppingapps. Go and innovate a new Chat-bot service, here are 11 examples of Chat-bots from the UK!

Give the Chat-bot, a persona that is suitable for your markets served. For example, many US-based clients often implement Chat-bots with outgoing personalities. A Japanese beer uses the face of a popular actor who features in their TV advertisements—the Chat-bot using that same voice reinforces the brand by leveraging that actor’s persona Technology and entertainment companies tend to use a sexy voice from Allison Smith for both recordings and Text2Speach. I had a Debt Consolidation call center who asked Allison Smith "Can you sound less sexy?"… they quickly mutually agreed to separate. You need the right persona, to match your clientele.

Use adaptive content management to sustain the relevance and performance of your content. Here the main adaptive content management factors:

• Device (operating system, mobile, tablet, desktop, screen resolution)
• Context (time, region, location, velocity, humidity, temperature)
• Person (age, gender, stage of life, language, relationships)

How are where to put a Chat-bot on your website:

• Place the Chat-bot near the top of the screen, but not at the very top. Customers expect advertisements at the top of the screen.
• Have the Chat-bot consistently (but discreetly) available on every page.
• If the Chat-bot has to be started with a button, label the button clearly.
• Very important, when a Chat-bot gives a web page, provide a link to that page.
• Make the chat text box large enough to contain a typical query so that users can see all of what they have typed without scrolling.
• Avoid a pop-up window for the Chat-bot. Consumers don’t like communicating with Chat-bots if the chat window obscures the web pages they are on.
• Make sure the Chat-bot accepts common SMS Slang as well as spelling and grammatical errors.
• Make sure you phrase error messages so they do not antagonize customers who are already frustrated, instead try "Tell me more about that" or "Is that what you think?" and not that they’ve made “errors”!
• Apply human-to-human communication best practices to Chat-bots. Implement Chat-bots that are emotionally intelligent and display empathy through expressions as well as language.

Eliza was the most famous and successful early Chat-bots and was developed by MIT in 1964-1966. Eliza was supposed to be a parody of psychotherapists at the time, asking open-ended and vague questions about everything the person said. "How do you feel about that?" "Why do you think you did that? "What do you think it means?" The questions just kept going and going. MIT’s subjects really responded to it. Many said that Eliza helped them, and some asked the people conducting the test to leave them alone with Eliza so they could discuss things in private. Eliza was so successful that people were proposing it as a low-cost way to handle people with mild psychological problems.

Please contact us for any call center technology need or telecom challenge.

Thank you,
James Wilson, CEO
Call Center Pros
+1-404 936 4000
james@call-center-pros.comr
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswwilson