What does the lack of quality standards mean for chatbots in the enterprise?

Published on
12/12/2019 01:43 PM

At the risk of sounding very 'the robots are taking over', chatbots are well and truly dominating industries (but without it being a cyber uprising). Increasingly, businesses are recognising the value that chatbots and AI have to offer. Not only are they fun, but they offer a fresh and efficient take on customer- and employee-facing assistance.

Thus, many organisations are enthusiastically building chatbots (or having chatbots built) for themselves. Natural language technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) have chatbots to the forefront of answering the simple queries of your customers or employees. However, 'simple' is the key word, as it's still very early days for chatbots. Firstly, they are yet to mature in terms of answering more complex enquiries. Thus, human agents will intervene if necessary to finish handling the query.

Furthermore, many people today could identify whether they're speaking to a bot or agent, without great difficulty. This would indicate that consumers or, if employee-facing, your staff, have certain expectations of human agents and robots. Ultimately, this leads to a wider conversation about the standards currently in place for chatbots. Do customers recognise chatbots because the quality is so high, or so low?

Still without standards

Chatbots are very much still in their advent, with organisations and consumers alike enjoying their novelty. However, a number of businesses are having to build and rebuild bots. This could be a result of the lack of industry-wide standards. It's completely new territory and, without knowing what you're aiming for, it can be difficult to navigate.

There are some obvious factors to keep in mind, consistency being one of them. Think 'unified tone of voice' across all of your deployments. Furthermore, Nicole Radziwill and Morgan Benton did some investigating into the qualities that chatbots should possess and boiled it down to the following three: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.

Leaving it to the experts

If uncertainty is preventing you getting started with chatbots, you can always seek the aid of AI chatbot platforms to help you build yours. There are a number of impressive platforms available on the market, including Boost.ai and SnatchbotKore.ai in particular are championing these platforms for the enterprise (in fact, they're the only AI platform built with enterprise in mind). Kore.ai promise "differentiated, world-class customer experiences". This is becoming increasingly important for businesses as the customer satisfaction competition brews more ferociously.

What's more, Kore.ai's end-to-end conversational AI-powered bots platform allows you to create and test to your heart's content. It is also the only platform to provide every component for enterprise use case requirements. Better still, it does so without huge investments of time and money.

However, it's not just your organisation that saves time. Customers also can enjoy shorter wait times and queues with conversational AI. Perhaps most important of all, these platforms also keep you in check with regulatory mandates. Therefore, although standards aren't quite in place, you can rest assured that you remain compliant.

It's clear that conversational AI is a catapult for customer experience, offering them a more personal and time-effective journey with your business. Although the lack of standards leave it very open-ended, organisations should enjoy the creativity involved in their deployment. Your customers will thank you for it.

Chatbots aren't the only thing bettering customer experience. Find out how the cloud is improving it too.

Join 34,209 IT professionals who already have a head start

Network with the biggest names in IT and gain instant access to all of our exclusive content for free.

Get Started Now