Customers want to have simpler means to interact with businesses and get faster response to a question or complaint. This behaviour is similar across all customer focused markets, such as Retail and Finance, where the loyalty of the customer depends on the quality of interaction with the business. Interaction with the customer (here the civilian) is also crucial in the Public domain, where trust in the authorities is determined by the speed and precision of the provided feedback. Chatbots offer a new automated channel for conversation with the customer. One single channel, for instance Facebook Messenger, supports the interaction with multiple businesses and government agencies.
The complexity of working with chatbots is the ability to understand the conversation with the customer. Every sentence typed in by the customer has a specific meaning, also known as ‘intent’. For instance, there are many ways to say ‘My bicycle is stolen’, ‘My bike is gone’, ‘They nicked me iron horse’, etc.
The promise of chatbots is enormous. Customers and businesses expect intelligent conversations from day one with interactions in different languages, across many channels and the ability to have self learning capabilities. As always, with hyped new initiatives and functionalities we need to tone down the expectations. A maturity model will help managing the expectations and provide a roadmap that will guide towards an expected result.
In this blog series, we will look at the different capabilities that are required for a chatbot, and then plot those onto a maturity model and roadmap.
There are some critical areas that determine the functionality of a chatbot, Interaction, Intelligence and Integration.
Interaction
is the area where the end-user experiences the chatbot functionality. Contrary to what an end-user would experience in a Web site or an App, there are no outstanding User Experience features in a chatbot. The communication is done via a command line in tools such as Facebook messenger. The user experience in a chatbot is aimed at facilitating a conversation. Read the complete article here.
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