Digital tools in the service of communication
The communication between firms and their customers has become even more complex over the years. Those who needed to enhance their image have created new kinds of relationships, in which various tools and ideas help initiate contact and improve the processing of applications. In addition, the evolution of technology created many ways of contacting a firm, whatever the customer’s habits, his/her age or mobility.
The digital era has, indeed, generated new challenges for the firms in terms of dialogue : the need for responsiveness impacts all types of discussions : those now need to be quick and efficient, and also to satisfy the consumer. But digital tools have also found a way to make this same consumer more autonomous by inventing self-care tools. Thus, many problems can be solved by the client him-/herself, and he/she often has the choice between several tools.
Far from creating distance as one could imagine, digital tools have been able to rebuild a relationship between the firms and their customers. One-way discussions have become more balanced and thus satisfying. Even though many of the firms’ discussion partners are now bots, those bots play a positive role in this satisfaction. By enabling the customers to find answers to all of their questions and by giving comprehensive information at anytime, they participate in the firms’ popularity.
Conversational AI, a state-of-the-art bot
Far from formatted answers, it is now possible to have a real conversation with a bot. The conversational AI in particular is based on the principle of a digital interlocutor which learns from the previous questions and gathers all necessary information in order to create an individual answer. Dialogue can be initiated through chats, electronic messaging or support services with a very advanced level of natural language recognition.
The current AI technologies enables the bots not only to recognize their interlocutor’s profile, but also to determine emotions and intentions and to include more subtlety into the discussions. Their ability to learn brings additional precision to the dialogue and provides an authentic tone to the conversation, which significantly — and often positively — impacts the firm’s image. Being customizable in order to fit all needs, conversational AI tools can take care of all or part of the requests and transfer those that are too complex. Possibilities are therefore countless and they can adapt to any firm’s typology.
Robot automation tools are based on various technologies and are often complementary, each one of them involving their own challenges.
In this way, the learning of recurring tasks can be achieved through the interlinking of logical rules by the machine — symbolic AI — or it can use an almost human kind of reflection thanks to an artificial neural network — Deep Learning.
While the first method is considered as less subtle, it is perfectly complementary with the second one, which results are promising but difficult to read.
Furthermore, managing a dialogue, even a basic one, requests an optimal preparation of the bot in order for it to understand the question and to answer it the right way. Managing compliance, asking for details, taking initiatives or contextualizing are all part of the Dialog Management notion and generate major challenges.
Success that depends on quality
As we can see, conversational AI is a generic term that contains different levels of technology. It can name a very basic bot that delivers formatted answers, but firms can also utilize a number of features in order to create chat-bots that will be very close to human counsellors. In that case, the main challenge is to fully replace the human taskforce and to relieve the customer services from a significant part of their daily work.
Some large companies wanted to be pioneers in the field of conversational AI and thus have gone further than the others.
The Accenture Group, for instance, called on IPSoft to develop Amelia, a very sophisticated agent that can understand natural language instantly and gives an oral answer as a real person would. The biggest strength of IPSoft’s AI is to recognize precisely each type of situation and to naturally contextualize requests or transfer them if they are too complex. This way, no question remains unanswered, as this can be the case with less advanced bots.
The Watson agent, created by IBM, has been constantly improved since 2005. It is able to perform extremely quick searches in gigantic databases and to adapt to a large number of businesses. Watson uses the Deep Learning technology and is thus able to read articles from millions of different sources, to make assertions and to update its knowledge all the time in order to offer a suitable answer in each situation.
Those advanced AIs aim at blurring the bounderline between man and machine and give us an overview of what solutions could be used by every firm in the near future. The power of the bot and the level of technology that is used have a clear impact on the quality of the discussion. It is then welcome in businesses that require a lot of precision.
This kind of AI is both a conversational tool meant for clients and partners, and a precious help for internal use. Generally speaking, the use of an advanced technology is a guarantee of giving the bot a specific personality and of drawing the customer’s attention. The similarity with the human behavior, the efficiency of the bot and, even more importantly, its ability to create a privileged relationship with its interlocutor are the main points that make a firm a pioneer and create a real differentiation.
