Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Ever wish a robot could cook or clean for you? We might not be on Jetsons-level technology, but for customer service and sales professionals, the robot assistants are already here. When you hear “chatbots” what do you think of? Helpful robots, conversational cannon fodder, or malevolent machines bent on siphoning off human employment? Well for one, chatbots aren’t coming for Customer Support jobs. Secondly, the others are both correct, but only to an extent.

When chatbots were first introduced in customer support, they were only capable of executing rule-based commands that often led to poor customer experiences. Chatbot features back then weren’t developed keeping user experience in mind, and caused frustration instead of offering solutions. Chatbots have evolved over time, but so have customer expectations. Customers today do not accept experiences that are less than ideal.

Human brains are wired to process images 60,000 times faster than text. The age-old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” is apparently severely undershooting it. Not only that, but an image has the ability to instantly traverse cultural and lingual barriers. Heard of the painting The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh?

With more than two billion people regularly buying items online across the world, giving customers access to the service and answers they need via your website or social media is key to giving them a great shopping experience. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots are software tools that can be used to answer customers’ basic questions or gather more information from them about their queries.