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the 7 prejudices about chatbots

by | Dec 24, 2023 | AI and chatbots, blog, chatbot, NLP

How the Conversational approach is going to be a revolution for your customer relations and your course of action : 7 prejudices we must fight.

50% or more of all your interactions with customers will be handled by vocal and chat conversational assistants by 2025.*

Conversational bots are a new interface that gives companies the possibility to be closer to their customers, to get to know their users using a cutting-edge method and to improve customer services performance. Nothing new, you’ll say.
Well, tools and technologies that allow to have a real conversation, and not just answer a list of questions asked by the customer are scarce.
The real stakes for the next 3 years are to be able to have a real conversation with customers, or in other words, to be able to understand and to care for their needs thanks to an automated method. We can predict that 50% or more of customer interactions will be handled by robots on all channels: web, mobile phone, smart speakers and social media.
Conversation will allow you to attract customers, and to stand out from other competitors.
Conversation is the most natural way to express yourself and it will represent a real weapon that others won’t possess: customer knowledge. Knowing a customer is securing a customer.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of conversational benefits:

Answering very basic and repetitive questions calls upon a robot’s minimal skills.
Answering more specific and personalized questions (a connection to CRM and/or other tools is essential) : A customer in a bank would ask: “Am I eligible for a mortgage?” Following several questions asked just like a real financial consultant, the robot is able to tell the customer if they are or are not eligible for a mortgage, what amount they are eligible for, in which situations, and what the risks are: The robot possesses all the information about the customer’s situation, and has access to their file.
Carrying out actions in Information Services tools (RPA): the robot goes beyond conversation, it can performs actions.
Example: “I’ve lost my membership card.” The customer calls the company and a robot answers on the phone or in a chat window. The bot logs the customer in and asks all the essential questions to analyze their request. If needed, it can create a tracking number while handling the request using the company tool created for this purpose. The membership card is processed and printed without any human help. The tracking is handled by the robot which can send a text message for each step of the process.
Asking questions to get to know the customer and their needs. It is possible to create a robot that can ask questions and can give advice just like a human retail adviser. Say goodbye to robots that cannot have a real conversation and can only answer FAQ questions.
Collecting behavioral data (non private) in order to adjust a marketing offer or to improve a service.
Automating tasks and processes to save human teams time.
Now, here are some prejudices about robots:

 

#1 Prejudice : “Virtual assistants are lame, they don’t understand anything.”
A robot’s ability to understand human words or not solely depends on the technology used for its creation. There are two reasons why a robot may not understand or may not learn properly: either its knowledge has not been implemented in its system, either it has but the tool used to create and train the robot is limited and therefore does not allow the robot to understand some expressions. Choose wisely the technology you want to use.

#2 Prejudice: “A virtual assistant will have an impact on my department only.”
In reality, once you have introduced a virtual assistant in your company, know that you may have to rethink almost everything. For instance, in order for the callbot to recognize the person it is talking to and to be able to personalize the conversation, the robot must be connected to your CRM or any other tool that can provide the caller the information they need.
However, this means rethinking the marketing automation or the content you are going to provide. Answering a few questions will not be enough, as the FAQ era is over. From now on, anticipating questions and being proactive with clients constitute a quality you can acquire by ceasing the opportunity and innovating thanks to your robot.

#3 Prejudice: “A robot is difficult to implement as it requires a huge transformation.”
In order to reinvent the communication system with different audiences , transforming a process, a department or even a whole company might seem difficult at first. However, during our meetings with different companies, we have found a simple and unerring method: start with a simple robot in 2 or 3 situations, where you will be able to learn. Target your department’s real “pain-points”, or in other words tasks that take 60-70% of your time but are not the most useful ones. By improving your pain-points, other situations will become easier to handle and your robot will be able to grow with you.

#4 Prejudice: “I need to have technical skills in order to create or manage my assistant.”
Remember the first websites from the 2000’s : it seems shocking now to think that back then companies needed to call a developer to insert a URL link on their website’s homepage that had cost 50K$.
In order to prevent this from happening again and losing 10-15 years of the bot’s history, Kwalys has made all of that easier and more reachable for everybody: anybody can configure and improve bots. The only required skill: having good sense and having a good knowledge of the job.

#5 Prejudice: “A robot is expensive, it’s only affordable for fat wallets.”
Any company needs high-quality tools and needs to have quality interactions with customers and partners as well as getting its process maximized: from a company ran by 2 employees, that uses a bot to answer frequently asked questions either on their website or by phone for instance “When is my order going to arrive?”, to a small or medium company that can handle 40% of all the requests thanks to their bot.
We have made this bot more reachable for everybody as we wanted to generalize robots.We all are customers to these companies that represent 80% of the french economical sphere and as consumers, we all deserve to save time and being well cared for.

#6 Prejudice: “If I make a chatbot for my website, I need to start EVERYTHING over to make a voicebot or a callbot.”
The multi-channel and omni-channel approach is now possible with Kwalys. We work on the assumption that your robot assistant is your partner and can answer on any channel, as the most important point is to be relevant with customers and to be where they stand. The same bot, varying depending on the channel, is connected on the voice and chat channels. A true time saver for the multi-channel bot’s management and for the stats supervision.

#7 Prejudice: “Robots are just programs.”
Conversational assistants are not just simple programs or simple robots. At Kwalys, we consider these robots as your full-time partners. We do everything we can for them to suit and join your company smoothly in order to bring an added worth to your customer relations and make your company a great competitor.

Katya Lainé
CEO & Co-founder

*Forecast by TALKR

How to detect answering machines (AMD)

by | Dec 30, 2021 | Non classifié(e)

Detection of an answering machine on the emission of calls by robots.

This subject is not yet evoked on the web in France in 2020 because to reach this problem, it is necessary to understand that it is not always easy for a robot to detect that the robot is addressing a classic answering machine with DTMF keys or why not another robot (in the case of the virtual secretaries that we have set up).  When a human picks up the phone, in general, he or she will speak in a very short way: “Hello” or “yes hello” or “who is this” ? etc… When, on the other hand, the answering machine is triggered, we will have a more or less long tirade and the possibility to leave a message to our interlocutor. 
How can we effectively detect that we are dealing with an answering machine and a voice mail?
The tool is adapted to understand the voice and the duration of the first message and its content and also the environment which can be noisy. We can therefore measure with precision the duration of the speech of this first interaction which will generally be longer than a human.  We can also detect a small tone or BIP just before leaving a message. This signal is an important indicator in the choice of the scenario to close the conversation. 
It is possible to leave a message for example, but here again, you must be able to record it and you must use little tricks that no one knows of. All of this is preconfigured in our platform to avoid you asking this type of question: What should I do when I meet an answering machine?
We take advantage of our voice recognition engines to detect the tone of the answering machine and the transcript before indicating that you can leave the message. This ensures that the entire message is successfully delivered or that the call can be automatically replayed at another time.
More than 70% of unknown calls are redirected to voicemail because people do not like to talk to strangers. Thanks to deeplearning and acoustic modeling, digital signal processing techniques can tell if a person has actually picked up the phone. The analysis of audios is always interesting because it allows to enrich the knowledge base on the “answering machine” part. The understanding of audio spectra also allows to detect other sound samples and surrounding noises: The television, the train, the car to mention only them, birds. It is likely that in the future, legislation will prohibit communication between a robot and a person in a car for example.

However, we must beware of false positives, where the robot would think that we are on an answering machine or the opposite. The human sometimes picks up the phone but does not speak immediately and waits or does not speak loud enough and there is a long silence. It has been calculated that everything happens in the first second of the call and that some answering machines are impossible to detect. The most important thing is to be able to cut the conversation when we understand that it is an answering machine or a music on hold right after the dialing of the called person.

In the case of call transfers, it is also necessary to imagine more complex scenarios in the event that you also get an answering machine and therefore you must be able to return to the conversation. I’m telling you: it is complex.