13th of June 2024
‘Thanks for your question’ - How Ami can help, even when the question is impossible
Chatbots have become a bit of a hot topic in recent years. Along with this increase in interest, people’s expectations of what chatbots can do have also gotten much higher, particularly in the customer service sector. In a way, this makes sense – when you get a new phone, your old one suddenly seems impossibly slow. But are our expectations of what chatbots can do reasonable?
Sometimes, our expectations of chatbots aren’t just higher than they used to be, they’re even higher than the expectations we have of human agents.
We wouldn’t be surprised or offended if a human customer service agent tells us they have to look something up or check with a colleague; but we seem to expect chatbots to have all the answers right away, no matter how convoluted our questions.
Of course, Ami’s goal is to know as much as possible. There are also many challenges human agents face that Ami doesn’t have to deal with which enable Ami to answer customer queries more easily: Ami doesn’t have to spend time looking things up, doesn’t have any trouble multitasking, and doesn’t get tired of answering the same questions over and over again! Nevertheless, there are some questions we simply cannot expect Ami to be able to answer because even we as humans, all life-long students of our native language, struggle to understand what’s being asked.
Conversations such as these are pretty commonplace in my experience working with Ami:
What would you say if you were a tea expert and were faced with these questions? Very likely, you’d have to ask the customer to clarify.
Or maybe you’ve been able to pick up on the topic, but the customer’s question falls outside your expertise. The conversation might then look something like this:
These are the exact strategies Ami uses: clarifying or asking the customer to elaborate. This enables Ami to best help the customer and with this little bit of help, you’d be surprised how many questions Ami knows the answer to.
Author
Juliette van Steensel
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