How to Make Your Chatbot Smarter With Intelligent Automation

With recent research showing three out of four consumers prefer communicating with chatbots, it’s no surprise that retail stores want to improve their digital experience. In fact, Gartner predicts 25 percent of enterprises across the globe will have a digital assistant to handle support issues, and it further supports two-thirds of customers who would prefer solving problems on their own.

However, chatbots are still very immature and tend to handle only basic requests based on keywords from the user — causing much frustration and sometimes abandonment.

So how do you make your digital customer service reps smarter so that shoppers are happier and more issues are resolved quicker with less human intervention?

Following are three ways intelligent automation can help.

Connect your systems.

According to Microsoft’s State of Global Customer Experience Report, more than 75 percent of respondents expect customer service representatives to have visibility into previous interactions and purchases. Yet nearly half of those surveyed said they almost never or only occasionally have the context they need to solve an issue most effectively. Chatbots often don’t hold contextual information for longer than a few chat bubbles and end up getting lost in the conversation. This is where robotic process automation (RPA) comes in.

A key factor limiting quick access to accurate information is connecting back-end systems of records containing meaningful, actionable content for inquiries and commands. RPA can connect business systems and processes to deliver data quickly to chatbot platforms.

For example, the user may want additional details on when a refund will be processed, and the bot will have the ability to access previous transactions and account information to see when goods were received, and when monies will be delivered into their account.

Give your chatbots brains.

While RPA bots are fast to connect data and systems, you need to go one step further for a truly smart chatbot. They need document artificial intelligence skills to transform the unstructured data fueling enterprise systems. Document skills can read and understand data to better make a decision, answer questions more thoroughly and correctly, and process a request faster. With intelligent document processing (IDP) you're giving your RPA bot “brains” or cognitive skills to think like a human.

Based on machine learning (ML) technology, IDP will ensure your chatbots learn over time. By incorporating ML into your chatbot platform you can be sure the customer won’t go crazy with repeating questions that deliver the same wrong answers. The bot will remember any previous interactions and recognize where it went wrong to ensure it takes the right path. These interactions are also excellent at revealing customers’ needs and enhancing the customer experience by collecting actionable details such as pain points and gauging the popularity of services.

This will also help with transactions like making online returns of items bought in-store. Most retailers can’t deliver the “Amazon” experience that consumers expect with other e-commerce sites. Using IDP within your conversational AI platform, consumers can snap and send a photo of their receipt, match it with recent store purchases, and transfer the details to the sales return portal to be processed.

Also, now with new low code-no code IDP products available you can add these brains to your chatbots without the need for huge IT resource investment. It’s simply "plug and play" to upgrade your digital customer service rep.

Improve your chatbot process.

One of the most frustrating experiences for consumers and staff is dealing with a bad or broken process. Many times this is caused by your customer-facing processes not adequately integrating with your back-end systems to deliver a seamless experience. To successfully leverage a conversational AI platform, your chatbots need to follow a workflow that offers a “happy path” with minimal exceptions, deviations and human intervention. This happy path cannot be mapped out by IT or business managers — they cannot see every step in a workflow or they may even be biased. A data-driven approach using process mining will create a digital twin of your processes so you can identify the best way to automate processes, monitor chatbots’ workflows, and predict how variations will impact the customer experience.

In summary, great customer service is about seamless, pleasant and efficient interactions. Make sure your chatbot is powered by intelligent automation to make that happen.

Bill Galusha is vice president of product marketing at intelligent automation company ABBYY.