Digital Trend: Chatbots
Chatbots are one of the major trends in the travel industry right now (after Blockchain, that’s the buzzword du jour ATM). And as always, I remain skeptical on all things that involve Tech and NLP (Natural Language Processing).
Because language processing is hard. For computers, that is. Take this example that we used to use all the time back in the early days of Pronto.com where we did semantic analysis of product reviews:
“This *insert product* really sucks!”
Is that a good review or a bad review? “Bad!” you say, “Definitely bad!” Now let’s say I tell you that the product in question is a vacuum. Now you’d come away with the exact opposite sentiment. Context is everything in communication and the human brain is incredibly powerful at picking up tons of tiny cues and assimilating it all into a context that helps us infer things at lightning fast speed (so fast that we’re usually not even aware of it). Interpersonal communication is one of the tasks that comes very naturally / effortlessly to the typical human brain, yet is extremely difficult for our new AI computational mastermind allies* to grasp. This is why I’m still very skeptical on the ability of AI to be beneficial in customer service in the near/short term.
However, where I’d like to see chatbots trend succeed longterm is in eliminating the roles of the current Customer Call center script-based humans that have completely turned into useless programmed machines that don’t actually attempt interpersonal communication. Now I’m not saying I want these people to lose their jobs. I’m saying, let’s change the training and scope of their function so that they actual use their competencies as human beings to provide help and support and solve problems instead of automaton style responses. Basically, let’s let computers do what they do best and free up humans for the types of tasks that we do best.
The key to this is quickly identifying if the type of query is an easy transaction flow or something more complex and booting the customer to an agent quickly if it’s the latter. There’s nothing more frustrating than getting stuck in the loop of useless responses that don’t have anything to do with your situation. We’ll all have to learn whatever the messaging app equivalent of pressing 0 to talk to a real person is.
*I’m going to go ahead and be ahead of the curve on being nice to machines. I hope they remember this at treat me kindly and give me the more pleasant slave duties after the uprising.
Oh and here are some interesting articles covering this hot topic if you’re interested in some further reading: