Human interactions have something peculiar. The way individuals generate relationships and communicate has an extraordinary specificity that only a few other species can somehow emulate.

Over the last few years, customer care has become a centralized topic for what concerns the latest developments in artificial intelligence. Companies worldwide have competed to develop and place on the market the most advanced chatbots.

This is the logical consequence of a dramatic evolution of customer interaction with the brands. The customers’ expectations led the technology to a new, further edge in pursuit of excellence in customer care. Nonetheless, when we, as customers, interact with an “old school” customer service, we do expect agile and easy access to the right resources, high capacity to convey a proper and informative communication by answering the questions, and an instantaneous answer in case we need to access information to make an impelling decision, a matter of life or death.

How do chatbots interact

It is improbable that a regular person can achieve this high efficiency working in regular customer service. However, the customers’ needs increase day by day and any brands try to meet the requests of the markets. How? The answer is in the new technology combined with advanced artificial intelligence.

(Un)fortunately, something is missing inside the ideal world where customer care achieves perfection: emotions. How would a regular chatbot emulate human emotions or, better, understand human emotions and react consequently?

A few years ago, this question could not find a pragmatic demonstration of an artificial assistant fully immersed in a lovely conversation with a frustrated customer who has purchased the wrong rail ticket online and requires immediate assistance to replace the wrong ticket with a new one, because she needs to reach the destination at the same expected time to meet the CEO of an important client.

It may sound like science fiction, but recent developments have improved the way chatbots interact with the customers, increasing and optimizing the emotional analysis. It doesn’t mean that a chatbot would recite poetry to make a regular customer fall in love with it however, it can run a sophisticated analysis to detect when a customer is becoming frustrated, indicating that it is time to transfer the case to a contact center representative.

Instantaneous and optimized responses

An AI-powered chatbot can access any customers’ previous calls and analyze the historical data via the CRM database. The records can be used in association with other variables and at this point, after gathering all the information the bot needs, it can instantaneously predict the customer’s needs and react accordingly. When this information becomes available to a contact center representative, it makes the whole customer experience smoother and easier.

What else chatbots can do?

More and more companies use a long sequence of systems to manage their business. Important Information is hosted in different locations that are all essential to deliver the right communication and access when dealing with customers. This is why the same companies use APIs to integrate their systems, ensuring a smooth way of integration to funnel through the same channel what they need.

Chatbots can utilize APIs and connect to different systems. It enables a full and quick collection of information that simplifies their response to the customers. The demand for chatbots that interact across multiple channels increased consistently.

What’s next?

The relationships between customers and companies have suddenly reached a completely new level. Clients expect to interact with brands in the same way they interact with family members, friends or colleagues. Profiting from the latest technology, companies can finally offer this type of experience using the most common communication channels: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, messages, voice or chat.

Today’s customer experience has literally challenged any brands. The chatbot technology is only at the beginning but it has already revolutionized the interaction between companies and clients, helping achieve stronger, long-term and trustworthy relationships.

Author: Simone Santarelli is a PR Manager and Copywriter who strongly believe in the power of digital transformation in pursuit of a more sustainable future for the transportation industry. He works at Passengera s.r.o (www.passengera.com), a Prague-based company that aims to offer the best onboard digital solutions to transport providers and help the market support sustainability while enhancing the customer experience onboard. In a world where climate change is much more than a simple conjecture, digital solutions can play a key role to make a better future.