CIO OPINION
Many have tried and failed to build a chatbot capable of doing anything more than responding to basic information or transactional requests .
Ryan Falkenberg , Co-CEO , CLEVVA
Virtual Agents-as-a-Service : why it may be the ideal model for your business
Ryan Falkenberg , Co-CEO , CLEVVA , explains some of the issues found with most chatbot software and examines some of the advantages offered by a Solution-as-a-Service model .
A growing number of companies in South Africa and around the globe are looking to offer their customers significantly improved selfservice . Many have tried and failed to build a chatbot capable of doing anything more than responding to basic information or transactional requests . As soon as a customer has a more complex query , issue or complaint , the chatbot immediately hands it over to a live agent .
So much was promised with chatbot technology . With low-code teams , you were convinced that within no time you could have an intelligent virtual agent that can speak like a human agent and perform like one too . The truth is it ’ s not that simple .
While chatbot technology has improved enormously from a natural language understanding perspective , it ’ s the brain department that continues to underwhelm . This is because chatbots are designed to learn off a knowledge base – the same generic content we use to train and support our human agents who then take months of trial and error to ‘ join the missing dots ’. While chatbots are capable of learning too , they don ’ t have the benefit to draw on years of interpersonal learning that humans do . They are expected to learn from the responses of customers , who seldom have the patience to teach them .
Software vendors are very quick to shift the blame to the chatbot developers , or the content quality
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