Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 73 | Page 39

CIO OPINION within the knowledge base . They highlight the almost magical superpowers they can showcase when illustrating their chatbots off a carefully designed and curated demo environment .
The truth is that building , deploying and managing a virtual agent capable of performing like a human expert and resolving hundreds of complex queries in a consistent , compliant and hyper-personalised way is not easy to do . You certainly can ’ t do it using standard chatbot logic .
What you need is technology that can capture and automate expert-level thinking and specialist teams that can build a digital brain capable of engaging at the level of a human expert . When you do , that ’ s when magic really happens . It ’ s when you see your customers truly embrace your digital self-service , with resulting lowered call volumes , improved customer satisfaction ratings and a reduction in your total cost to serve .
Simple software delivers simple solutions
They will probably only ever manage to offer your customers basic tier-one support .
The second issue is that most CX platforms offer chatbot modules . This allows them to promise a multichannel offering . However , these platforms are all at their core designed to support human agents . Their licensing is largely based on human agents . Why then would they look to offer a chatbot that successfully resolves more queries without relying on a live agent ? Wouldn ’ t it be better to rather have a limited chatbot that keeps many live agents in business ? What incentive would they have to cannibalise their own revenue stream ?
Why a Solution-as-a-Service model makes sense
Faced with a noisy landscape of chatbot technologies , all using different words to describe the same things , wouldn ’ t it be better to approach your digital selfservice channels the same way many approach your human-assisted channels ?
Before digging into the advantages offered by a Solution-as-a-Service model , it ’ s worth taking a deeper dive into some of the issues with most chatbot software .
The first issue , as noted above , is that chatbot logic is by design limited . While you may hope your chatbot will self-learn to become an expert , don ’ t hold your breath .
It ’ s worth taking a deeper dive into some of the issues with most chatbot software .
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