As the Chatbot revolution takes hold, will human customer service jobs be put at risk? Not if brands still trust in the authentic human voice.
Next year, will see the acceleration of a Chatbot revolution that Gartner predicts will see intelligent automation managing 85% of businesses’ customer relationships by 2020. While incorporating Chatbots into some of today’s most prominent messaging apps has allowed people to grow more accustomed to interacting with automated answering, the result, according to soothsayers such as Gartner, will be white-collar workers replaced by Chatbots at call-centres, offices and businesses around the world.
But is this accurate? In order to believe that Chatbots will take over 85% of customer care enquiries, you have to believe firstly, that they can help a customer through every purchasing scenario and secondly, and perhaps more importantly, that an intelligent automated interaction between a brand and its customer is more profitable than an authentic human one.
Anyone who has ever called up a customer care number will be familiar with the tiresome sound of, “Press one to hear the menu, press two to know about the latest services, press three for payment information”, so on and so forth. Even after pressing a series of buttons, we still end up listening to piped music while holding the phone indefinitely. The pro-Chatbot argument, therefore, is that these annoyances can be replaced with chat. Employing bots to answer customer queries instantly can make it much easier for them, as customers can chat with those bots at their convenience. Not to mention, 80% of customer queries are repetitive, so it makes perfect sense to make bots address them, as they would never get tired of answering the same question over and over again. Right?
The problem with that argument, however, is that these days, the repetitive queries can easily be dealt with through other digital channels. Quick responses to facts like ‘What are your opening hours?’ and ‘What is my balance?’ are now answered via apps and search. But when it comes to more complex, nuanced problems or escalating situations, we still need to speak with a human consultant. Second, we have very little patience when automated systems don’t give us what we want immediately. For instance, when a consumer is exposed to a couple of automated questions over a phone call, or a voice command isn’t understood, the average consumer starts to become increasingly irritated. Data from a previous Marchex survey reveals consumers curse frequently in this situation.
Third, an authentic human connection is simply more profitable. According to our recent report into call centres, when a person calls a business and the customer service representative answers the phone with a genuinely warm greeting, sales conversions are known to jump by more than 22%. Our data suggests that click-to-call is responsible for $1 trillion in consumer spending, with that set to rise to nearly $2tn by 2019. Lost in the sea of data about volume of calls to call centres decreasing is the fact that consumers are talking on the phone longer than ever — a record 2.8 trillion minutes in 2015 — and will make nearly 100 billion phone calls to businesses from smartphones this year. In effect, consumers have an expectation that every type of communication be available — text, message, voice, and in-person.
Clearly, there is something about an authentic human connection that builds brand trust and loyalty in a way that a machine cannot. Perhaps it’s simply called being human. Brands that understand this are not replacing their workforces with Chatbots. In fact, a recent Forrester study of call centres found that 64% were planning to add more seats this year, compared with just 6% who were planning on reducing the workforce. In the UK, there’s an estimated 734,000 call centre agents people employed to answer 42 billion minutes of inbound calls per year. These businesses have decided that a human connection is still the most powerful interaction. That’s not going to change however much we come to rely on in-home digital assistance to turn on our lights, order us pizza or play our music.
By John Busby, senior vice president of consumer insights & marketing at Marchex
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