AI chat bots are disrupting the customer service industry…

I recently came across an interesting report on artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled chat bots that caught my eye. It turns out that AI chat bots have skyrocketed in popularity over the past 12 months. This is more evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped our world. AI chat bots use natural language processing to learn how to answer common customer service and sales questions. 

They are deployed through a text window on a customer-facing website.  This is something that you have encountered before. Sometimes the AI chat bot will even pop up on a site and invite us to ask it a question by typing into the text box. It is usually located in the lower right hand corner of our screen, and it appears to be someone with a human name…  Here’s an example of what a chat bot looks like: 

Twilio Chat Bot

On a retail consumer website, examples of some common questions are: * “What’s your return policy?” * “What does the size chart look like?” * “Where do I find my bill?” AI chat bots are perfectly suited to handle basic questions like these. And unlike a human representative, the AI can respond instantly. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers used AI chat bots less than 10% of the time. 

They preferred to speak with a customer service agent over the phone or send an email.  Fast forward to today, and consumers are using AI chat bots about 25% of the time. And analysts predict that this will rise to around 35% by year-end. We are witnessing a clear and dramatic shift in consumer preferences. 

People have become much more willing to use a chat window to get their questions answered than they were just a year ago. To me, this suggests that we have become much more comfortable interacting and doing commerce from behind a keyboard. And many have realized that this is faster, easier, and even results in a better outcome in most cases. We can resolve things more quickly through a chat window than with a phone call.   

This is a trend that will definitely continue.I have watched this industry closely over the last three years. At first, the AI chat bots weren’t very good. They had a hard time providing relevant answers.  But the technology has improved exponentially since then. I wouldn’t be surprised if AI chat bots handle half of all customer service inquiries by the end of next year. And that means we are going to see a drastic shift in the customer service industry going forward.