I’ve been working on implementing an AI-powered chatbot to streamline our customer service. While it’s doing well with basic inquiries, I’m curious how effective these chatbots are when it comes to handling more complex or emotionally driven customer requests. Has anyone here successfully scaled chatbot usage for deeper support interactions?
Would love to hear about your experiences with AI chatbots do they live up to the hype when it comes to handling real, high-stakes customer support moments?
You can certainly use AI bots as great lead generators and lead detail capture, but, as with anything, you get out what you put in.
If you spend time to use the API to build a flow around your client interactions you will get the most out of it.
Typically, you end up with :
Greeting
Information request
Information delivery
Call to action
Detail capture
There are products on the market that take the coding aspect of this away, but they have their own leaning curves akin to learning python, they simply abstract away some of the complexity. Voice Flow is one such package, but there are many others.
IMHO, you can get more out of a bot if you spend a little time on R&D with a competent AI engineer/team.
In the context of customer support, the more you let an AI Chatbot handle complex requests, then the harder it gets to set up reliable guardrails for the chatbot.
So oftentimes the question is not about whether AI Chatbots can handle it, but more about how much the management and customers can tolerate the occasional out-of-line behavior of the chatbot, and how much effort it takes to avoid such cases.
There are some interesting tutorials on youtube in this area. Usage of techniques to understand customer intent / emotion would be the way to go. While the user interface might look like a simple “chatbot”, behind the curtain there is a fair bit going on.
I actually describe it more as a joint effort. Whilst I coded the bot, the client focussed on the very important task of knowledge base management and requirements evolution.
It’s a fairly straightforward knowledge retrieval bot but has the ability to escalate to the human team so that they can take over the conversation.
It’s based on the Discourse platform and is open source. The client uses an instance of Discourse to engage in his customer community. (Discourse powers this site of course)
You can read about my clients experience here:
I’m keen to expand the bots capability further and have been thinking about the ways I could use it to extract and record information from the client and how to add more elements of workflow.
I’m keen to find more commercial partners to help me build that out.
I would wait for a better version of ChatGPT. Like ChatGPT 8. For this matter. It is basic for now I would say. I’m sure it can do better in the future.
