(2017-07-03) Reality Of Automating Customer Service Chat With Ai Today

The reality of automating customer service chat with AI today

Virtual customer agents (customer service-focused bots, or VCAs) (ChatBot) are intelligent systems able to understand what users ask via chat and to provide them with adequate answers. In the context of this article, when we talk about VCAs we mean systems that are able to understand natural language and texting and do not just operate in a rules-based multiple-choice environment

1. Good VCAs need customers’ chat log history

train the VCA with thousands of questions

most companies do not have existing chat history data readily available

even if companies have a chat log history, it is generally unlabeled. This means the questions in the chat logs are not paired with intents. Fully manual pairing of thousands of questions to intents is time-consuming

2. There is no one-size-fits-all algorithm for understanding user intent

3. Moving beyond current machine learning approaches

4. Humans are still needed in customer service