Make intelligent customer service more "acceptable"
Nowadays, more and more apps and platforms have launched smart customer service to check phone bills, consult logistics progress, understand service content... No matter the time, as long as you send a question, you can get a corresponding response immediately.
For the basic questioning of the public, intelligent customer service has played an essential role.
However, many consumers report that smart customer service is not smart in answering complex questions.
Promising, sought after by enterprises
It is understood that intelligent customer service often compiles questions and answers, and then touches preset information through keywords, and distributes them to users.
Zhu Guohua, an associate professor at the School of Artificial Intelligence of Jianghan University, said that it mainly includes "knowledge acquisition and expression, user understanding, answer retrieval and generation, and dialogue scheduling".
In an ideal situation, intelligent customer service has quite a few advantages.
Some insiders pointed out that smart customer service can respond to customer questions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with high response efficiency that cannot be matched by manual customer service.
In addition, the speed of data processing and unified data management of the former is far better than that of the latter, and the efficiency is higher.
The relevant person in charge of Yichao Technology said that the intelligent customer service also has the characteristics of "quick on-the-job".
After the formation of the customer service team is completed, the system can be trained before taking up the post. This process is time-consuming and labor-intensive.
Once new and old employees are replaced, they need to be trained again, which will increase time and money costs.
The intelligent customer service can be used on duty with simple configuration, and the expressiveness can also reach the unified service standard, avoiding the pain points of long training period and uneven ability of manual customer service.
Based on these factors, the prospect of intelligent customer service is very broad.
The "Research Report on China's Intelligent Customer Service Industry in 2020" issued by the 36Kr Research Institute pointed out that the future growth of the intelligent customer service market is expected to exceed 30 billion to 60 billion yuan.
Another related data shows that the number of registered companies using smart customer service last year was twice that of 2018.
Some smart customer services are in vain
However, in real life, smart customer service is often criticized by users.
"I can't find a solution, nor can I find a human customer service." Tingting, who works in Guangxi, was helpless when she mentioned a certain video app that she frequently uses.
She said that she planned to complete a task called "Watch 6 valid videos" in order to earn points. Since she didn't know what a valid video was, she checked in the customer service column.
Unexpectedly, there are no relevant explanations in all the questions provided by the smart customer service. Finally, Tingting learned about the viewing rules through the netizens of the social platform. "The so-called customer service system is not as reliable as the search engine. It is completely useless."
Some intelligent customer services cannot "answer" the question, and some intelligent customer service kicks the ball of "looking for human customer service" back to the user.
Ms. Tian, who lives in Beijing, wanted to ask the staff about a certain operation method of an application, so she sent words such as "manual", "manual customer service", "transfer manual" to the intelligent customer service, and only received "please enter other keywords" 'S reply.
Ms. Tian said: "Some smart customer service phones are not easy to use, either because the surrounding environment is noisy or the voice is heavy when calling, and the system does not recognize it; or it is impossible to connect to manual customer service at all."
Similar situations are very common. According to data released by the Jiangsu Consumer Rights Protection Committee a few days ago, 71.2% of consumers participating in the survey have encountered problems such as intelligent customer service answering non-asked questions.
Among the 48 commonly used apps surveyed, 47 apps have online customer service, and more than a quarter of the smart customer service cannot accurately identify the user’s question; more than 80% of the online manual customer service is “hidden deep” and requires one or more input "Manual" and "Manual" can be transferred.
These have greatly affected the daily lives of consumers.
On the Black Cat complaint platform, there are more than a thousand complaints about smart customer service. For example, after contacting the smart customer service, the automatic renewal or refund of the ticket cannot be cancelled.
Experts pointed out that the unintelligence of consumer intelligent customer service and the series of consequences caused by it have violated the legitimate rights and interests of consumers.
Complementary with manual customer service
Providing users with humanized and thoughtful and convenient services and making up for the many shortcomings of manual customer service are the top priorities for the development of intelligent customer service.
In Zhu Guohua's view, it can improve algorithm efficiency, ensure accuracy and practicability; strengthen the ability to acquire and express complex knowledge, and try to integrate various cross-domain, multi-modal, and dynamic knowledge to enrich data.
In response to the problems of simple conversations criticized by people in smart customer service and easy to fall into a "dead loop", Zhu Guohua said that it is necessary to improve closed-loop service capabilities, break the constraints of existing data sources, and open and broaden the channels for customer service to actively obtain information. This is both smart customer service. The direction of development is an issue that needs to be considered in the entire intelligent field.
Recently, the use needs of groups such as the elderly and people with disabilities have also received great attention.
The "14th Five-Year Plan" outlines that it is necessary to accelerate the construction of information barrier-free, help the elderly and the disabled to share digital life; develop the silver economy, and develop aging technologies and products.
Experts believe that smart customer service should be suitable for the elderly and the disabled as an important research and development direction in the design process, and provide more precise and refined services for them.
It is worth noting that at this stage, manual customer service still plays an indispensable role.
According to survey data from the Jiangsu Provincial Consumer Rights Protection Commission, 4 of the 47 platforms with smart customer service have set up services for the elderly to directly connect to manual customer service or one-click access to the elderly’s dedicated line.
Zhao Xin, director of the Supervision Department of the Jiangsu Provincial Consumer Protection Commission, suggested that more platforms can ensure that the elderly can cross the intelligent customer service and directly transfer to the manual customer service.
The intelligent customer service system is "available", but it must be "easy to use". It should be "understanding" to ensure that customers' questions are answered effectively.
Wang Jingyue