How Chatbots are uncovering true customer intent

In a highly competitive landscape, such customer touchpoints have a substantialimpact on your business. In this regard, understanding customer intent becomes pivotal for effective customer query resolutionand paves the way for unsurpassed customer satisfaction.Also, the initial perception — might it be positive or negative — is the primary building block of the customer journey and is always going to remain in their hindsight throughout their interaction with your brand.Since, businesses are now using virtual assistants, also known as chatbots, providing an unparalleled customer experiences while also maintaining consistency becomes an even more daunting task.

Why is customer experience important?

Customer experience is coming to the centre stage ofbusiness management in an unprecedented fashion on a global level.It is serving as one of the prime differentiators for customers as they make their decision of staying with a brand,andalso while choosing a new one. It is at par, in terms of importance, with the quality of product as well as servicesthat are being offered.

But offering an evolved brand experience not only enables a company in customer retention, it also has financial rewards unique to itself. The Customer Experience Impact Report by Oracle has revealed that 86% of customers are willing to pay a higher price for services if they receive better customer service. This makes it mandatory for businesses to offer unmatched levels of end-user satisfaction.

NLP-driven chatbots vs. AI-driven chatbots:

Natural Language Processing is the most basic element that enables a chatbot to understand the customer intent. Itanalyses the grammatical structuring of customer’s queries through basic keyword mapping and then presents to them the predefined use cases. But these chatbots, as they lack the depth offered by Artificial Intelligence, canfail to understand the true customer intent. “I want homestaysfor the first three days and a hotelroom havinga river view for the last two”has an obvious meaning. But prospective customers with the same customer intent can phrase the statement in infinite numbers of combinations. For example, “Need homestay till Sunday… hotel besides the river later” or “Hotel by the river for 17 and 18… meanwhile would prefer to stay as a paying guest”.These chatbots, due to their inherent design and limited use cases, can fail to interpret the actual gist of the command and often rendered ineffective againstmultiple user intents within a single statement. Factor in grammatical errors, and you have considerable room for missing a sales opportunity.Also, such chatbot models force a customer to follow a predetermined and quite mechanical flow of conversation which bears its brunt on the overall customer experience.

This is where NLP-driven chatbots with AI capabilities come into perspective. Such virtual assistants do away with canned methodologies and use cognitive representation while AI modelling is executed. Customer intent in these models is extracted by framing the relevance between different talk points, concepts, features, properties, as well as emotions. They, moreover, leverage machine learning technology, which enables them to learn and evolve by themselves without constant manual programming. Soon after their initial deployment, theygradually increase their number of use cases that are needed to aptly fulfilcustomer’s wide-ranging requirements.

They also simultaneously analyse the data generated by customersto identify their behavioural pattern so that they can be targeted more precisely. 

They also simultaneously analyse the data generated by customersto identify their behavioural pattern so that they can be targeted more precisely. This also equips such chatbots to follow an optimal approach accordingto the customer which is likely to generate the most favourable results, with both the long-term and short-term goals of a business within perspective.Such systems while using AI modelling to build knowledge graphs and knowledge map, also keep taxonomy and ontology well-defined to make the customer intent highly accurate. This gives it higher clarity if the customer is to be serviced with an issue resolution, or rather be presented with a product or service based on the specific requirements.

Chat bots or virtual assistants are all about customer conversations or engagements. Like in everyday life, there is no better way to understand a human being than by getting into an engaging conversation during a party. As AI-driven Chatbots are coming to the fore, they are doing exactly the same to better understand the customer and become aware of the true customer intent.

The author is the CEO & Co-Founder of Cognicor