There’s no substitute for the human touch. When you’re servicing customers in the online environment, it’s natural to look for automated solutions first. After all, IT solutions are often more cost-effective than hiring team members. The same is often true for virtual assistants — and with dozens of AI “bots” on the market, it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to automate your customer interactions.
The reason it’s a trap is because forcing your customers to go through automated chat-bots & “choose your problem” trouble-ticket systems lowers customer satisfaction & increases churn — costing you high LTV customer accounts cumulatively produce far more revenue than you save through automation. That’s assuming of course, that your automation works.
Despite tremendous success by VA software like Siri & Google Assistant by big-5 tech companies, most of the “DIY” solutions out there lack the programmatic ability to respond in a genuinely human way to queries. Your customer begins their interaction thinking they’re chatting with a person, and when they realize its a bot, their level of satisfaction drops precipitously.
Don’t believe me? Check your chat logfiles for questions like “are you a real person” and “are you a bot” — if you’re like most companies, you’ll find lots of these queries, and what it demonstrates is customer distrust with automated solutions and a genuine desire for human interaction. This may change in the distant future, but with today’s customers the need is clear: they want to work with people, because people actually solve problems.
How does a human virtual assistant fit into this? MyOutDesk virtual assistants are experienced, qualified staff capable of supplementing your customer onboarding & training processes, along with Tier 1 support and Help Desk tasks. They can open, manage, and close tickets — solving issues for your customers and delivering genuine satisfaction, and they can do it for less than 60% of what you’d pay for in-house labor.
Despite the hype, commercial AI is still maturing, and while it can be useful for basic keyphrase recognition & providing canned responses to common questions, ultimately it’s confined to the limitations of a predefined workflow. It can’t think outside the box and adapt to situations that require a degree of empathy and comprehension — and it often falls apart when asked even simple questions outside of what it was programmed to recognize.
Relying on AI as a front-line customer interaction tool can be dangerous, but attempting to replace human assistance with AI solutions for customer service & help desk tasks is downright self destructive. The modern workplace is increasingly collaborative, and human assistants far surpass their AI counterparts when in terms of teamwork. A human virtual professional can coordinate the skills and efforts of multiple members of a team and outside individuals to accomplish an urgent task — where in contrast, AI struggles with even basic collaborative tasks.
There’s a place for automation, but there’s also a place for real, human staffing — and MyOutDesk virtual assistants are the top-tier solution for your help desk & customer service roles that increase customer satisfaction & retention, and for a fraction of what you’d pay locally. Hire human & avoid the painful learning lesson in the limitations of AI: take a moment to learn how MyOutDesk virtual assistant services can help!
Original story: https://www.myoutdesk.com/blog/need-it-help-hire-real-people-not-robots/
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