EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW Nanorep CTO Amit Ben: Chatbots Should Be Useful, Not Human

Author: Vivian Wagner / Source: E-Commerce Times

Amit Ben is the CTO and cofounder of Nanorep.

In this exclusive interview, Ben explains how companies that offer highly automated self-service tools can make the customer experience highly personal.

CRM Buyer: What is personalized self-service, and why is it important?

Amit Ben: When you provide service, it can be either completely general, or contextual — which means it’s different for different demographics. Personalized service means that you get to the most fine-grained resolution possible.

It’s self-service that can be catered and adjusted dynamically to each person experiencing that service. People really want to get the feeling that someone hears and understands their own personal problems.

CRM Buyer: How can a customer service platform be anticipatory?

Ben: You need to learn the behavioral patterns of users, and once an organization understands these behavioral patterns, it can take preventative actions, provide actionable items, or offer options to alleviate the issue.

The general understanding is that people don’t do one isolated action on their journey. It’s complicated, and the flow between different actions is important. You need to ask multiple questions throughout a customer’s journey.

In some cases, for instance, when people ask a specific question, another question immediately follows. If a bot can provide that question, it creates a much more fluent experience. That’s something you’d expect a human sales agent to be able to do, but if you leverage data you can easily spot those on the digital channel as well.

CRM Buyer: What are some recent advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing that are shaping this field?

Ben: We’re having an AI renaissance. We see it all over the place. We see voice interfaces and personal assistants becoming ubiquitous. Advances in technology are reaching a point where it’s almost becoming difficult to tell if you’re talking to a virtual agent or a real one.

It allows us to create richer experiences, and over time we’ll see these experiences become more complex and broader reaching. It will have a huge impact on day-to-day life.

The bigger challenge is creating a changing field of knowledge solution. Mostly, the biggest players have virtual agents that have…

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