Unlike commodity technology, you can’t just launch and leave your chatbot. Just like a human employee requires training, reviews and improved resources to do their job, so too does your digital employee. And in the same way that leaving your employees without support and systems can create a liability, a digital employee left without on-going guidance will start to cause frustration and friction with its users.
Digital employees have the potential to transform efficiencies and user engagement to give your business a distinct advantage. It makes sense that you’d want to invest in keeping them performing well. Here’s more on why regularly looking after your digital employee matters:
Evolving expectations
In a rapidly evolving digital world, expectations of customer experience online are continually increasing. What’s considered impressive today, can quickly become a given tomorrow, leaving your business looking outdated, and your customers disappointed.
As users, we’ve gone past the stage of tolerating the early and awkward iterations of chatbots. Our expectations now are of a natural and more realistic digital engagement - one that goes beyond strict rule-based workflows and is better equipped to handle the nuances of language. As a business, that means continuously staying ahead of technology that can be used to enhance and add value to each user experience.
They don’t always get it right
Despite their aptitude for retaining information, digital employees can get things wrong. While your digital employee does have the ability to learn ‘on the job’, that can sometimes mean it offers a poor experience while it’s still learning the ropes. Therefore they require both supervised and unsupervised machine learning in order to stay on track.
Good digital employee performance requires regular, repetitive use to keep it active. As it is exposed to more and more conversations and variables, your digital employee becomes smarter and better equipped to answer questions, respond to requests intelligently and deliver value to each user engagement.
Monitor engagements to see where your digital employee trips up. It’s likely you’ll notice patterns where your platform seems to under perform, confuse or serve up bad responses that cause conversations to fall flat. Regularly check in, and provide it with the information it needs to work around problems, or engage in the right way. Remember, as processes, policies or terminology in your business or industry change, you’ll need to keep your digital employee up to date, otherwise conflicting information or conversation dead-ends will begin to cause frustration and niggles with users.
Changing technology
Technology such as machine learning, NLP (Natural Language Processing), NLU (Natural Language Understanding) and sentiment analysis is continuously getting smarter. This technology can help your digital employee improve their ability to hold decent conversations, answer questions from various angles, handle small talk, makes jokes, learn speech patterns, communicate in different languages and develop behavioural awareness.
The demanding pace of digital technology is exciting, but also leaves your digital employee vulnerable to quickly being left behind - and damaging your customer experience in the process. The upshot of a digital employee, is that while your human workforce has limited capacity for remembering and recalling information, your digital employee is a diligent student with no limit to the amount of information it can take on. Investing in the learning and development of your digital employee in the same way you support your human workforce will ensure it continues to work hard for your business to strengthen customer engagement.
Keen to find out more? See some of our other insights here.