But if you’re searching for the perfect seaside expanse of sun and sand, would you prefer speaking with a person who has been there, done that – or text with an automaton?

Make no mistake: Bots can give quick and easy answers, but they cannot engage in conversations that build trust and relationships. Smart companies restrict chatbots to low-touch transactional interactions, reserving human agents for high-touch conversational experiences, enhanced with state-of-the-art visual engagement technology. Those industry leaders have seen their net promoter scores soar.

Why the human element is so important

We all know the fingernail-scraping exasperation of an endless interactive voice response (IVR) menu. One wrong tap and its back to the beginning (or off to find a competitor). According to a recent survey by The Conversation, a whopping 90 percent of customers using a phone-based customer-service system just want to talk to a live human being. When confronted by an IVR system, most people just want to bypass it. Results of the same survey found that 83 percent of people engaged by an automated response system – including VR, chatbots, social media accounts, or emails – complete their journey by talking to an actual human being.

Having a living, breathing person behind the controls of a customer-service experience can make all the difference. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for automated or AI-driven assistance in your customer-service experience. It just means that you need to make sure a real human representative is easily accessible should your customers require one.

Blending AI into a great customer experience

Chatbots potentially offer a much-faster, much-media-richer way than IVR to triage and accurately offload low-touch queries from the expensive voice agent queue. But avoid ugly bot experiences by obeying two cardinal rules: 

1. Always admit to the customer that they’re conversing with a “bot.”  Knowing that truth can help diffuse frustration that may surface when the bot’s “AI” ain’t so “I.”  
2. Let the customer choose. As early as practicable, present a one-click path to take the customer to a real human being.

If there’s a queue for agents, you might consider having the bot offer to continue providing help during the wait. Regardless, be sure to present whatever the bot learns to the agent, so the customer need not repeat themselves.

A great implementation doesn’t come easy. It takes a dedicated team, focused on the entire customer experience, to craft a design that leverages the best of what a bot can offer.