Questions asked…
Q: Did you do anything to let the customers know they weren’t dealing with a Chatbot?
A: We encourage the use of a Persona to give it more of a personal touch. This extends to how the “virtual agent” introduces itself, how it encourages the customer to interact naturally, and how it responds to questions. This persona is then replicated through all channels (telephone, email, chat). We also recommend acknowledging the interaction with a “virtual assistant” and setting the customer up for success.
For example: Welcome to Netcall. My Name is Ava, your AI Virtual Assistant, I’m here to help and can answer best if you speak in short sentences, such as I want to speak with support or I have a question about my renewal. How can I help you today?
We use more personal language but also give examples of the types of things residents can ask for. We also only give one try so that customers don’t get stuck in a frustrating loop. If the natural language model doesn’t understand their request they will be put through to our customer services team. Initially, this saw a slight increase in call volumes to this team but it was surprising how quickly customers adapted to the change.
Q: Here in Worcestershire, we use Chatbot/Webchat through Netcall so are used to building flows. We deal with many different Council services. Did it take a long time to build the AI Flows?
A: We did invest time with services to make sure we had all of the utterances for different services and that the call flows were bespoke for each service. We took more time over this as it also ensured buy-in from the services, they were very much involved in the development of their service area.