After years in the customer support business, Michael Doyle has dealt with just about every kind of help desk emergency you can think of. Earlier this year, however, Doyle faced a situation that finally pushed him to the edge: His company, Logitech, was about to launch a new product â€" a US$49 camera for sending images over the Web â€" and Doyle expected a flood of customer calls and e-mail would overwhelm him and his help desk.
But Doyle, ever the pro, didn't panic. Instead he hired Lily, a Web-based automated customer support bot that never needs a lunch break or a day off. With Lily working round-the-clock, Doyle and his team managed to handle all the customer queries and save Logitech a pile of money at the same time.
At a time when e-commerce profits are down, margins are thin and the number of new, inexperienced Web users with lots of questions is growing, e-businesses such as Logitech are facing a customer support dilemma. The traditional solutionâ€"a call center manned by trained customer support repsâ€"can cost $20 per call, or more, according to some estimates (see story). Moreover, human staffers aren't easily scalableâ€"for new product launches, for exampleâ€"and they don't work nonstop.
Enter a new generation of smart, self-learning Web products such as Lilyâ€"hosted service bot software from NoHold â€"that can answer e-mail personally, converse with users and even project a personality, of sorts.
Such technology can drastically cut the cost of providing online customer serviceâ€"to around 25 to 50 cents per callâ€"while helping e-businesses gather information about exactly which questions are being asked, how often and how they're resolved.
But, experts say, you need to pick the right bot for the job. A company selling directly to consumers, like Logi tech, might want a chatterbot with a persona, while a business-to-business site might simply need to get the job done efficiently.
So, it's important to examine the underlying technology before choosing a service bot product, experts say, and to resist the temptation to simply give consumers online access to customer service automation systems originally designed for help desk professionals.
