How Machine Learning Can Add Value to Customer Service Automation

It wasn't long ago that we hosted a webinar for our clients that focused on emerging messaging channels for customer service. The shiny new object in the room by far was SMS chatbots. Using SMS as a support channel was cool, but the real goal of the pilot was to implement chatbots and see how many customer interactions could be automated. All of the wind went out of the sails when we realized that thousands of interactions would be required to train the bot and our client's volume was somewhere in the low hundreds. The pilot was abandoned shortly thereafter and the search for other technology that increase customer service efficiency continued.