Integrations

Front + Meya: Bots and humans working together

Erik Kalviainen
 on December 6, 2016

The future of AI is collaborative

Your Meya bots just got a major upgrade thanks to Front.

The Meya team is super excited to launch our brand new Front integration. Bots can now collaborate with live human agents using Front’s powerful customer service software.

With a few clicks, you can connect your Meya bot to your Front inbox.

Why is this important?

  • Customers want immediate and amazing customer service
  • Customer service is difficult to scale
  • Bots do scale
  • Bots and humans have complementary strengths & weaknesses
  • Customers won’t tolerate a poor bot user experience
  • Bots (and bot builders) need to learn in order to get better

By having bot and human agents collaborate, you can address these 6 points and deliver customer service that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

How bots and humans can collaborate

The mechanics of the human + bot collaboration

Opportunities for bot/human collaboration

1. Answering common questions (FAQs / KB)

Your customer service questions likely follow the 80/20 rule with the most common 20% of questions being asked 80% of the time. This is a great opportunity for a bot:

  • The number of use-cases to consider is manageable
  • Throughput is increased by sparing agents from repetitive responses
  • Q/A pairs can be added & altered without human training

Customer questions are often the first step of a more valuable customer activation. For example, if a customer is asking about pricing, in effect they have self-identified as someone who is considering making a purchase.

Have your bot ask a pertinent, actionable follow up question.

Facebook Messenger example

An FAQ response might lead to a sale

2. Triaging customer service

Many interactions with customers follow a well-defined “fact-gathering” process before crystallizing in a business process or task: new application, service upgrade, status check, order modification, cancellation, etc.

The bot does the repetitive part and transfer to a human for approval

The agent sees the pertinent details and pushes a button to approve the request

If the business process can’t be fully automated, the bot should handle the front-end information gathering then hand off to a human agent to complete the task.

While your bot is handling the mundane aspects of information acquisition, your agent can be helping other customers until the bot notifies them that an action is required.

3. Supporting the long tail

If you’re building a bot, you will very likely want to launch early and often. In doing this, you will not know all the use-cases, utterances, and features needed to be programmed into your bot from day 1.

An odd request from Elon

With a human/bot hybrid you can launch early and automate incrementally as time goes on. This technique is also powerful in providing help to the user if they get stuck.

Useful links

About the author

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