Description

Many companies seeking to optimize cost in their support operations “offshored” their helpdesks over the past decade. Yet, the backlash over poor customer experiences, many rooted in language barriers, has caused many firms to bring their support operations back “onshore,” with native English speakers manning the phones. This still, however, does not address the cost and quality challenges associated with human operators that created the desire for offshoring helpdesks in the first place. Chatbots can help address these challenges, and many more—but only if companies can overcome serious chatbot development challenges. Surmounting these challenges is imperative if chatbots are to provide fully informed, rapidly executed, truly human-like interactions with, well, humans.

This SPIE report introduces an innovative application of big data to help companies build better bots—an innovation that is available for free. We like free; and so does the market, in nearly all cases. Following is our analysis of this development, and its implications on bots and big data.