In a a new survey of over 1,000 people commissioned by Amdocs, a digital solutions provider specializing in telecommunications and media verticals, Forrester Research documented findings that invited headline writers at various technology journals to draw incorrect conclusions about attitudes toward Intelligent Assistants. For example, Cynthia Harvey, writing for InformationWeek, titled her article: “Consumers Leave No Doubt: People Over Chatbots.”

Given its origins, the purpose of the survey obviously isn’t to discourage companies from implementing virtual agents. Instead, Forrester and Amdocs use the information collected to make suggestions about how brands can improve their self-service solutions. But the way some of the questions were phrased has skewed the results.

The survey indicates that automated self-service solutions, whether they’re called virtual agents, chatbots, or intelligent assistants, are pervasive and widely used. A surprising majority (86%) of those questioned say they interact with chatbots at least once a week. That in itself is something of a revelation.

When the survey dug a little deeper, though, it seemed to uncover negative sentiment towards these automated helpers. Almost half of respondents said they only used virtual agents because they had no other choice. Most of those surveyed (83%) said they would rather interact with a real human as opposed to an automated chatbot.

But when attempting to understand how consumers really feel about virtual agents, does it even make sense to ask whether they’d prefer to talk to a person or a chatbot? The real surprise is that some respondents said they’d prefer the chatbot. One would think that, given the option, pretty much everybody would opt for interacting with a human. Humans are adept at understanding context and emotion, aren’t limited by a constrained set of responses, and are flexible.

Yet it’s not feasible for a business to provide each of its customers their own personal human agent who is on call 24/7. Today’s consumers want information in real-time and from whatever channel they happen to be interacting with. More frequently, the channels preferred by consumers are digital. Automated self-service options need to be there so that customers aren’t left stranded.

As we’ve seen from the numerous high-quality submissions for our upcoming annual Intelligent Assistants Awards, customers are receiving significant, quantifiable benefits from automated self-service options. Having a capable, always available intelligent assistant is, at least for the foreseeable future, the next best thing to talking with an available customer care agent. We hope you can join us at next week’s Intelligent Assistant Conference to share how your customers are benefiting from natural language powered self-service options and to find out which brands receive our coveted award.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants