Reading exercise 3:
In business so much emphasis is put on effective communication, personalising customer interaction and building a rapport with clients that it leaves you wondering where chatbots fit into this way of thinking.
Chatbots - automated systems for conversations by text or voice - are becoming more and more common in customer service situations. The little pre-sales chatbox with 'Hello, can I help you?' that pops up on the corner of your screen as you are browsing a shopping site can quite easily be ignored but if you contact a company with a question or a problem to be resolved you might not have any choice, at least at first, but to talk to one of these chatbots. These virtual agents, available 24/7, can save companies time and money by dealing with requests like billing details, technical support and all manner of other mundane tasks, freeing up real customer service agents for other more complex situations.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language generation have meant that today’s chatbots have come a long way from the stilted, scripted conversations which were all the first examples were capable of, but it takes a lot of time, financial investment and data to build an advanced system. Transcripts of hundreds of thousands of company specific enquiries and calls have to be analysed to train the AI, through deep learning, in order for the chatbots to handle requests correctly. In addition, they must be able to connect with the rest of the company’s IT system and records, such as a customer's past purchases, settings and location. This allows the chatbots to combine this information with the customer’s current question so as to identify and then correctly respond to the customer’s intent. For these reasons, the latest virtual agent systems are really only suitable for huge service-oriented companies, with large-scale customer interactions, such as retail, travel, telecommunications and financial services.
These advanced forms of chatbots might be able to mimic real speech and respond to subtle changes in tone of voice, however their aim is not to fool people into believing they are talking with a real person – that would leave clients feeling cheated and probably wary of using the company again – but to show that chatbots offer a fast, easy, reliable and above all secure way of contacting a company. In this way, it should be possible to overcome customers’ dislike and fear of dealing with an automated system instead of talking to a customer service assistant. After all, being able to resolve any issues quickly and easily is good news for businesses and customers alike.
Exercise 1: What is the main idea of the passage?
A. Chatbots fuel customers’ fear of dealing with a machine.
B. Chatbots need a compilation of transcripts to grow more powerful.
C. Chatbots provide 24/7 responses to almost all customer inquiries.
D. Chatbots act as a solution to enhanced business-customer communication.
Exercise 2: Read the article and decide if these sentences are True (T), False (F), or Not given (NG).
1. The use of chatbots in customer service has increased.
2. Chatbots on e-commerce websites are often ignored by shoppers.
3. Chatbots mean that customer service agents may no longer have employment.
4. The first chatbots used a very natural and flowing form of language.
5. Deep learning is how AI chatbots are able to learn to deal efficiently with customer requests.
6. Smaller companies are advised not to use chatbots until the costs drop.
7. A good chatbot should be able to convince people it is a real person.
8. Some clients would prefer to speak to customer service assistants than use chatbots.
Ex1: D
Ex2:
1.True
2.True
3.False
4.False
5.True
6. Not given
7. False
8.True