How to improve your chatbot performance using conversation intelligence

Chatbots have become essential for many businesses looking to provide 24/7 customer service and support. Driving this trend is a consumer base with less time to resolve their issues and high expectations for effortless customer experiences. According to ACA’s 2024 State of CX report, 88% of customers think customer service is more important than ever in 2024.

However, chatbots aren't perfect. One of the biggest challenges with chatbots is that they can often get confused–or just not have a predetermined answer–and need to redirect interactions to a human agent. This not only frustrates customers but also defeats the purpose of having a chatbot in the first place.  

This challenge is compounded by the fact that most chatbot providers offer limited visibility into why these interactions are failing. They may provide data into your chat volume and containment rate–but they don’t provide insights into what your customers are chatting about, what questions are stumping the bot, and how satisfied or dissatisfied customers are. This leaves call center leaders, customer experience leaders, and quality assurance managers in the dark about how to improve the chatbot’s performance and the customer experience. 

Luckily, this is where conversation intelligence platforms like Tethr shine. Conversation intelligence can monitor chatbots and surface insights to improve their performance without manual analysis or review. We explain below how this works, why it’s important, and how to improve chatbot performance to ensure a better customer experience.

How conversation intelligence technology works

Conversation intelligence technology, like Tethr, uses machine learning to identify categories, or points of interest, in conversation transcripts. These categories can range from specific product issues to customer sentiment (and everything in between). By categorizing conversations in this way, Tethr allows you to quickly identify the topics causing the most confusion for your chatbot so you can have support teams intervene and improve the chatbot’s knowledge base.

In other words, conversation intelligence can identify the issues customers are discussing with your chatbot and pinpoint ones that the chatbot can’t provide a resolution for that require human intervention. 

‍How Tethr improves chatbot performance

Many of Tethr’s customers have call center agents to primarily handle complaints or service-related issues, while ​​their chatbots handle basic FAQs or simple requests (e.g., providing an account balance). These company’s goals are similar: to maximize the number of conversations their chatbot can handle without transferring to a human agent.  With this goal in mind, Tethr offers a range of features designed to help you enhance your chatbot's effectiveness (regardless of the intended use case):

• Out-of-the-box categories: Tethr's conversation intelligence platform comes equipped with pre-built categories that enable you to quickly identify the reasons customers are engaging with your chatbot and the issues causing it confusion.
• Custom categories: You can add custom categories to Tethr to catch issues specific to your business or products and to flag moments of chatbot confusion since every company's chatbot has different ways of saying "I don't know." Additionally, you can build out custom categories to catch any red-flag phrases that you've identified as commonly used by fraudbots.
• Chatbot dashboard: Tethr customers can also use a chatbot dashboard to track their containment rate and quickly identify the top issues causing chatbot confusion. This dashboard provides a clear view of chatbot performance and allows businesses to make data-driven decisions to improve their chatbot.‍
• Increasing chatbot knowledge: Conversation intelligence helps you train your chatbot to answer questions that it couldn't previously, increasing the rate of issues resolved by the chatbot. This means fewer issues are escalated to live agents (which equals cost savings for the contact center) and less effort for customers.

By leveraging conversation intelligence, you can gain a deeper and more objective understanding of where your chatbot is struggling and take targeted actions to improve its performance.

A new challenge: Monitoring generative AI chatbots

Generative AI chatbots aren't widely used in contact centers yet. However, many companies are beginning to test this technology to reduce the service burden on human agents. While there are benefits, there are also risks associated with deploying a customer-facing generative AI chatbot. Some of these risks include sharing inaccurate information (with confidence), incorporating harmful biases in its responses due to subtle biases in its training data, and opening the door to security threats and fraud.

Tethr is proactively thinking about how conversation intelligence can help address the risks of chatbot inaccuracies. By analyzing conversation transcripts, Tethr can identify instances where the chatbot provides inaccurate or incomplete information or uses harmful biases that were not intended. It's still a best practice for humans to review generative AI outputs for accuracy, but conversation intelligence can help efficiently identify the responses most in need of human review. Conversation intelligence allows businesses to quickly correct these issues and prevent them from happening again.

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Final takeaways

Conversation intelligence platforms like Tethr offer an effective solution for businesses looking to improve their chatbot performance and self-service adoption.

By analyzing conversation transcripts and identifying the issues causing chatbot confusion, conversation intelligence allows you and your organization to make data-driven decisions, optimize your chatbot’s performance, and better assist customers. As generative AI chatbots become more common, conversation intelligence will play an important role in ensuring the accuracy and suitability of the information provided by these chatbots. 

If you're struggling with chatbot confusion and looking to improve chatbot performance, consider implementing a conversation intelligence platform. With Tethr’s insights, you can ensure consistent improvement to your chatbot, deflect simple issues so human agents have more time to focus on complex ones and provide a better experience for your customers.