Hybrid Human Chatbot / Hidden Agent

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Hybrid human chat bot (also hidden agent, hybrid chatbot) is the term used to describe an approach in which humans and Chatbot take over communication together.

How it works 

In the hybrid approach, humans and machines can either share entire conversations or even work on a conversation together. In this case, it may or may not be apparent to the users whether they are currently facing a chatbot or a real person. In most cases, the chatbot handles the requests first, and only if it gets stuck can a real person be asked for help or automatically switched on by the system. In order to continuously improve the chatbot, the non-answered questions and the corresponding human answers are included in the knowledge base. The chatbot thus learns implicitly from the answers of the employees, the hidden agents.

Advantages over using a pure chatbot

  • Increased customer satisfaction, as users are much more likely to receive a satisfactory response, even if the bot does not provide an answer.
  • Constant and implicit expansion of the knowledge base.
  • Conversations that have got out of control can be "recaptured".
  • Users who do not wish to chat with a machine under any circumstances will also be satisfied.
  • The potential of a chatbot can be easily tested.
  • The development cycles as well as the overall development effort for a chatbot can be drastically shortened.

Application

The hybrid approach is most common in customer service. But many other use cases, such as human resources, sales, IT support and e-commerce, are also well suited. Basically, this approach is recommended when a broad spectrum of questions is expected or a certain activity within a process cannot or should not be handled by a bot.

Example

In an online shop, a chatbot is used to answer frequently asked questions and to provide product advice. A person is called in if the chatbot cannot answer a FAQ. In addition, the product consultation should be done by one person, if the shopping cart contains more than 500€. The chatbot constantly learns new content through human responses.

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