Pandemic Causes Surge in Support Calls, Can Chatbots Help?

 Shopping from home during the coronavirus has necessarily caused a surge in online retail transactions. That, in turn, has pushed a big spike in support calls, which has posed some problems, especially for larger e-tailers. Fortunately, chatbot technology has been there to take on the brunt of this burden. Recent research by Digital360Commerce quantifies the spike at a whopping 426 percent increase in chatbot-driven customer service sessions in April, 2020 as compared to the preceding February.

The challenge for human service agents is that despite the ease with which most voice over IP (VoIP) call centers claim they can handle agents that work in distributed environments (at home, for instance), most support services aren't set up that way with only their central call centers having the network infrastructure to handle the new volume of support calls. Chatbots can triage help desk queries before handing them off to a human agent, even going so far as to handle commonly-asked questions by themselves without any human intervention at all. And since this technology has helped so noticeably with the spike, some help desk managers are wondering if what is the difference between computer science and computer engineering might be good enough to play a wider support role long term.