Empathic conversational agents
Chatbots, or conversational agents, are software that simulate human conversations with users through text messages in the chat. Its main task is to help users by providing answers to their questions or engage in general conversations (Dale, 2016). This technological solution is being used in organizations to automate interactions with prospects and customers and, at the same time, to improve customer service.
The new generation of bots, such as virtual assistants, is not only able to communicate with its user, but also to understand their emotions and recognize them in a conversation in real time. The use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Sentiment Analysis models in a chatbot prepares it to respond emotionally to users. While NLP catalogs human language in an understandable way to the chatbot system and allows it to generate responses; sentiment analysis recognizes how the user is feeling about something and broadly categorizes the user's response into positive and negative feelings.
No matter what the purpose of the chatbot is, building it to provide empathic responses is crucial for any business (Paiva et al., 2017). Although chatbots are built to collect data and assist users accordingly, users on the other side are trying to relate emotionally. When a conversation has an empathetic tone, the person chatting with the bot will have a sense of contentment. Also, empathy can inspire loyalty in customers. When they feel understood, they increase confidence in the brand, and consequently, the longevity of their interactionwith companies (Bahadur, 2020).
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Joana Dias
Strategic Design and Innovation Lab Member, Assistant Professor at IADE-UE and Branding course coordinator.
*Dale, R. (2016). The return of the chatbots. Natural Language Engineering, 22(5), 811–817.
**Paiva, A., Leite, I., Boukricha,H. and Wachsmuth, I. (2017). Empathy in Virtual Agents and Robots: A Survey. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems., 7(3).
*** Waseem Bahadur, Ali Nawaz Khan, Ahsan Ali & Muhammad Usman (2020) Investigating the Effect of Employee Empathy on Service Loyalty: The Mediating Role of Trust in and Satisfaction with a Service Employee, Journal of Relationship Marketing, 19:3, 229-252, DOI: 10.1080/15332667.2019.1688598