LogMeIn Bold360 updates improve chatbot customer experience

LogMeIn hopes to eliminate common barriers to positive customer interactions with new features for Bold360, its chatbot and customer experience platform. The Bold360 update includes new tools aimed at streamlining communication between the customer, the chatbot and the human agent, as well as simplifying and expediting how agents solve customer problems behind the scenes.

While chatbots are effective in handling routine concerns and quickly identifying the customer issue before passing off to an agent, they lack human empathy and understanding, often leading to confusion or frustration on the customer end, according to LogMeIn. Clients use LogMeIn Bold360's three new features -- Discussions, Join Chat and Bot to Agent Chat Reassignment -- to target this issue and deliver personalized customer engagements.

Bold360 Discussions allows agents to quickly start a behind-the-scenes conversation with another agent or supervisor to ask for assistance, consequently minimizing handle times, increasing first-call resolution, and ensuring a seamless hand-off to another agent if necessary. This also supports coaching between agents -- and ultimately decreases onboarding time, according to LogMeIn -- by allowing one to assist without directly being involved with the customer.

Within Discussions, Join Chat allows two support agents to communicate with the customer at the same time, decreasing the possibility of miscommunication and eliminating the need for the customer to repeat themselves.

The third new feature, Bot to Agent Chat Reassignment, allows supervisors to manually intervene in chatbot conversations -- rather than wait for the chatbot to reroute to an agent -- if the agents believe human assistance would be more effective.

"Artificial intelligence is perfectly suited for some things, but it isn't a replacement for human intelligence," said Ryan Lester, director of customer engagement technologies at LogMeIn, in a recent press release. "[The Blog360 update] focuses on the agent and ensuring they have the tools and technologies to take on more complicated challenges and ultimately be human when humanity is needed most."

LogMeIn offers three subscription plans, targeting SMBs and larger enterprises. Pricing is based on a per seat basis, according to LogMeIn.

LogMeIn and Bold360 compete in the same space as larger, more established platforms such as LiveChat, LiveAgent, Zendesk and Intercom, among others. According to Gartner Inc., the chatbot market is expected to grow; Gartner projects that by 2020, 25% of customer service operations will integrate chatbot technology -- in 2017, that figure was less than 2%.