AliPay Customers Will Soon Be Dealing with Smart Robots

Alibaba’s affiliate payment company, AliPay, has reportedly installed smart robots at its call centers to handle customer support issues.

While smart robots have been playing key roles in manufacturing and warehouse works, the innovative approach to introduce robots for customer support by AliPay is something new in the payment industry.

Apparently, a Research and Development group consisting of a dozen people at Ant Financial, the company behind AliPay, have worked on this project to bring this AI based customer support interface for some time now. However, right now these customer support smart robots will be handling a very limited number of responsibilities.

For example, their tasks would include things like checking deposit balance of customers, verifying authentication, and checking credit lines. AliPay is planning to gradually increase the roles of these smart robots to cover all the services offered by their call center.

Shanghai based China Business News first broke the story that these smart robots can recognize voice and understand customer’s speech. Moreover, the AI is capable of learning from client interactions, and would be able to improve the customer experience as they deal with more customers.

According to the report, these smart robots would be able to provide efficient customer support parallel to a university graduates with proper job training.

AliPay is may also employ these smart robots for providing financial consulting at some point in the future, the report claimed.

Currently, most robotic customer support interfaces utilize a knowledge bank and acts more like an automated search engine to find answers to customer inquiries. Since they just read out from Frequently Asked Questions from existing data banks, the customer experience is not up to the mark.

Compared to the existing customer support robots, AliPay’s smart robots will be able to find clues from customer’s expressions and fully understand the customer inquiry. Not only that, it will also ask confirmation from the customer that it has fully understood what they customer is asking for.

Ant Financial claimed that the high processing powers of these smart robots can find a suitable solution to the customer inquiry within a second, where current systems takes as long as 30 to 60 seconds to come up with an answer.

AliPay has around 400 million registered users and the introduction of these smart robots would provide its customers a faster response time from customer support centers.