Touch Your Heart: A Tone-aware Chatbot for Customer Care on Social Media
This addresses user experience in customer care on social media by incorporating tone, but it is incremental as it builds on existing chatbot methods with a new focus.
The authors tackled the problem of chatbots for customer care on social media lacking tone awareness, and their tone-aware chatbot generated responses as appropriate as human agents and was perceived as more empathetic.
Chatbot has become an important solution to rapidly increasing customer care demands on social media in recent years. However, current work on chatbot for customer care ignores a key to impact user experience - tones. In this work, we create a novel tone-aware chatbot that generates toned responses to user requests on social media. We first conduct a formative research, in which the effects of tones are studied. Significant and various influences of different tones on user experience are uncovered in the study. With the knowledge of effects of tones, we design a deep learning based chatbot that takes tone information into account. We train our system on over 1.5 million real customer care conversations collected from Twitter. The evaluation reveals that our tone-aware chatbot generates as appropriate responses to user requests as human agents. More importantly, our chatbot is perceived to be even more empathetic than human agents.