Conversational AI is the next frontier for customer service. Indeed, estimations suggest that the chatbot market will grow from $17.17 billion in 2020 to $102.29 billion by 2026.
Numerous factors are fuelling this trend, including an intensifying consumer desire for convenience, lower costs of service, and the ever-increasing ease of implementation.
To this point, a recent Opus Research study even suggested: "If you can play a videogame, you can build a bot."
However, such ease of implementation must not result in compliance complacency, and unfortunately, these fears are already coming to fruition. Authorities across Europe have issued enormous fines to companies such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook that have fallen foul of GDPR regulations.
Particularly relevant cases include:
- TIM - the Italian Telecom firm – was fined €27.8 million for improperly storing and processing customer data, risking security breaches.
- Capio St. Göran AB - the Swedish healthcare company – was fined 30 Million Swedish Kroner for failing to protect customer data adequately. As a result, the authorities ordered it to reimagine its entire data processing and storage ecosystem.
As chatbots process customer data, the technology must not become a brand’s weak link. Otherwise, similar fines likely lie in wait for many companies as precedents for breaking GDPR guidelines are beginning to take shape.
Many Chatbots ARE a Data Privacy Risk
GDPR has given customers new powers. They now have the right to be forgotten, while they may also gain access to all their personal data gathered by a company.
Customer data collected by the chatbot is subject to these GDPR requirements (and others) - just like website cookies, online forms, and survey logs.
Yet, unlike these means of data collection, the customer information gathered is much less rigid. Thanks to the interactivity of a chatbot experience, customers may impulsively share personal details – willingly or unwillingly – that they would not share in a structured webform.
Introducing the perils of this tricky phenomenon in a thought-provoking blog, Colleen McCarthy writes:
All of this sets up your company for huge data privacy risks, especially if you collect excessive data that’s then stored in insecure databases. In addition, chatbot data collection may complicate consumers’ right to be forgotten by having their data erased.
The bottom line is that contact centers must consolidate their compliance practice across all customer engagement channels - not just data storage systems - ensuring there are no data leaks. Automated customer conversations must not slip under the radar.
