In today’s highly competitive business environment, Customer Service is one of the main pillars of any organization. Customers will stay loyal only if you give them a great customer service experience. In any business, issues are always going to arise but if your customers know that their complaints will be addressed properly with quick turnaround time, they will be more comfortable in making a purchase from you.
Mainly, organizations have got 3 customer service channels- Phone, Email/SMS, and WebChat support where customers can contact and raise their concerns but these medium have their own drawbacks. Talking to a customer service agent can be frustrating and time-consuming due to long wait time and multiple navigations. Customers do not prefer sending Email/SMS because they want immediate support and not an automated email stating that someone will contact you. Online Chat has provided some respite, but customer satisfaction levels are still low.
To enhance the customer support experience, companies have now started using AI-powered Chatbots (Virtual Assistant) which enables a new medium where customers can raise their concerns through Text/Voice Messaging Apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Cisco Spark, WebChat and Amazon Alexa/Google Assistant. Chatbots can play a major role in this space by automating and handling the first level customer interactions.
The potential to improve customer service while lowering the support cost makes this one of the most exciting areas of opportunity. According to a Gartner report, ‘’By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human’’. There is a growing interest in the chatbots for customer service, mainly driven by 2 factors:
1. Growing Messaging trend: Messaging Trend has spread rapidly over the past few years and currently it is one of the most used smartphone services. There have been a significant growth in the number of Messaging Apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat) downloads and customers feel more comfortable to chat over the messaging Apps rather than a phone call, email or any other medium.
2. Advancement in Artificial Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has also made significant steps to improve the quality of the decision making, thanks to Machine Learning and Deep Learning Algorithms. This has led to the growth of AI enabled chatbots as they can answer queries using the Knowledge Base.
Here are few of the prominent ways in which customers have been served better customer service using Chatbots:
- 24/7 Real-time Customer Support: Chatbots are available 24/7 to solve customer queries in real-time. This ensures that the customers can get support anytime, anywhere.
- Speedy Support: Chatbots can handle multiple customer queries at a time, therefore, customers do not have to wait for the next agent available, unlike phone calls.
- Increased Human Agents’ Productivity: Chatbots can handle generic and repetitive questions and can answer the most relevant answers based on historical effectiveness. When Chatbots cannot solve the problems, they can escalate to human agents. This allows human agents to work on the complex queries, increasing their productivity.
- Reduced Support Cost: Study shows that 30% customer inquiries are repetitive in nature and chatbots can handle these queries, helping the organizations to reduce the support hours of human agents which in turn reduces the operational cost.
- Access to Backend Data: Chatbots can be integrated with all leading backend Systems like SAP, Oracle, IBM, and SharePoint, enabling them to access the data from the backend system and resolve queries appropriately.
- Multi-Channel: Chatbots enable organizations to give the Omni-channel experience to its customers because chatbots can be integrated with all the leading Messaging/Voice Apps (Slack, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Cisco Spark, WebChat, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and others)
These are just some of the ways chatbots can improve customer support. As Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language processing advance, the responses given by chatbots will definitely improve and they will be able to handle more complex tasks. Unvired has developed Chyme, an Enterprise Bots Platform to easily build Digital Assistants for Sales, Customer Service, IT Helpdesk systems, and custom bots that integrate with backend systems like SAP, ServiceNow, Oracle, Salesforce, and others to access the data. Chyme powered bots are omnichannel and can be invoked from Slack, Microsoft Skype for Business, Facebook Messenger and Workplace, Salesforce Chatter, and Cisco Spark.
If you want to know more, write to me at susheel.kumar@unvired.com and let’s have a conversation around chatbots.