Leveraging Chatbots for Customer Service
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That doesn't sound right, does it? Yet, this is what most customer service departments put their customers through when they send an enquiry.
Wait.
Humans are not designed to wait anymore. Waiting is old school. New school is speed and instantaneity. In this article, we'll see how chatbots can help your customer service team meet customers' expectations of speed.
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The opportunities of a chatbot in customer service
Obviously, I strongly believe that when it comes to customer enquiries, there are many opportunities to bring a chatbot into the mix. One third of our AI stack is the bespoke customer service chatbot.
What are the main opportunities?
For your customers
Speed and convenience.
No one likes to call businesses anymore. Even though we expect to be served 24/7, we don't want to pick up the phone and call (we asked back in 2016, you can still find the results in our 2016 mobile messaging report). We could try sending an email but, as illustrated in my hilarious introduction, this is often met with delay and uncertainty. The last resort, right now, is Twitter. I often use Twitter to reach out to brands.
Customers want to be able to contact brands through messaging apps and chatbots. They want a conversation but not the nuisance of actually calling. They want the instantaneity.
Consumers want more chatbots. Read the data.
What better way to offer this than through a chatbot? Chatbots are instant, always online, and can know pretty much everything there is to know. Consumers no longer want to look for answers, they want to ask. Allow them to ask through an automated chatbot.
For your company
Time and consistency.
As you probably are aware, most enquiries your customer service department receive are very similar. It is generally assumed about 80% of all enquiries come from the same repetitive questions.
How would you like to automatically answer these questions and claim your precious time back? This is how we help enterprises' customer service teams all over the world. We figure out which of the enquiries are most common and build a chatbot around answering them consistently.
The result is a lot of time saved, happier customers (read the 'for the customer' section above to understand why), and even happier staff. After all, who likes copy/pasting the same thing over and over again?
Aside from saving time, a customer service chatbot also brings consistency.
A chatbot is automated, 24/7, always-on and always there to help. It is also always on time, always in a good mood and never hungover, sad, or angry.
This brings you consistency and standardisation in your customer service. Once the chatbot has been built and is released, you know exactly how it is going to answer the questions it has been programmed to answer. You know the words it is going to use, the sentences it is going to construct, and the data it is going to take form the interactions.
Between speed, consistency, and giving your customers the care they are now expecting, a chatbot for customer service seems to be the way forward for any business handling a fair number of enquiries.
