Strengthening Your Brand Reputation with a Customer Service Chatbot
With online reviews impacting 93% of consumers purchasing habits (source), your brand’s reputation is more important than ever.
Reviews, comments and user stories are everywhere, when someone Google's your brand they'll see your reviews reviews directly next to your website.
If a lot of people speak out negatively, it’s going to hurt your growth.
Fun (and scary) fact: The average American tells 15 people when they’ve had a bad experience with a brand.
So, what leads to people speaking out online about your brand? There’s 3 main reasons:
- They had a great experience.
- They had a terrible experience.
- They felt like they had no other way of getting your attention.
Customers are, on average, 30% less likely to share a good experience online than a bad one (source). Due to this bad experience bias, it’s important businesses do everything we can to keep customers happy.
We’re going to take a dive into how chatbots tackle points two and three, with the hope of turning them all into point one.
Using chatbots to improve a customers experience with your brand
When someone has a terrible experience, it’s normally going to come down to customer service.
They might have been on hold for hours, waiting for an email for days or given incorrect information by mistake.
By design, chatbots are here to stop that from happening:
They reply in seconds - and are capable of dealing with hundreds of enquiries every second.
They give your team more time - Chatbots are capable of saving customer service teams 35% of their time (source). This extra time means teams make less mistakes and can spend longer on complex queries.
This is where businesses really benefit from chatbots. The extra time and attention given to unhappy customers goes a long way to helping them leaving a happy one.
A customer that feels like a service rep genuinely cared about their issues and worked hard to resolve them is 77% more likely to refer the brand to a friend (source).
Robots have much smaller error margins - Whilst us humans make the odd typo and forget to do things from time to time, chatbots don’t.
We’d be lying if we said chatbots were completely perfect and never make mistakes. Bugs can occasionally pop up and lead to something going wrong, as with all technology.
That being said, the margin for error is a lot slimmer and over time (thanks to machine learning) becomes almost non-existent.
Combining these 3 points gives you a customer service agent that replies instantly (even at 2am), enhances your human agents and never goes “whoops, my bad.”
Stopping the “I never got a reply from customer service” reviews
It’s not uncommon for businesses to receive a review along the lines of “impossible to get in touch with customer service.” When this happens, it’s likely the reviewer hasn’t really tried to get in touch with your business.
They’ve picked the one channel that works for them and given it a few hours.
Enter chatbots.
Chatbots extend the arm of your customer service department, giving your customers another channel to reach out to. They also help increase your businesses self-serve options, empowering your customers to help themselves.
Make sure you read how chatbots help your self-service strategy.
This extra contact option helps reduce the amount of customers that don’t want to get on the phone and become disgruntled if you don’t reply to their tweet in minutes.
With 57% of customers preferring to connect with a brand using digital methods (source), it’s becoming even more important to broaden your digital customer service options.
The importance of human fallback
Whilst a chatbot is great at improving the customer service you provide, and in turn reducing the amount of complaints, having some form of human fallback is necessary.
Giving customers the option to interact both with your chatbot or simply have the chatbot raise the issue to the relevant team acts as a best of both worlds situation.
Those that want a quick answer have access to it, those that need a human are told how long until they can expect a response - without the customer needing to get up from their sofa.
Keeping customers sweet with chatbots
Chatbots enhance your customer service and expand the options available for your customers. and provide a better experience for your customers.
Your existing service reps are able to provide a better service and the extra medium of communication helps keep your brand accessible.
It’s worth noting that, as chatbots learn and improve over time, the sooner you invest the better your chatbot will be this time next year.
