Customer Experience Archives - BotCore Enterprise Chatbot Fri, 15 Mar 2024 09:25:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://botcore.ai/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cropped-favicon-32x32-1-70x70.png Customer Experience Archives - BotCore 32 32 Deliver Total Experience With Microsoft Power Virtual Agents https://botcore.ai/blog/total-experience-with-microsoft-power-virtual-agents/ Thu, 11 Aug 2022 12:18:02 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10556 Deliver Total Experience with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents With multiple technologies working together to decipher the language, context, and intent to respond in an almost human manner, Conversational AI has seen staggering growth in the last few years. 70% of the world’s white-collar population has adopted it as a way of life. Today, organizations worldwide […]

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Deliver Total Experience with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

With multiple technologies working together to decipher the language, context, and intent to respond in an almost human manner, Conversational AI has seen staggering growth in the last few years. 70% of the world’s white-collar population has adopted it as a way of life. Today, organizations worldwide are using chatbots, among other technologies, to meet employee and customer experience needs and deliver what Gartner calls Total Experience (TX).

Microsoft Power Virtual Agents is one such intelligent no-code solution that allows businesses of all sizes to create chatbots to engage with customers and employees. This bot-builder is part of the Microsoft Power Platform that gives it access to powerful technologies, making it a compelling tool for your business.

What is Power Virtual Agent?

At its core, Microsoft Power Virtual Agents provides the building blocks for customizable AI chatbots. It allows businesses to stay connected to customers, employees, and other intended users 24×7, answer queries in real-time and improve self-service capabilities through company websites or employee platforms. Eventually, chatbots designed on Power Virtual Agents reduce the workload on CX, HR, and IT helpdesk teams.

Easy to customize for the unique needs of each business, Power Virtual Agents do not depend on high-end resources like data scientists and developers. This allows any business user, even in smaller firms, to build bots that deliver the same interactivity and experience as large brands. In addition, Power Virtual Agents is available as a standalone application on the web or as an app within Microsoft Teams, giving businesses the flexibility on where they choose to deploy it.

Power Virtual Agents vs. other bot builders – what's the difference?

With conversational AI becoming the new norm for TX, many fly-by-the-night bot builders are available. But none with the nuances and ease of use of Power Virtual Agents.

Some features that differentiate Power Virtual Agents include –

1. Ease of use and cost-effectiveness

Power Virtual Agents allows the bot to be built quickly without any high-end resources or skills. With its no-code, intuitive UI, PVA is perfect for users with little or no technical capabilities and advanced developers. In addition, the pre-built drag-and-drop features supported by Microsoft Power Automate make this no-code process easy to deploy.

2. Deep customization

Business can integrate their relevant processes with Power Virtual Agents with pre-built connectors. This allows them to quickly customize and deploy bots on your website, social media, and Microsoft Teams, among other platforms, to engage with the end-user in various contexts.

3. Simple escalation hierarchy

Power Virtual Agents addresses low-level requests, freeing up customer service resources. But it also enables the bot to flag a concern that needs live, human intervention. Ultimately, this means a quick resolution of customer or employee queries despite lean dependence on person-hours.

4. Performance monitoring

The inbuilt data-driven insights and AI-enabled analytics allow for real-time monitoring of the chatbot’s performance. This ensures continuous learning and improvement in a company’s conversational AI experience.

5. Real-time adaptation

The Microsoft Azure machine learning capabilities inherent to PVA allow the chatbots to adapt to real-time situations and deliver accurate responses. This ensures that your bot is almost human-like in its response, making the experience more personalized for the customer.

6. Round-the clock-customer support

No more waiting for opening hours! Chatbot’ agents’ can now be available for end-users in a time-zone agnostic manner. So, whether your employee wants information on healthcare insurance at 2 am during an emergency or your customer asks WISMO at midnight, you can rest assured that they will get the answers they need.

The evolution of Power Virtual Agents

As recently as May 2022, Microsoft announced many transformative new features that make Power Virtual Agents more potent than ever. According to Microsoft, the new and improved platform unifies the sophistication of Microsoft Azure Bot Framework Composer’s pro-code capabilities with the simplicity of the existing low-code platform. Simply put, Power Virtual Platform now allows professional developers and subject matter experts to work collaboratively to build a bot on the unified Microsoft Bot Building Studio. An additional feature will enable it to go from a simple bot-builder to a complete suite of interactive voice response (IVR) builder. This is made possible by incorporating an end-to-end backend support framework for telephony. It now also includes the agility of Power BI, which helps with data visualization, self-service analytics, and data protection.

This evolution is built around four main themes:

1. Unified bot building to leverage the true potential of the Microsoft stack

With the new single unified bot building studio, Power Virtual Agents now incorporates-

  • The advanced functionality of Bot Framework Composer with the bot-building experience of Power Virtual Agents.
  • Deep integration of Bot Framework Composer and Microsoft Cognitive Services, allowing professional developers and domain experts to collaborate easily in building powerful conversational bots and IVRs.

2. Advanced authoring for richer experiences

With this new feature, Power Virtual Agents now delivers –

  • Richer conversations with integrated multi-media response support through images and video sharing, adaptive cards, and quick response capabilities
  • Data storage, reuse, and transformation for professional developers. Made possible by the use of the Power FX editor to connect to the custom API via the Microsoft Power Platform connectors, elicit a response, resolve it into its parts and ultimately transform the information for use within the conversation
  • Reaction to events with contextual responses. For example, for a product delivery query, any system information on delivery updates will trigger the bot to respond with “Your product will reach you soon.” or “Your product is in transit in X location.”
  • Logic using variables, loops, and advanced conversational flows to make the interaction as close to mimicking a human interaction as possible

3. Seamless Fusion Teams collaboration

According to Gartner, 84% of companies have set up Fusion Teams, i.e., multi-disciplinary teams of technology and other experts. Power Virtual Agents now allows the collaboration of these Fusion Teams in the bot-building process, with features like multi-authoring and commenting that is similar to the MS Office experience. So, for example, your bot-building process can now have technology and psychology experts working together to deliver the most humane conversation AI experiences to your customers and employees.

4. IVR and Telephony for multichannel conversational AI support

Power Virtual Agents has progressed from a simple bot builder to an end-to-end IVR builder. Now, all businesses need is a phone number and a bot published on the back of it. And the next thing you know, your customers are engaging with your bot on the phone! This not only reduces customer service workload but also addresses delays in response times for the customer. More importantly, it makes conversational AI more inclusive, bringing elderly users into its fold who are more comfortable with phone conversations than with web- or platform-based chatbots.

How businesses are deploying Power Virtual Agents with Acuvate

With conversational AI becoming a must-have for organizations, Acuvate and Microsoft have delivered humane, sentient, and genuinely effective chatbots across the TX spectrum with Power Virtual Agents.

Some of the use-cases include –

1. Employee assistant chatbots

Using the latest features of PVA, Acuvate built Employee Assistant Chatbots to answer employees’ FAQs. This bot deployment was highly effective and helpful during the last two years of remote work and COVID concerns.

The chatbot can –

  • Issue COVID-related information, including insights from official sources, preventive measures and tips, COVID-19 health checks for employees, etc.
  • Deliver company-specific information, including advisories, news from the organization, and emergency contact details.
  • Act as an HR helpdesk, answering employees’ HR-related queries with minimal human intervention.

Yet another example of HR chatbots for employee experience include a turnkey project that Acuvate delivered for Neptune Energy, a large energy company that wanted to streamline its HR information seeding. With the sentient HR Handbook Bot built in a record two weeks using Power Virtual Agents, Neptune’s employees now have instant information and answers on terms and conditions, rewards and benefits, policies and procedures, and offshore employee guidance. Click here to read more about the success of Neptune’s HR Handbook Bot.

2. Customer support chatbots

No matter the size of your organization, ease of customer query resolution is always top of mind. Power Virtual Agents enables customer support automation with no-code capabilities. So, your customer support is up and running quickly and customized to deal with queries specific to the nature of your business. Simple questions like – ‘what are your working hours,’ ‘how soon can I expect my order to be delivered’ or ‘I need help to understand the refund process for the item I wish to return’ – can be easily programmed to be quickly dealt with by your chatbot. The system will flag queries beyond its scope and escalate seamlessly to a human agent wherever necessary.

3. IT helpdesk

IT-related issues can be aggravating, especially for employees working remotely. For example, imagine you are on a project deadline, and your system shuts down for unforeseeable reasons. When you call your IT Helpdesk, you are guided through all the possibilities of addressing the situation with automated IVR. If the matter is resolved, the ticket can be satisfactorily closed. If not, it can be escalated to a live helpdesk agent. This is how seamless and cost-effective Power Virtual Agents can make your IT and query resolution process.

Begin your chatbot journey with the next-gen Microsoft Power Virtual Agents

67% of consumers worldwide have interacted with a chatbot in the last 12 months, with an estimated 57-fold increase by 2025.

It is not too late to begin your conversational AI journey. Acuvate is ready to walk you through this process and help you achieve the maximum effectiveness from your Power Virtual Agents investment.

Talk to our experts today.

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Top use cases of Chatbots in the Banking and Finance Industry https://botcore.ai/blog/chatbots-in-the-banking-and-finance-industry/ Thu, 04 Aug 2022 08:11:20 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10488 Top Use Cases of Chatbots in the Banking and Finance Industry Chatbots have come a long way since the first time they were used by a banking application in 2015. With advancements in AI, NLP, and new communication channels like Google Home, Alexa, and social media platforms, they are now widely being used by almost […]

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Top Use Cases of Chatbots in the Banking and Finance Industry

Chatbots have come a long way since the first time they were used by a banking application in 2015. With advancements in AI, NLP, and new communication channels like Google Home, Alexa, and social media platforms, they are now widely being used by almost all popular banks and financial institutions. 

These ChatBots perform various repetitive tasks easily and accurately. Further, they can be personalized for each of the customers. 

The conversational bots can be text-based or voice-based. They can be accessed from a mobile app, a banking website, social media messaging platforms, or voice-based personal digital assistants. 

Generally, ChatBots used by banks are more popular in the finance and banking industry. However, chatbots are used for more complicated and personalized tasks beyond conventional uses.  

Though as bank customers using digital services we all experience ChatBots, they are also used by employees working in financial institutions to retrieve information easily. When we go to a bank to learn more about a policy the employee retrieves information not from big bundles of paper on their desks, but rather from the organization’s memory using a ChatBot. 

In 2017, Acuvate published a blog on top use cases of chatbots in the banking and finance industry. A lot has changed in these five years. They can guess the information we seek, suggest policies and initiatives, and are more convenient to use. 

Here are 5 ways banks and financial institutions are using chatbots

1. Addressing Customer’s concerns

Unlike banking personnel, digital tools like websites are available for customers 24×7. To make it further easy for users, chatbots integrated into websites and mobile apps can answer the most common questions faster and with fewer clicks.  

For example, reporting a hacking attempt, locking your account to stop a hacking attempt, or finding out more information about an unidentified debit would previously require the customer to log in to the website, search for the option, and take action. These are the most common tasks that a banking chatbot in the banking website or social media app can answer in just a few seconds.  Since the app is on your mobile phone, verifying your credentials is easy. Here’s an example 

Addressing Customer's Concerns

The ambit of the operations a chatbot can perform has greatly widened these days with advancements in security systems and technologies. ChatBot interactions are now more personalized and natural.  

2. Retaining old customers and expanding customer base

Customer engagement is beyond human interactions between customers and employees at the office. With more customers using digital tools like websites, apps embedded in mobile phones, and other personal digital assistants like Google Home or Alexa, each of these tools have ChatBots to answer customers and cater to their needs in time.  

These tools simplify various processes and save time and effort. ChatBots are integral to all digital tools to engage with a large number of customers and provide personalized services. They define the quality of service and ease of operations a financial institution provides its customers.  

For example, ChatBots identify new customers and present them with options of information they are more likely to seek. For older customers, ChatBots identify them, address them by their name, and with knowledge of their account details, they present a different set of actions for each of them. With advanced ChatBots, customers can’t say if they’re talking to a human or a digital assistant.  

When embedded in IoT digital assistants like Alexa or Google Home, the latest advancements in NLP ( Natural Language Processing) technologies help the audio-based Chatbots provide a pleasant conversational experience to customers along with information they asked for and may be interested in.

Retaining Old Customers And Expanding Customer Base

3. Generating useful Marketing Leads

Modern ChatBots backed with Artificial Intelligence can build interest in a financial institution’s products and services. Chatbots are the perfect tools to implement digitalized marketing techniques to find new customers and sustain old ones. They are effective in keeping customers active by providing the convenience of being there for them always.  

The ChatBots collect information from customers and provide them with information on various initiatives that are likely to interest them. This helps in identifying potential customers and in growing the customer base. 

Generating Useful Marketing Leads

4. Recommendations and upselling

As the services of banking and financial institutions grew wider, it is important to let the right customers know about the right policies and initiatives. Intelligent digital systems like chatbots can more accurately identify interested customers. Chatbots make it easier to maintain customer profiles, identify who wants to buy other products, and get feedback on existing products and services. 

Moreover, these Chatbots learn and adapt to situations. Hence they learn more about customers and get better and more accurate over time.  

Recommendations And Upselling

5. Personal Financial Assistant

Chatbots help users track their spending and receive a timely reminder of impending payments. Payments can be automated to avoid late fees. They do help customers refrain from overspending and provide regular reports of their expenses. 

The information collected by chatbots can be used to profile customers based on their financial needs, status, and expenses. They especially make loan approvals and investment decisions easier and more manageable. 

Personal Financial Assistant

How to build the most reliable chatbots?

Chatbots reduce costs, no doubt, but that’s not the main advantage. They provide a better customer experience and make essential processes simpler. Every bank and the financial institution needs a chatbot.  

However, these simple solutions are not so easy to build. As with any other financial system, since they involve sensitive information and must be error-free, they should be built with care and by trustable experts. Moreover, unlike physical assets, digital infrastructure like chatbots need to be updated continuously to address changing needs of customers and to stay relevant and competitive in the market. 

BotCore - the powerful enterprise bot builder platform from Acuvate

Over the past few years, we have helped several enterprises build & launch bots to meet the needs of their employees, customers, and vendors. After observing several enterprise scenarios large landscape of user intents, and common pain points across various departments, we spent more than 15 person-years of research, design & development on building a highly flexible and powerful enterprise bot builder platform – “BotCore”. 

BotCore is the perfect accelerator that enables banks and financial institutions to train, build, and launch customized conversational bots powered by artificial intelligence. Using “Cognitive Abstraction” it can leverage an AI service available today and are scalable for future services. 

BotCore today powers chatbots at several Fortune 100 & large enterprises. To learn more about how Botcare can help your business in providing superior customer engagement, please mail us at

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The DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI https://botcore.ai/blog/dos-and-donts-of-conversational-ai/ Wed, 13 Jul 2022 06:27:43 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10431 The DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI Conversational AI is an emerging market that is taking over the business world by storm. Indeed, interest in chatbots, voice bots, and other AI-driven virtual assistants is growing by leaps and bounds, so much so that the conversational AI market is expected to reach $18.02 billion by 2027, […]

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The DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI

Conversational AI is an emerging market that is taking over the business world by storm. Indeed, interest in chatbots, voice bots, and other AI-driven virtual assistants is growing by leaps and bounds, so much so that the conversational AI market is expected to reach $18.02 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 21.02%.

While chatbots and other digital assistants have immense potential to improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) levels, enhance employee engagement, empower organizations with exceptional experiences, and improve brand image, not every conversational AI project may prove to be successful.

That’s where an effective conversational AI design comes into the picture. Effective conversational AI design builds the user’s trust and boosts their confidence in the virtual assistant. It keeps them engaged and brings them back again and again.

When a user enters a chatbot, they may be apprehensive about the quality of interactions at first and whether the chatbot can resolve their issue. While chatbots automate conversations and offload human tasks, the discussions should still feel human and akin to having a one-on-one chat with the brand.

So, what are the dos and don’ts of conversational AI? What best practices can you keep in mind while designing and implementing a chatbot?

Let’s explore.

DOs and DON’Ts of Conversational AI

Here are some key chatbot considerations and DOs and DON’Ts that organizations must be mindful of –

1. Ask yourself — what purpose is my bot designed to serve?

While a chatbot can do many things for your organization, answering queries, executing simple tasks, or even pulling relevant information, it’s essential to ensure it achieves its actual purpose. Narrowing down the chatbot’s purpose can help the organization ensure that the scripts, content, and functions required to make the chatbot successful aren’t ambiguous. Answer questions like- 

  • Am I designing my chatbot to promote self-service? If yes, do I know the common contact reasons and transactional issues that burden my contact center?
  • Do I have sufficient data to design an AI chatbot to solve queries and hold an end-to-end conversation?
  • Are there restrictions on what the chatbot can/cannot do?
  • What if the bot is unable to fulfill its role? Is there a backup plan for that?

It’s imperative to set the right expectations when it comes to what your chatbot is supposed to do. Moreover, in large organizations with several departments, considering the needs of all business divisions may be tough and lead to delays in time-to-market. Rather, deploying separate conversational AI solutions for disparate use cases will be the wiser option.

2. Choose the right platform and expertise.

Jumping into the world of conversational AI without the right expertise in your hands can be daunting and make the entire process extremely disorganized and uneconomical.

Instead of burdening your IT team with the responsibility of learning, designing, and optimizing conversational AI technology and embedding automated workflows, try choosing a conversational AI tool from a host of vendors available in the market.

Depending on your needs and intended use cases, you can either go for a custom solution, a specific service/functional offering, or else a platform-based approach.

A platform-based conversational AI offering leverages game-changing no-code or low-code solutions (LCAPs) that help non-technical users build, improve, and adjust apps based on needs with little or no coding.

3. Security and privacy are must-haves

Data privacy and cybersecurity are significant conversational AI implementation considerations. Since chatbots can handle sensitive customer information at times, incorporating robust security protocols is a “must-do.”

After all, a cyberattack on the PII of customers has an enormous financial impact and can significantly hamper the brand image of your organization.

  • Keep up with the latest security regulations in the conversational AI space, including any industry or location-specific requirements.
  • Before implementing the chatbot, run comprehensive penetration and API security tests.
  • Space out dispensing information based on the users’ authorization levels. Implement user, intent level, and channel authorization and privacy, and ensure end-to-end encryption.

4. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify

Keep it simple for the user. Design the chatbot to minimize the list of asks for the user.

  • Avoid unnecessary questions or overly wordy sentences.
  • Use directions like “Tap, yes to continue” or “Please select one option from below” to tell the user exactly what is required.
  • Design auto pop-ups that tell what the chatbot can do and gently nudge the customer to discuss his queries.
    Earn user confidence by matching your bots to your brand’s tone and identity.

5. Human handoff is always key.

Forcing customers to interact with a chatbot in the name of modernizing IT, scaling operations, or reducing costs isn’t the best option. While providing an intelligent, natural language interface that simplifies problems, understands context, and allows users to speak to the bot on their own terms is the best option, it’s also necessary to build an escalation pathway that supports an effortless transition to a human agent.

So, when an issue arises beyond the bot’s scope, or if the customer seems irate (sensed through sentiment analysis) and willing to speak to a human agent only, the bot must be able to escalate the call to ensure quick resolutions seamlessly.

6. Never stop working on making your conversational AI solution better.

As conversational AI technology progresses and your organization needs mature responses to deal with different intent types, make sure your chatbot is equipped to harness user data and deliver more meaningful and personalized engagement. 

If required, keep on adding new responses and natural language and machine learning capabilities to progressively make your bot better and more human-like.

7. Don’t forget to integrate your bot with existing systems and digital channels.

Integrations with backend and legacy systems, such as ERP, CRM, or databases, are essential if you want to provide seamless support to your customers or employees.

Conversational AI platforms when integrated with other systems can help in checking the status of orders to answering queries, address problems from diagnosing a problem to resolving issues quickly. Also, with the data from the systems the Conversational AI platform can provide valuable insights. So based on your use case, identify what integrations are a must for your case.

8. Don’t forget to check — How successful is my bot?

Goal completion rates, bounce rates, and customer satisfaction scores are great examples of significant metrics and KPIs that determine the success/failure of conversational AI implementation.

As a result of monitoring, organizations can continually develop better and more seamless experiences for users and build a winning conversational AI strategy.

The Dos And Don’ts Of Conversational

Want to implement the best-in-class conversational AI technology? Talk to our experts.

At Acuvate, we help clients develop and deploy powerful chatbots, voice bots, and digital assistants, keeping in mind the DOs, DON’Ts, and must-haves of conversational AI.

Our enterprise bot-building platform, BotCore, uses top-notch AI and natural language processing technologies to build intelligent bots and support exceptional customer and employee experiences.

To know more, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

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Conversational Commerce in various Social Channels https://botcore.ai/blog/conversational-commerce-in-social-channels/ Wed, 06 Jul 2022 12:17:59 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10409 Conversational Commerce in various Social Channels We live in an era where artificial intelligence (AI) has taken over every aspect of our being. And customer experience (CX) is not alien to it. As the world embraces new-age customer experiences (CX) with open hands, warranting the delivery of hyper-personalized customer engagement to a more informed, connected, […]

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Conversational Commerce in various Social Channels

We live in an era where artificial intelligence (AI) has taken over every aspect of our being. And customer experience (CX) is not alien to it.

As the world embraces new-age customer experiences (CX) with open hands, warranting the delivery of hyper-personalized customer engagement to a more informed, connected, and empowered customer, organizations are left to deal with several questions and dilemmas.

After all, endless customer conversations are happening online on various social channels — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter —  it’s challenging to cover every digital touchpoint and use the enormous amount of customer data it generates to fathom “what customers want.”

That’s where conversational commerce comes to the rescue. Powered by AI, conversational commerce solutions like chatbots, voice bots, and other digital assistants have enabled companies to render human-like customer interactions at scale. Conversational commerce apps on various social channels leverage the unending amount of customer data to analyze customer behavior, predict their needs to deliver proactive engagement, and provide more personalized support.

Let’s explore more.

Conversational commerce in various social channels - What can it do for your business?

“Human interaction matters now — 82% of U.S. and 74% of non-U.S. consumers want more of it in the future. Regardless, the technology supporting human interaction must be seamless and unobtrusive across channels,” stated PWC’s latest report, Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right.

Conversational commerce solutions in the form of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp chatbots are making this a reality. 

Conversational chat commerce, powered by advanced technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing, is the latest paradigm in the customer experience world that draws in huge investments from the C-suite leaders. Chat and voice bots available on various social channels are now being used to solve a host of simple and complex customer queries 24X7, understand customer emotions, store information about purchase history, discover patterns in their behavior, and act accordingly to achieve maximum customer satisfaction.

Modern customers live online. They may be awake at two at night, browsing for new products or even reaching out to customer support. And they may do so from their desired social channel, be it Messenger, WhatsApp, or Instagram. Moreover, they may want to switch channels amidst an ongoing support case, i.e., change from WhatsApp to Facebook. Here conversational commerce solutions take charge. Not only do they provide instant, round-the-clock customer support, but e-commerce bots can retain the original context of the conversation to allow seamless switching without the customer being asked to start over.

So, what are the use cases of conversational commerce? How can chat and voice bots present on various social channels delight customers and build value at each stage of the sales funnel?

Let’s find out.

Curating a personalized sales journey through conversational commerce

Below, we present to you the use cases of conversational commerce on various social channels that can help organizations tailor sales journeys and win the life-long loyalty of their customers.

  • Amplify reach to new customer segments by pushing alerts about new products, collecting customer preferences and behavior data, answering initial queries, and delivering personalized recommendations and tips.
  • Acquire customers by curating creative marketing campaigns on the most popular social channels, assisting customers with website navigation, payment, checkout, and product use, and tailoring product suggestions according to purchase history and past behavior.
  • Is this shirt available in a different color? When will I receive my package? Customers can get their queries addressed simply by approaching the brand’s chatbot on the social channel of their liking. In this way, not only customer support becomes more accessible, but brands also get hold of valuable information that can help personalize CX.
  • As and when the customer’s desired product becomes available, e-commerce bots can push notifications and alerts through various social channels and provide a CTA to “Buy Now.” It can also suggest alternative and supplementary products as the case may demand.
  • Collect customer feedback through Instagram and Facebook surveys on a test batch of a new product.
  • Curate loyalty programs and send personalized discount and reward coupons to encourage customers to share product ratings and feedback and develop long-lasting relationships.

Take a look at the type of conversations a bot can have with your customers.

Conversation Bot
Conversation
Conversations A Bot

A sneak peek into a few conversational commerce solutions on various social channels

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy bots on various social channels that consistently deliver exceptional CX with minimum friction or hassle with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

  • BotCore is a Microsoft Preferred Co-Sell-ready solution that leverages Microsoft’s best AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) technologies.
  • Our conversational commerce solutions are deployable on popular social channels (WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) and support multiple languages, including German, French, Italian, English, etc.

Here are a few examples of how brands are using conversational commerce in various social channels to engage, inform, and support their customers.

1. POND’s SAL chatbot for Facebook Messenger

Chatbot For Facebook Messenger

An FB Messenger bot, also available on webchat in different countries, POND’s SAL can be accessed through Unilever’s flagship store on Shopee. Using technologies like AI and augmented reality (AR),  SAL interacts three-dimensionally with customers to deliver personalized and more immersive shopping experiences.

When a user uploads a selfie,  SAL works on identifying critical skincare concerns across four significant areas, namely, pimples, wrinkles, spots, and uneven skin tone.

The bot also sends relevant skincare articles and beauty tips to keep the users engaged.

Having completed the skin analysis, SAL then recommends suitable products from POND’s according to the customer’s skin condition.

2. pRANA’s chatbot for Facebook Messenger

Prana’s Chatbot For Facebook Messenger

Sustainable clothing company prAna’s chatbot for Facebook Messenger uses a casual, friendly tone to help customers shop online or get the information they need.

The bot helps shoppers navigate through the online store by asking them to choose between options like  “Shop Women’s, “Shop Men’s, or “Shop Best Sellers.” Moreover, the bot’s intuitive conversational AI interface gives the option to type a message or easily navigate to the previous menu.

3. BMW’s “Follow Now” chatbot on WhatsApp

Chatbot On Whatsapp

To combat the massive inflow of service requests when summers and winters are approaching, BMW launched its “Follow Now” chatbot on WhatsApp to help customers book an appointment from the convenience of their home from an app they use every day.

The bot offers real-time updates on the service status of their car and intimates them when their cars are ready for pickup. Moreover, service assistants can intervene and answer certain queries if the bot isn’t able to answer those.

4. Clear’s Cera chatbot for Facebook Messenger

Clear’s Cera Chatbot For Facebook Messenger

Clear is Unilever’s leading anti-dandruff shampoo brand. The company’s chatbot Cera, available for the Indonesian market on Facebook Messenger, acts as your go-to hair care assistant offering personalized hair diagnosis, advice, and product recommendations for dandruff, dry hair, oily hair, etc.

The bot proactively sends relevant articles to the users after analyzing their behavior, preferences, and needs and delivers answers to a range of frequently asked questions related to hair care.

5. Roma by Rochi’s chatbot for Instagram

Chatbot For Instagram

Roma by Rochi is a popular fashion brand in Argentina that revolves around encouraging women to embrace their sense of style.

Though quite popular on Instagram from likes, comments, and story mentions, recently, the brand launched a digital assistant on the social media platform to assist with a “tag and like” giveaway.

Post the deployment of the bot; the brand experienced an astounding 82% increase in reach in one week and a whopping 741% rise in engagement.

The brand also has a Facebook Messenger bot, which they use to answer queries, upsell products, and notify customers when sales begin.

We, at Acuvate, can help clients across industries build engaging conversational commerce experiences in various social channels using our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore. To know more, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our AI experts.

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Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms https://botcore.ai/blog/total-experience-in-conversational-ai-platforms/ Wed, 18 May 2022 12:41:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=10254 Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms This new decade that began with the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of business experiences that are mobile, remote, and digital-centric. The keywords here being “experiences” and “digital.” Yes, we are in the midst of a business environment that feeds on experiences that empower, driven […]

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Total Experience in the Age of Conversational AI Platforms

This new decade that began with the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an era of business experiences that are mobile, remote, and digital-centric. The keywords here being “experiences” and “digital.”

Yes, we are in the midst of a business environment that feeds on experiences that empower, driven by social, cultural, and economic changes. And yes, “digital” is the fodder fuelling these experiences. So, putting it in simpler words, the quality of the digital experiences businesses deliver to their customers is foundational to their success in today’s landscape.

After all, products and services are commodities that can be easily imitated and lose their differentiating value in the long run. But it’s the emotions and feelings that customers take away that matter the most and create memorable brands at the end of the day.

But, it’s not just about the customers anymore. To create exceptional experiences, it is vital to focus on providing meaningful employee experiences. After all, fulfilling even a minor customer request requires coordination amongst different departments at the workplace. A great employee experience makes it easier for employees to do their jobs and serve customers better. Moreover, it is only an engaged, motivated, and enthusiastic workforce that would work towards reaching outstanding CSAT scores.

Hence, intelligent, future-oriented organizations understand that they cannot separate customer (CX) and employee experience (EX) strategies into silos anymore. As important as it is for CX and EX to function outside the formerly created vacuum, it is equally vital to strengthen “experience” strategies with thoughtful user experiences (UX) and flexible multi-experiences (MX).

As put forth by leading analyst firm Gartner, “MX, UX, CX, and EX (or, simply “total experience”) are inextricably intertwined in the digital experience economy.”

In its latest report, “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022,” Gartner defines total experience (TX) as “a business strategy that integrates employee experience, customer experience, user experience, and multi-experience across multiple touchpoints to accelerate growth.”

Through holistic management of the expectations of various stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, and vendors, TX boosts confidence, satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

So, how can an organization optimize experiences for its customers, employees, and other stakeholders?

The simple answer lies in enhancing the everyday interactions that make up a considerable chunk of a typical day at work. And mature conversational AI technologies and platforms can play a significant role in this.

Let’s explore further.

Understanding Total Experience from an Organizational Perspective

By 2024, Gartner estimates that organizations providing TX will outperform competitors by 25% in satisfaction metrics for both CX and EX. Additionally, by 2026, 60% of large enterprises are expected to employ a total experience strategy to transform their business models and achieve “world-class customer and employee advocacy levels,” in which both groups are motivated to promote the corporate brand.

So, what is total experience from an organizational perspective? TX consists of the following four components 

  • Customer Experience (CX) – Customers’ interactions and feelings about a brand
  • Employee Experience (EX) – Employees’ interactions, perceptions, and engagement with the company
  • User Experience (UX) – How a user feels after interacting with your product or service. Measured in terms of KPIs like error rate, abandonment rate, success rate, etc.
  • Multi-Experience (MX) – Delivering seamless and consistent experiences on multiple touchpoints, devices, and modalities.

Jason Wong, a distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, rightly stated, “While excellence in one area is valuable, the organization as a whole can be further strengthened if these four disciplines are intertwined as a Total experience (TX) strategy so that they mutually reinforce one another.”

As discussed above, everyday business interactions amongst the different stakeholders, including customers, employees, support agents, suppliers, and vendors, drive overall experience management in any organization.

These stakeholders demand new-world experiences that are A) personalized, B) consistent, C) resolution-driven, and D) enable faster decision-making. Often, these interactions are routine and repetitive, leaving massive room to automate and optimize them using the latest technologies. Additionally, even though managing individual stakeholder experiences may be effortless, problems arise at the points where they intersect.

With an explosion of interactions taking place across different channels, how can organizations deliver new-world experiences for everyone at scale and ensure seamless TX? Moreover, most prevailing digital technologies in the workplace fail to understand the context and respond conversationally to customer and employee queries, consequently increasing human dependencies and operational costs.

The solution lies in deploying AI-first conversational technologies that work in tandem with chatbots, voice bots, and other virtual assistants to offer contextual, meaningful, and personalized engagement to customers and employees, and a rich user experience with real-time alerts, nudges, and contextual information.

Conversational AI Platforms for Total Experience (TX)

Conversational Ai Platforms For Total Experience

An integrated conversational AI platform brings CX and UX together by helping users build automated workflows and deliver intelligent conversations that delight customers and engage employees.

Conversational AI platforms ensure a robust total experience (TX) by integrating powerful UX and MX and building intelligent virtual assistants and chatbots that provide user-friendly, consistent, multilingual experiences across numerous social, messaging, web, and voice channels.

Customer Experience

Chatbots and voice bots deliver exceptional, quick, personalized, and resolution-driven customer support. These bots leverage powerful AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to understand customer sentiment, learn from past customer behavior, and recommend the right products based on their interests, activities, and profiles.

Employee Experience

A conversational AI platform can make employees’ lives easier by building chatbot personas for every need. Be it HR, IT helpdesk, business intelligence (BI), or the intranet, employee-facing bots answer simple and complex queries, perform day-to-day tasks, and fetch relevant information.

Additionally, agent assist bots simplify the access to the CRM system and knowledge base for agents, providing contextual information and suggestions about the customers in the middle of interactions.

User Experience

A chatbot’s UX comprises its usability, accessibility, and the pleasure of interacting with it. Enhancing these three aspects constitutes an exceptional user experience. Simply put, the faster the bot is able to understand and execute the user’s request, the better will be the UX.

With the latest advancements in machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies, a conversational AI platform can ensure users have a seamless, natural, human-like conversations with customers and employees, understand their needs better and quicker, and offer maximum support by asking the bare minimum number of questions.

Multi-experience

Conversational AI platforms allow users to experience personalized engagement across multiple channels (social, web, voice, etc.), through multiple devices (mobile, desktop, smart speakers, etc.), and across multiple languages (multilingual functionality).

How Can Acuvate Help?

Acuvate is a Microsoft Gold Partner that helps clients build intelligent chat and voice bots using its enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore. Powered by Microsoft Azure and AI technologies and armed with advanced, future-ready functionalities like Knowledge Graphs, context management, dialog builders, machine learning, and a superior NLP engine, BotCore is used by 150+ customers across industries for a range of customer and employee use cases.

What’s more, you can offer customers the convenience of conversational IVR support with text-to-speech bots and the option to interact in the language of their choice with 90+ languages.

It is a low-code platform that can be deployed both on-cloud and on-premise and provides integrations with 100+ enterprise systems, including Office365, PowerBI, Oracle, SAP, and much more.

To know more about BotCore, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

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6 ways chatbots can help improve customer engagement in CPG & Retail industry https://botcore.ai/blog/chatbots-customer-engagement-cpg-retail/ Wed, 29 Dec 2021 06:25:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=9332 6 ways chatbots can help improve customer engagement in CPG & Retail industry Juniper’s recent study, “Conversational Commerce: Market Outlook, Emerging Opportunities, and Forecasts 2021-2025,” has highlighted that the total spend over conversational commerce channels will reach $290 billion by 2025. Conversational commerce leverages chatbots, messaging, and digital voice assistants to automate retail transactions and […]

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6 ways chatbots can help improve customer engagement in CPG & Retail industry

Juniper’s recent study, “Conversational Commerce: Market Outlook, Emerging Opportunities, and Forecasts 2021-2025,” has highlighted that the total spend over conversational commerce channels will reach $290 billion by 2025.

Conversational commerce leverages chatbots, messaging, and digital voice assistants to automate retail transactions and payments. Chatbots shall process $145 billion of the spend by 2025.

With customers adopting digital channels post-pandemic, customer experience has gained traction and become as significant as the products and services the brand provides. Customers, particularly in the fast-moving world of retail and CPG, not only expect speedy resolutions but also want brands to understand their preferences, interactions, and end-to-end history and remember them at every touchpoint.

In short, retail brands must take a proactive stance to comprehend the potential value of each customer interaction and how it can be leveraged to deliver personalized engagement.

Many organizations in the CPG and retail industry have started adopting AI-enabled chatbots to address these challenges. Chatbots offer a fast and easy way to interact with customers and help retailers streamline processes and earn more revenue.

Let’s explore in detail.

1. Send personalized product recommendations after understanding customer needs

Chatbots can study customer profiles to provide personalized product recommendations and engage smartly with customers by leveraging intelligent machine learning technology.

Moreover, retail brands may design bots to ask a few questions about the customer’s needs and preferences and then display a tailored collection of specific products that they may like. Customers can click through to the brand’s online store and make a purchase.

2. Push notifications about new products

Retail brands must concentrate their marketing efforts on the channels where customers are present and most likely to engage with the company.

They can deploy AI chatbots on popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to push alerts and notifications about new products and services, increase sales,  and ensure customers are constantly engaged with the brand and its offerings.

3. Assist in online shopping

Chatbots can lead customers to the retailer’s online website, help them navigate the portal, suggest complementary/alternate products, and assist with payment and checkout.

Moreover, retail bots can also bring back customers who added products to their cart but left without buying anything. Abandoned cart reminders from a chatbot are beneficial in converting sales. Research shows they have 80% open rates compared to email’s 25% and ten times higher click-through rates.

4. Give personalized tips and advice

Brands can use chatbots to send personalized tips, diagnosis, and advice and help customers select the right products.

Moreover, they can provide additional product information and suggestions on how to use the product.

Mark bot
Mark bot

Unox has been linked to Dutch cuisine for over 80 years. The brand is popular for its smoked sausages, frankfurters, and canned soup.

Through its website chatbot, “Mark,” the brand answers customer queries, addresses their complaints, and provides recipes for delicious Dutch dishes, with options for vegetarian recipes too.

Unox bot
Unox bot

Another brand in the food space that has deployed a chatbot to deliver personalized engagement to website visitors is Conimex.

Conimex brings delicious Asian flavors to the Netherlands. With more than 100 products, including soy sauce, sambal, side dishes, soups, and marinades. The brand’s website bot Connie helps customers answer questions, give suggestions and feedback, and look for recipe inspiration.

wholes food

Whole Foods’s Facebook Messenger chatbot helps customers find recipes based on meal type, ingredients, and dietary restrictions— foods for dinner, gluten-free and vegan recipes, etc. Customers can use emojis or a combination of text and emojis to find new meals.

Moreover, they may also check if their nearest Whole Foods retail store has the required ingredients for a particular recipe.

Ponds Chatbot

POND’s SAL is an interesting example of how chatbots have transformed post-pandemic customer engagement in the retail industry. Customers can access SAL through Unilever’s flagship store on Shopee under “chat.”

After that, a user must upload a selfie, and based on the headshot, the bot identifies key skin concerns in four significant areas— wrinkles, pimples, spots, and uneven skin tone. While the skin analysis takes place, the bot keeps sending beauty tips to keep the user engaged.

Post the skin analysis, SAL recommends suitable products from POND’s according to the user’s skin type.

98% of users cited positive ratings with SAL. 95% of users who have completed the SAL experience on Shopee have enjoyed the personalized shopping experience.

5. Provide customer support

AI chatbots can assist users with their queries, handle grievances, and provide product support.

Chatting with a bot is not only fast and convenient— users can request support at any time of the day and through any platform the brand is on. The chatbot will be available instantly to provide personalized support.

Moreover, retailers can customize their bots to support multiple languages— driving engagement and localizing experiences for global customers. 

6. Boost customer loyalty and advocacy through offers and feedback

Pepsodent bot

Digidentist, Pepsodent’s personalized oral care advisor, helps you with common oral health problems, including tooth pain, sensitivity, tooth decay, etc. The bot is a free online tool to help with oral health concerns quickly and provide personalized healthcare advice endorsed by the IDA.

Moreover, Digidentist collects personal information from website visitors, such as phone numbers and email addresses, to send information about Pepsodent and other Unilever brands’ products, services, and offers.

Chatbots can build customer loyalty by sending freebies, offers, and discount coupons to customers through email and social media.

Moreover, data collected by the bot helps retailers predict customer needs, understand the features they like and the ones they don’t prefer, and design products and marketing campaigns accordingly.

Additionally, retailers can use bots to collect customer feedback, understand their pain points, and help solve these through suitable engagement.

Building loyalty increases customer satisfaction (CSAT) levels and improves the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Meet HelloFresh’s Freddy

HelloFresh sells pre-curated meal kits in the US. The company delivers step-by-step recipes complete with nutritional information and fresh, pre-measured ingredients to help customers whip up delicious meals in no time.

HelloFresh has deployed a customer-facing chatbot called Freddy. Freddy’s primary purpose is to shorten wait times for customers by responding to customer queries. Besides providing customer support, the bot offers recipe suggestions to customers looking for a particular dish, reminds users to pick their weekly meals on time, and provides Spotify playlist recommendations so that customers have something to listen to while cooking their meals.

The bot also comes with built-in “food-themed” quizzes to engage and entertain users. Freddy has been so successful that HelloFresh has recorded a 47% increase in incoming messages and witnessed a staggering reduction in response times by 76%.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help our retail and CPG clients deploy customer-facing chatbots to deliver fast, interactive, and personalized customer engagement with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) technologies.

BotCore boasts of the following capabilities —

  • An intuitive, low-code, visual interface allows the quick implementation of AI chatbots in the fast-paced retail world.
  • Seamless integration with existing legacy systems and AI services
  • Our chatbots simulate highly complex customer conversations.
  • Our bots are deployable on almost all popular enterprise messaging and social media channels and support multiple languages, including English, German, French, Italian, etc.

Moreover, we help clients build and deploy AI chatbots using Microsoft’s low-code bot-building solution called Power Virtual Agents.

To know more about BotCore, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

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23 Experts Share How Chatbots Will Transform Customer Experience in 2022 https://botcore.ai/blog/how-chatbots-will-transform-customer-experience-in-2022/ Wed, 01 Dec 2021 11:03:04 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=9111 23 Experts Share How Chatbots Will Transform Customer Experience in 2022 The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed customer behaviours in an unprecedented way. In order to adapt to the sudden shift towards interacting with customers on digital channels, organizations across the globe have swiftly implemented chatbots to improve customer self-service, provide information, deliver continuous and cost-effective […]

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23 Experts Share How Chatbots Will Transform Customer Experience in 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed customer behaviours in an unprecedented way.

In order to adapt to the sudden shift towards interacting with customers on digital channels, organizations across the globe have swiftly implemented chatbots to improve customer self-service, provide information, deliver continuous and cost-effective support and delight customers with personalized experiences.

With the adoption of customer experience chatbots soaring across industries, we reached out to global CX thought leaders and analysts to get their insights on:

“How chatbots will transform transform customer experience in 2022 and beyond”

Here are their responses:

“What will be interesting to see is the expansion of chatbots into the middle and top levels of the marketing funnel”

Particularly in a B2C environment, Chatbots will increasingly come to integrate into every stage of the marketing and sales funnel in 2022 and beyond.

There is no reason why you should not use a chatbot to execute a purchase or facilitate a transaction at the bottom of the funnel. Similarly, automating follow up customer care interactions is perfectly reasonable.

What will be interesting to see is the expansion of chatbots into the Middle and Top levels of the marketing funnel to assist customers with their questions relating to the consideration and decision-making part of the customer journey.

As natural language processing continues to develop, and interactions with customers become increasingly natural, these personalised interactions are going to become more and more prevalent.

Keith Williams Influencer V2

Keith Williams

Chatbot Consultant, Founder, KMW3

David Truog Influencer

David Truog

VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

“Smart companies will upskill to the new discipline of conversation design”

Chatbots have a bad reputation, and it’s well deserved: most of them disappoint. Why? Forrester’s research finds that companies often treat conversational AI efforts primarily as IT projects, unfortunately, neglecting UX and human-centered design. Fortunately, a new discipline is emerging for creating chatbots that help users instead of frustrating them: conversation design.

In 2022, smart companies will upskill to the new discipline of conversation design, combining proven principles of human-centric design with deep understanding of how people talk and expect a conversation to flow. Those companies’ chatbots won’t disappoint — they’ll start to delight, instead.

“Chatbots are no more the future. They are the present.”

Brands have started reaping the benefits from their chatbots already. The power of chatbots will increase exponentially in the coming months and years, performing many more tasks, answering many more queries for the ease of the user. From spotting the right products to buying and using the product at ease, chatbots will start personalizing responses by understanding preferences, conditions, etc., and recommending the right products and best places to buy .

Rakesh Reddy Influencer

Rakesh Reddy

Chairman and CEO of Acuvate Software

Roman Influencer

Roman V. Yampolskiy

Associate Professor, University of Louisville

“AI will develop beyond chatbots providing a complete social interaction experience”

2022 is basically here, so I don’t anticipate any significant changes from the current situation. Long term, AI will develop beyond chatbots providing a complete social interaction experience, including audio, video and domain intelligence making it possible to fully automate human tech-support and sales jobs. AI will have a detailed profile of each customer and will use that information to customize and target each interaction providing better service, but also exerting unprecedented influence and sales pressure.

“....The technologies that enable (chatbots’ benefits) include sentiment analysis, emotion detection, data-driven question-answering, automatic language translation…”

Chatbots have several benefits that will drive digitally transformed customer experiences. Those benefits include scalability (simultaneously addressing the needs and questions of many customers); 360 view (able to access many different dimensions of customer data for hyper-personalization of the customer experience); security (able to receive, send, and use customer confidential data in a secure conversation, through secure cloud data access); and speed (promptly answering the customer call and delivering just-in-time customer service).

The technologies that enable this include cloud, AI, and multi-modal natural language processing: natural language understanding and generation, sentiment analysis, emotion detection, data-driven question-answering, and automatic language translation. Chatbots are a dream customer engagement and experience solution for organizations of all sizes.

Kirk Borne Influencer

Kirk Borne

Chief Science Officer, DataPrime Inc

Kate Leggett Influencer

Kate Leggett

VP and Principal Analyst for CRM and Customer Service, Forrester Research

“...Make sure they (chatbots) are connected to human-assisted channels to truly transform the customer experience...”

Chatbots have the power to reduce the volume of traditional email, chat or phone traffic; reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction by providing quick answers to questions that are tailored to the customer, or guiding customers through automated processes. Yet customers remain skeptical that chatbots can provide a similar level of engagement as a human agent. Look for ways to continuously improve the experience that chatbots deliver and make sure they are connected to human-assisted channels to truly transform the customer experience in 2022.

“2022 will likely usher in real advances in the convergence of voice and VR with text”

Chatbots need to become more “human”. Even really well designed, smart, AI-driven chatbots can be boring as hell, if they are only text based. And typing on mobile devices isn’t going to get any better any time soon. 2022 will likely usher in real advances in the convergence of voice and VR with text. When customers can have a natural conversation with an assistant with whom they can make ‘eye contact’, chat will really take off.

Barry Dalton Influencer

Barry Dalton

VP of Digital & Analytics Transformation, Genpact

Bernie Borges Influencer

Bernie Borges

Vice President Global Content Marketing, iQor

“While the maturity of the underlying technologies like NLU that makes chatbots function is high, the key goal is to deliver meaningful automation that solves customer problems”

If the predictions are accurate, retail spend on Chatbots is expected to exceed $140 billion by 2024. This investment in AI tech by retail is primarily focused on reducing customer friction, leading to memorable experiences. To deliver that amazing experience requires a level of expertise with Design thinking. While the maturity of the underlying technologies like NLU that makes chatbots function is high, the key goal is to deliver meaningful automation that solves customer problems.

Companies that are successfully delivering world class digital experiences listen to their customers and their customer service agents to find those business processes that could be easily handled by AI while allowing the workforce to have more meaningful engagements with the customers.

“We will witness a noticeable increase in the capacity of chatbots to communicate a ‘personality’...”

In 2022, we will witness a noticeable increase in the capacity of chatbots to communicate a “personality,” enabling the tone and style to match the culture and brand of an organization. The style of luxury hotel chatbots might sound and feel different than ones used by Harley dealerships or funeral homes. Thanks to A.I. and machine learning, chatbots will be able to assume more complex queries thus freeing agents to apply ingenuity and empathy in ways chatbots cannot.

Chip Bell Influencer

Chip Bell

Senior Partner, The Chip Bell Group | Keynote Speaker

Shep Hyken Influencer

Shep Hyken

Customer Service / Experience expert and New York Times bestselling business author

“The (chatbot) technology has a better ability to understand questions asked in many different ways”

Chatbots continue to improve. The technology has a better ability to understand questions asked in many different ways, the ability to overcome the customer’s mistakes in grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and give an overall “human-like” experience. Digital has become a go-to first choice for many customers.

That said, for it to be truly successful, even with the great improvements, there will be times when the customer will need to move from a conversation with a chatbot to one with a human/live agent. At that point, there must be a seamless transition that causes, ideally, no friction for the customer. The company/brand that gets this right will win in a world where customer service is more important than ever.

“(Chatbot) reduces a customer’s resolution time and empowers internal agents to have time to serve in H2H engagement”

Customer behaviours and demand for anytime help has increased rapidly, accelerated further by the pandemic and a need to get things done often at odd times of the day. Many organisations are redressing their contact centre model and with increased inbound volumes need to automate in order to deliver a quality customer experience.

Front ended triage of customers using automated AI chatbots enables an organisation to direct a customer to the right information, guide them through help as required or where needed route them to a direct chat or live agent call efficiently. The chatbot done well reduces a customer’s resolution time and empowers internal agents to have time to serve in H2H engagement those that truly need this help

Ian Moyse

Chief Revenue Officer, OneUp Sales

Heverton Anunciacao Influencer

Heverton Anunciacao

Founder and CRM CX Consultant at University of Customer

“Chatbots...should have more kindness and empathy in their scripts”

In my humble view, chatbots will transform customer experience in 2022 in the following ways:

Chatbots and CRM/CX initiatives of digital transformation should calibrate and put more kindness and empathy in their scripts. It is because I noticed many chatbots around the world became rigid in their dialogs with end users and customers. Remember, around the world, there are customers in different generations and levels of education.

Chatbots should prepare their contingency plan in case like we have in 2021 when Whatsapp was out of service and impacted 3 billion people around the world. Chatbots and their companies should ask themselves: what should I do if my backend applications like Faceboook Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, and so on.. are out of service? how to provide a good and continuing experience to my customer?

“It is critical that organisations do not see chatbots as a replacement for human to human interaction”

In 2022 and beyond, advancing digital technology will undoubtedly continue to play an increasingly important role in the lives of business and consumers. Chatbots are one primary example of this. If used in alignment with the customer journey, chatbots can help to automate simple tasks and activities to enable humans to perform more important, value-added tasks directly with customers. It is critical that organisations do not see chatbots as a replacement for human to human interaction, but as a way to improve the customer experience.

Ian Golding Influencer

Ian Golding

Global Customer Experience Specialist, Customer Experience Consultancy Ltd

Stacy Sherman Influencer

Stacy Sherman

Founder, DoingCXRight®‬

“The (chatbot) solution must provide a ‘low level of effort’..”

Chatbots have become a common solution to enhance customer online experiences and will continue to be a popular tactic in 2022. Chatbots are especially valuable for routine questions that can save customer care reps time and cost per call, while also useful to quickly solve simple customer questions, such as finding a nearby retail address, or hours of operation.

As questions get more complex, chatbots can become a source of customer dissatisfaction if not done right. The solution must provide a “low level of effort” and be easy to reach a human being (unlike when calling a company 800# and getting lost in an IVR system).

It’s no secret that people’s patience is dwindling, so the companies that use technology to enhance and solve their needs fast will win in a competitive marketplace. That means that companies must lean on CX-skilled leaders to ensure best practices are applied, such as communication continuity.

What I mean by this is when a customer asks a series of questions of the bot and is then forwarded to a live rep, the details of the conversation must be transferred simultaneously to avoid the customer having to repeat the same questions again.

In sum, chatbots and similar automated technologies will definitely be part of our future. The uncertain part is whether company leaders will focus on the Customer Experiences (CX) and their needs vs solve for internal requirements and processes–resulting in brand advocates turning into detractors over time.

“We’ll see the use of chatbots expand into areas where they can help the company create more value for their customers”

Until now, chatbots have primarily been deployed where companies can save money. Encouraging customers to shoulder routine tasks like Q&A, tech support, product registrations, and appointment scheduling allows employees to focus on higher-value work. This approach is attractive because it promises a permanent reduction in labor costs.

In 2022, I believe we’ll see the use of chatbots expand into areas where they can help the company create more value for their customers. Imagine you’re scheduling a dentist appointment using a chatbot. It might remind you when your kids are due for check-ups and try to find the most convenient time for all of you, including working around local school holidays.

The more value chatbots create for customers, the more valuable they are to a company’s brand.

Mike Wittenstein Influencer

Mike Wittenstein

Founder & Managing Partner, Storyminers

Jill Raff

CEO & Founder Jill Raff Group, LLC

“No one wants to feel they’re in a digital feedback loop with tech that cannot solve their problem”

Chatbots have become a part of our expected experiences as customers. As we move into 2022 and beyond, AI is progressing at lightning speed. It is crucial that organizations create internal Customer Experience (CX) teams working hand in hand with employee and customer experience experts for an external fresh-eyes perspective to ensure as much of a natural real ‘human conversation’ as possible.

In 2022, customers will demand more, faster, and with more convenience. No one wants to feel they’re in a digital feedback loop with tech that cannot solve their problem. Intelligently programmed chatbots can make ALL the difference in realizing these expectations.

“Thanks to AI, chatbots have, and will increasingly, expedite complex customer queries cost-effectively”

Chatbots offer three key components in customer value – access, information, and efficiency. Thanks to AI, chatbots have, and will increasingly, expedite complex customer queries cost-effectively. These savings ensure companies can hire talented service professionals when customers “opt human.” Chatbots have moved from a less desirable service option to a necessary and invaluable one.

Joseph Michelli Influencer

Joseph Michelli

CEO, The Michelli Experience

Alex Jimenez Influencer

Alex Jimenez

Chief Strategy Officer, Finalytics.ai

“2022 will see an incremental increase in proof-of-concept tests”

The pandemic has increased the demand for automated and self-service. Consumers expect 24×7 service in all kinds of industries. According to Business Insider “Nearly 40% of internet users worldwide prefer interacting with chatbots than virtual agents, and with major industries including retail and healthcare turning to digital technology, chatbots will likely increase in popularity moving forward.”

While for these reasons, I’m bullish on chatbots in the long-term, I don’t expect chatbots to hit their stride by 2022. The main reasons why I think it is too early are:

A customer’s intent often escapes current chatbots. Human language and variations are complex and even with models like OpenAI’s GPT3, basic requests are easily misinterpreted. Consumers trained by human-powered chat functions find that purely AI-powered chatbots lack the conversational intelligence they associate with digital chats.

Chatbots are trained on data that is biased and often impacts the experience of people of cultures that aren’t reflected in the training data. This is more of a challenge with voice bots, as accents continue to be a problem for the Alexas and Siris of the world. Personally, I experience this nearly every day with my Amazon Echo.

2022 will see an incremental increase in proof-of-concept tests, implementations, and demand but it will not yet be the tipping point.

“Predictive analysis won’t replace humans, but serve them better. Chatbots are at the helm of this! ”

We are in the age of hyper-customisation. Serving segments with the highest degree of diversity would remain distant without AI/ML . Predictive analysis won’t replace humans, but serve them better. Chatbots are at the helm of this! Since 2020 digital use has quadrupled . Hence, data collection on every behaviour to predict the future is scaling new heights. In such a competitive world, Customer Experience would be defined by efficient communication,thereby increasing loyalty!

Nabomita Mazumdar Influencer

Nabomita Mazumdar

Founder, Nabomita

Leslie O’flahavan Influencer

Leslie O’Flahavan

Principal & Owner E-WRITE

“If deployed correctly, the convenience and accessibility of chatbots could transform customer experience”

The best chatbots will make great customer experiences better. The worst chatbots will damage customer experience in ways companies cannot recover from. Even simple rule-based chatbots can improve customer experience when they’re built to answer customers’ authentic questions or efficiently guide customers to self-service content.

But many chatbots transform customer experience into customer frustration when they ask for the customer’s patience because they’re “learning,” fail to give the customer an easy exit to a live person, or keep offering information the customer’s indicated they don’t want or need.

If deployed correctly, the convenience and accessibility of chatbots could transform customer experience in 2022 in the most positive ways. It’s more likely, however, that clunky, inadequate chatbots will make customer experience worse.

“use chatbots for simple, transactional interactions to free up agent time that can be focused on more meaningful, emotional experiences”

Chatbots used to help streamline transactional experiences can really make customer journeys easier, quicker and more convenient. But using chatbots to try and cut costs in emotional experiences will cause frustration, resentment and will damage the relationship between customer and company.

So my advice is to use chatbots for simple, transactional interactions to free up agent time that can be focused on more meaningful, emotional experiences.

James Dodkins

CS Ambassador, Pega Systems

Debbie Akwara Influencer

deBBie akwara

Founder & Principal Consultant

“(Chatbots) can help improve (CX) with a focus on response time, personalization and staff utilization”

With a focus on customer service experiences in West Africa, I don’t predict that chatbots will transform CX because it is an enabler. However, it can help improve it with a focus on response time, personalization and staff utilization.

Chatbots do not have the power to transform CX because humans determine the outcome. From CX projects I executed in 2021, it’s clear that companies that have adopted it don’t understand how it works, haven’t optimized it or innovated with it. Chatbots can’t solve CX problems automatically. In my opinion, they are designed to provide technical support that impacts CX.

“Chatbots will increasingly become mainstream”

Chatbots will increasingly become mainstream and part of the customer’s expectation as an option to choose to interact with your brand. The fact that every customer won’t choose this option does not mean that you can ignore it!

Peter Lavers Influencer

Peter Lavers

Director, Customer Attuned

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How are chatbots transforming the oil and gas industry https://botcore.ai/blog/oil-and-gas-chatbots/ Mon, 08 Nov 2021 06:30:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=9016 How are chatbots transforming the oil and gas industry? While oil and gas (O&G) is one of the most valuable commodities, the industry witnessed a severe slump in demand amidst movement restrictions and social and economic challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, with the O&G market on its way to recovery, leading players are […]

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How are chatbots transforming the oil and gas industry?

While oil and gas (O&G) is one of the most valuable commodities, the industry witnessed a severe slump in demand amidst movement restrictions and social and economic challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, with the O&G market on its way to recovery, leading players are looking for methods to increase efficiencies in every aspect of the supply chain, maximize production, and enhance revenue.

Oil and gas companies are exploring new ways to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to automate and digitize processes, increase productivity, and solve complex and straightforward engineering challenges.

According to research by Mordor Intelligence, “The global AI in Oil and Gas market was valued at USD 2,040.89 million in 2019, and it is expected to reach a value of USD 3,349.89 million by 2026 while registering a CAGR of 10.14% year-on-year.”

AI chatbots, in particular, are aiding O&G companies in their relentless pursuit of transforming operations in both upstream and downstream activities.

Let’s explore further.

Chatbot Use Cases in the Oil and Gas Industry

1. Upstream Oil and Gas Production

Upstream oil and gas companies, also known as exploration and production companies, identify deposits, drill wells, and extract raw materials from underground.

AI chatbots help meet the specific needs of upstream oil and gas companies. Some of the use cases include –

A) Provide on-demand support for workers, both on-field and in the office

AI chatbots help workers in the field ask questions, access real-time information, and call for help in case of an emergency, within minutes and without having to stop what they were initially doing.

The chatbot connects to the company’s external and internal sources to quickly fetch information such as lube specifications, average reservoir porosity, details around faults, etc.

Additionally, voice-enabled bots can answer questions and provide status reports to operators as they move from one place to another.

B) Offer real-time solutions to onsite workers

An AI chatbot can receive unstructured inputs from workers currently performing maintenance on the field. It can then analyze these issues and offer real-time solutions, basis an extensive archive of expertise and insight.

C) Ease the learning curve for new hires

AI chatbots maintain an extensive repository of information about processes that can prove valuable for new hires.

Moreover, they can help reduce the time spent on the collection, interpretation, and simulation of data. The bot can leverage the company’s software programs to help workers prioritize infill drilling locations, find optimal well spacing, build type curves, and much more.

D) Prevent potentially costly issues

The oil and gas industry is prone to various upstream issues, such as problems in pipelines and drilling, oil spills, health and safety hazards, etc. For example, a defect in the production line can cause severe damages and result in the loss of millions in revenue.

When used properly, AI chatbots can alert users about events with potentially catastrophic consequences and suggest appropriate solutions.

2. Downstream Oil and Gas Production

Downstream oil and gas production is related to activities post the production of crude oil and natural gas.

Downstream O&G players are closer to the end consumer. With their natural language abilities, AI chatbots can answer customer queries, provide product information, and make tailored product suggestions.

Take the following example.

Shell Lubricants launched the first AI chatbot for B2B customers called LubeChat. LubeChat allows customers to find the best products for their equipment and the closest authorized dealers. Users can also ask questions about physical characteristics and specifications of the lubes and lube testing.

Let’s take another example.

Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd. (BPCL) launched an AI-enabled chatbot, “Urja,” to provide its customers a seamless self-service portal to get their queries resolved. Trained in more than 600 use cases, the chatbot offers services like LPG booking, price and payment status, the delivery status of booked LPG cylinder, and refill history. Moreover, users can update mobile numbers, change LPG distributors, request mechanic services, locate the nearest petrol pump, and seek doorstep delivery of fuel. Urja now speaks in 13 languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Telegu, Gujarati, Marathi, and Urdu.

The above cases are just a few examples of how chatbots play a pivotal role in customer-facing downstream oil and gas business activities.

  • With a faster response time, chatbots can handle hundreds of customer conversations simultaneously.
  • A majority of customer service queries asked are simple, repetitive questions. AI chatbots help deflect queries and are designed to handle surplus demand on customer service agents. This eases the load off their backs and allows them time to focus on tasks that add business value.
  • AI chatbots help create sales opportunities. They can understand customer needs and pitch the perfect products to them. Moreover, RPA integrated chatbots can automate the entire process, from initial conversation to recording customer details in the CRM system and completing the sale.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients in the oil and gas (O&G) industry deploy AI-enabled chatbots with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

BotCore’s minimal coding requirements and graphical design interface allow enterprises to build and deploy chatbots within a few weeks. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, ML, and NLP technologies to build intelligent bots that can cater to both employees and end-users.

Our bots can be deployed on several channels and support multiple languages, including French, German, Italian, English, and many more.

Additionally, we use Microsoft’s low-code, graphical interface bot-building solution Power Virtual Agents (PVA) to help clients build rich, conversational bots quickly – without the need for extensive coding knowledge.

To know more about BotCore and PVA, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

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Improve Your Customer Effort Score with Conversational AI https://botcore.ai/blog/improve-your-customer-effort-score-with-conversational-ai/ Mon, 11 Oct 2021 10:48:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=8860 Improve Your Customer Effort Score with Conversational AI 96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction become more disloyal compared to just 9% who have a low-effort experience. ~ Gartner In recent times, customer-centricity has led to the emergence of a new spectrum in the customer experience (CX) space, “Customer Effort Score (CES).” Simply put, […]

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Improve Your Customer Effort Score with Conversational AI

96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction become more disloyal compared to just 9% who have a low-effort experience.

~ Gartner

In recent times, customer-centricity has led to the emergence of a new spectrum in the customer experience (CX) space, “Customer Effort Score (CES).” Simply put, CES is the amount of effort that a customer puts in to reach a specific level of satisfaction after putting in a query. In other words, it is the ease a customer experiences while getting his queries resolved by a brand.

According to Gartner, “Effort is the strongest driver to customer loyalty.” As put by Andrew Schumacher, Senior Principal, Advisory, Gartner, “Exceeding customer expectations provides, at best, a marginal lift to customer loyalty. Our research finds that to win customer loyalty, customer service and support leaders must focus on consistently meeting customer expectations.”

A recently conducted CCW Digital Consumer Preferences Survey revealed easy and convenient experiences are the #1 way to attract customers. Indeed, by reducing customer effort, brands can deliver high-quality interactions at lower costs.

Post the COVID-19 pandemic, brands have adopted conversational AI to fulfill customer needs and deliver speedy, personalized, and proactive customer engagement.

This blog provides a detailed insight into how organizations can improve their customer effort scores with conversational AI.

Improve your customer effort score (CES) with conversational AI

Before delving deeper into the role conversational AI plays in improving customer effort scores, let’s first understand what conversational AI is.

Conversational AI is a group of advanced technologies like machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) that empowers computers to analyze, process, and respond to human utterances (text/voice inputs) naturally. Experienced through chatbots, voice bots, and virtual assistants, conversational AI offers a flexible, fast, and accurate medium for organizations to interact with customers every day.

In today’s highly digitalized era, customers are opting for self-service channels to research products, make purchases, and most importantly, get their issues resolved. Chatbots and virtual assistants provide instant, round-the-clock support while personalizing interactions to individual customer needs.

Customers desire to get their problems resolved with the least amount of effort. In fact, CCW Digital conducted a robust customer survey that found 62% of respondents are more likely to spend with brands that deliver easy experiences.

Let’s understand how conversational AI helps reduce customer effort and contributes to enhancing CES.

1. Reaching customers where they want with omnichannel chatbots.

Omnichannel chatbots allow customers to easily access support in the channel of their choice – the platform that suits them or through which they have first communicated with the brand.

Moreover, a customer may wish to switch channels in the middle of a support case. For example, a customer communicating with a chatbot may ask for agent assistance or switch to another platform (Facebook Messenger to WhatsApp).

Omnichannel chatbots store customer information, such as purchase history, previous support tickets, and other demographics, by leveraging natural language processing, machine learning, and natural language understanding to deliver personalized engagement.

With a 360-degree view of each customer, such bots can retain the context of the original conversation, coordinate customer interactions across channels, and ensure customers can easily switch channels without the need to repeat information.

2. Automating customer service to provide instant, round-the-clock support

Considering the extensive customer base of enterprises, providing fast customer support can be challenging, and customers might often end up waiting for painstakingly long times.

In certain instances, customers end up looking for support when contact centers are closed for business.

That’s where conversational AI chatbots come into the picture. Bots operate 24×7 and provide timely responses to a host of customer problems, both complex and straightforward, in their native language. Thus, the caseload of contact center agents reduces, improving the Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) and customer effort score in the process.

3. Overcome the limitations of traditional IVR with conversational IVR

IVR continues to have a stronghold in contact center operations and remains the channel of choice for many customers.

However, an improved customer effort score means tackling the challenges related to traditional IVR, like navigating various menus and facing longer wait times before reaching the right agent.

In short, customers expect a speedy, hassle-free resolution of their queries, which involves a shift towards conversational IVR services.

Conversational IVR uses the text-to-speech capability of chatbots to provide interactive, accurate, and personalized human-like voice support.

For example, if a customer wants to book a flight, they can simply call up the support center and say, “Please book a flight to London.” Instead of sifting through the various IVR options, the bot will ask the customer for details, such as the preferred date and time of flight, book the next available flight, or directly route the customer to the concerned booking agent.

Interactive voice support and intelligent routing minimizes waiting time and improves MTTR and first-call resolution rates (FTC).

4. Deliver proactive assistance to improve customer effort score

Instead of reacting to a problem, brands must take the proactive approach and anticipate customer needs to provide them assistance even before they ask for it.

Conversational analytics studies customer utterances, words, and phrases, along with customer sentiment, purchase history, and buying behavior, to understand customer preferences, intentions, and perspectives and deliver tailored interactions based on a customer’s unique disposition and demeanor.

Let’s take a simple example.

Suppose a customer buys a product by interacting with the brand’s chatbot. Now, the brand knows that the product will require installation post-purchase and will see the customer visiting the website or calling the contact center for details.

In such a scenario, the chatbot must proactively take the customer through a step-by-step installation process, saving the customer an extra step and reducing customer effort and calls per event in the process.

Gartner’s Guide to Measuring Customer Effort Score

The Gartner Customer Effort Score (CES) is a customer experience survey metric that enables service organizations to account for the ease of customer interaction and resolution during a request.

CES is measured by asking the customer for feedback and scoring their response on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 representing the highest level of disagreement.

Benefits of improving customer effort score with conversational AI

Here’s looking at a few metrics studied by Gartner that outline the benefits of improving your customer effort score

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the customer’s loyalty and satisfaction and is calculated by how likely the customer would recommend a product, service, or brand. NPS is 65 points higher for top-performing, low-effort companies.
  • A low customer effort interaction costs 37% less than a high-effort interaction by reducing escalations (50%), repeat calls (40%), and channel switching (54%).
  • 94% of customers with low effort interactions tend to repurchase compared with just 4% of those experiencing high effort.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients deploy customer-facing chatbots with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

Our bots help improve customer effort scores with key capabilities, including –

  • An intuitive, low-code, graphical interface that allows the quick implementation of AI chatbots
  • Seamless integration with existing backend and legacy customer support systems.
  • Our chatbots can be designed to simulate highly complex employee conversations.
  • As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) technologies.
  • Our bots are deployable on almost all popular enterprise messaging channels and support multiple languages, including English, German, French, Italian, etc.
  • Users can create/update responses using rich media such as Buttons, Carousel, Images, Videos, etc., in response to evolving customer needs.

To know more about BotCore, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

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Customer Service and Beyond: Harnessing Chatbots to transform the customer experience https://botcore.ai/blog/chatbots-to-transform-customer-experience/ Fri, 17 Sep 2021 06:57:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=8725 Customer Service and Beyond: Harnessing Chatbots to transform the customer experience We are all aware of how organizations are using chatbots to provide exceptional customer service. Statistics say, “By 2023, more than 60% of all customer service engagements will be delivered via digital and web-service channels, up from 23% in 2019. Impressive, right? However, if […]

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Customer Service and Beyond: Harnessing Chatbots to transform the customer experience

We are all aware of how organizations are using chatbots to provide exceptional customer service. Statistics say, “By 2023, more than 60% of all customer service engagements will be delivered via digital and web-service channels, up from 23% in 2019. Impressive, right?

However, if you think that customer service is the only viable use case of chatbots, you may want to re-consider. With the advent and rise of technologies, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotic process automation (RPA), augmented reality (AR), etc., chatbots can be leveraged to lead customers through different stages of the sales funnel.

Research by Tech Republic has found “Teams that use chatbots to automate conversations are 27% more likely to meet rising customer expectations than those that don’t.”

Read the blog to know how chatbots can transform the overall customer experience, beyond just customer service.

Customer Service and Beyond: Harnessing chatbots to transform customer experience

Chatbots can be used to take customers through the entire sales funnel or lifecycle. The customer lifecycle defines the various stages a consumer goes through before, during, and after sales.

They are available 24/7 to help customers with queries, purchases, and product support, anytime and anywhere.

Here’s how chatbots can help create personalized, meaningful, and immersive customer engagement and transform customer experience in each of these phases –

1. Reach

Reach is the first step of the customer lifecycle. Your marketing efforts should be concentrated in places where your customers are to create awareness about your products.

In today’s world, customers demand an omnichannel experience. To generate customer interest around the company’s products and services, organizations can deploy chatbots on channels, such as websites, social media apps, and common messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Such chatbots can be used to push alerts and notifications about new products, answer customer queries around them, collect data about customer preferences through chats and email, and send personalized tips and advice.

2. Customer acquisition

Reaching potential customers isn’t enough. It is crucial to engage them with the right messaging and personalized product recommendations.

Bots can study customer profiles to make informed and targeted suggestions about what to purchase. Moreover, they can provide suggestions on how to use the product for more meaningful engagement, lead customers to the company’s online store, and assist with payment and checkout.

Examples:

Quaker’s Oats Facebook Messenger bot, Otis, guides customers with online shopping, sets reminders for overnight oats, provides consultation for the queries they raise, and offers delicious recipes.

Users may choose from some of the seasonal recipes available, or type in a food emoji for their preferred item.

This helps the bot guage customer preferences and personalize recommendations for recipes, products, and ingredients.

With Otis, Quaker’s customer engagement has increased 13% year-on-year without any other marketing support.

In 2019, skincare brand POND’S launched its Facebook Messenger bot called SAL that leverages augmented reality (AR) to provide immersive customer experiences. When users upload a selfie, the bot delivers personalized skincare recommendations across four significant areas of concern – pimples, wrinkles, uneven skin tone, and spots.

While the analysis is generated, which usually takes about a minute, the bot shares additional skincare tips to retain the user’s interest.

Upon the completion of the diagnosis, users are informed about their skin condition and offered personalized product recommendations by POND’S.

98% users stated a positive engagement with SAL chatbot.

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Shopee Asset

3. Customer retention

To retain customers, organizations must continue to send relevant and meaningful recommendations and messaging to them.

As a customer interacts more and more with the chatbot, data and feedback collected by the bot can help marketers predict customer needs, analyze, measure, and refine engagement strategies, and develop creative marketing campaigns.

Predictive analytics saves costs as organizations spend less time, money, and effort on developing products that the customers won’t prefer.

Using the chatbot, organizations can then proactively inform customers about latest offers, upcoming sales, complementary products, and upsell/cross-sell products to increase revenue.

In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2025, proactive customer engagement interactions will outnumber reactive customer engagement interactions.

Moreover, quick and accurate customer service using chatbots is one of the most basic ways to increase customer retention.

Examples:

Marriott Rewards members can book travel at Marriott International hotels worldwide on Messenger, handle hospitality-related arrangements, such as business meetings, plan their vacation with the digital magazine Marriott Traveler, and chat with the customer support executives in case of queries.

Additionally, the organization leverages the chatbot to upsell to customers their premium suites and services.

4. Customer loyalty and advocacy

Once retained, customers wouldn’t have an issue recommending the products and services of the organization.

Harnessing chatbots to transform customer experience is one of the surest ways to build customer loyalty, get them to spread positive word-of-mouth about your brand, and build your customer base.

Other benefits of customer-facing chatbots

  1. Cost Savings – Customer profiling and analysis using chatbots saves costs as organizations spend less time, money, and effort on developing products that the customers won’t prefer. Moreover, chatbots can handle multiple customer queries at once, 24X7, and at scale, allowing customer service agents to focus on more complex customer needs.
  2. Going local – With multilingual chatbots, organizations can interact with customers in their native tongue. Engaging with customers in their preferred language accelerates localization efforts, allows organizations to understand regional nuances and cultural subtleties, and makes customers feel valued.

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients deploy AI-enabled chatbots with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

With minimalistic coding requirements and a graphical design interface, enterprises can build and deploy chatbots customer-facing chatbots within a few weeks. Our bots leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, ML, and NLP technologies to understand what the customer wants, retain context, learn from past conversations, and provide seamless customer engagement.

Moreover, enterprises can cater to a global customer audience with support for multiple languages like French, German, Italian, English, etc.

To know more about BotCore, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

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