BotCore Archives - BotCore Enterprise Chatbot Fri, 15 Mar 2024 09:41:26 +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 BotCore Archives - BotCore 32 32 How can AI and chatbots improve support agent experience & productivity https://botcore.ai/blog/chatbots-agent-experience-productivity/ Mon, 15 Feb 2021 06:31:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=7448 How can AI and chatbots improve support agent experience & productivity According to a survey, post-covid, 59% of customers will care even more about customer experience than they did in the “before times” when deciding which companies to support or buy from. With the increased expectation for a speedy resolution and more interactive engagement, customer […]

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How can AI and chatbots improve support agent experience & productivity

According to a survey, post-covid, 59% of customers will care even more about customer experience than they did in the “before times” when deciding which companies to support or buy from.

With the increased expectation for a speedy resolution and more interactive engagement, customer service representatives (CSR) alone cannot handle the rapidly evolving needs of customer support. An American Express survey found that 78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction because of a lousy service interaction.

As the pressure to scale up processes and deliver quality customer engagements mounts, contact centers witness higher attrition and agent turnover. Hence, to be truly successful in providing exceptional customer experiences, an organization needs to view agent experience, meaning how efficient, empowered, and effective its agents are, as an integral part of its overall customer support strategy.

To augment agent effort, chatbots and other AI-driven technologies are making their way into contact centers. Let’s discuss how a hybrid, co-existential human and AI model improves support agent experience and productivity.

The Different Ways AI improves Agent Experience and Productivity

1. Cognitive Search

As agents routinely deal with tons of product information, they may have to put customers on hold while they skim through heaps of FAQs, blogs, documents, spreadsheets, and other internal sources of information in search of the right answers.

Moreover, traditional keyword-based searches lack context and often generate less relevant results that are not in sync with what the customer actually wants. This leads to a longer average handle time (AHT), a key performance metric for any support agent.

In such a scenario, AI-powered tools that understand the context and deliver highly meaningful search results come in handy. Such tools lead agents to the most relevant content within the vast array of structured and unstructured data that the organization holds.

Mesh 3.0 – A Modern SharePoint Intranet solution for enterprises, connects all your external and internal apps and offers a unified, AI-enabled cognitive search engine that reduces the time you spend locating the relevant information.

2. Smart AI Advisor

Today’s customers demand instant answers and expect the agent at the other end of the line to provide the best resolutions. However, on encountering a new query, agents may need time to review the customer’s account and evaluate potential solutions.

Advanced AI tools, including chatbots, can look into a customer’s history, including transactions, usage, preferences, and other information, and quickly provide a list of customized resolutions to assist the agents.

So, armed with contextual information and the right recommendations, agents can deliver more focussed, engaging, and meaningful interactions.

3. Reduce agent effort by understanding customer intent

Another critical metric involved in evaluating a support agent’s performance is the number of tickets closed.

Every time a customer emails an agent, even thanking them for their support, the service ticket gets reopened. Consequently, the support agent must manually update and close the ticket, leading to duplication of effort and an adverse impact on his KPIs.

With the help of AI, systems can detect the intent behind customer responses before deciding whether or not to reopen a ticket.

Read More: How Agent Assist Bots Help Improve Customer Service Productivity

4. Act as an AI assistant

Traditionally, customer-facing chatbots and virtual assistants were used for simple FAQs. However, a chatbot’s applications need not be limited to just customer-facing interactions.

Today’s sophisticated agents can handle more complex work – understand where to look for the right information, recommend verbiage that agents can use with customers, and automate routine queries to free up the agent for more complex tasks.

Moreover, bots can assist agents in delivering superior and more efficient customer service –

  • Supporting agents during live calls or chats by providing the needed information and immediate contextual suggestions
  • Connecting to backend knowledge bases and CRM systems and extracting relevant articles and documents to help with the customer’s query
  • Escalating customer interactions to a live agent, when needed, and providing the entire chat history, including sentiment analysis scores and other contextual information, to the CSR
  • Automating time-consuming and tedious tasks, such as recording customer information, post-interaction form filling, surveys, etc.
  • Mining audio calls and textual conversations to capture significant details and insights
  • Act as a chat AI co-pilot by studying customer profile, mining prior conversations with higher CSAT scores, and recommending responses

Read more: How Chatbots Can Boost The Customer Retention Rate

5. Assist in quality control through active listening

For training and quality assurance purposes, call center managers listen in to agent conversations, but they are limited to only one agent at a time. With the advent of text-to-speech technologies and machine learning, AI systems can listen in on thousands of live conversations, understand customer intent and context, and present insights on the agent’s screen in real-time.

Additionally, by conducting sentiment analysis on every customer utterance and agent response, systems can alert managers about conversations that require a handover to or assistance from a supervisor.

Get Started

Businesses are built on the experiences they provide to their customers. And agent experience is fundamental to delivering an excellent customer experience. AI-powered solutions enhance support agent productivity and deliver next-generation, synergistic customer experiences.

The best results occur when AI and humans work shoulder-to-shoulder. By acting as smart virtual assistants for agents, handling mundane tasks, and providing scalable, 24X7 service, AI tools are paving the way for seamless outcomes for both support agents and customers.

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy smart, AI-enabled chatbots with our enterprise no-code, bot-building platform called BotCore.

Functioning as a handy source of on-demand information, providing intuitive and proactive assistance to agents, and handling routine queries, BotCore’s AI bots help improve support agent experience and productivity and reduce agent turnover.

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

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Using AR and chatbots to increase customer engagement https://botcore.ai/blog/augmented-reality-chatbots/ Fri, 05 Feb 2021 07:15:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=7462 Using AR and chatbots to increase customer engagement Customers seek personalization while shopping for products. With most of the purchasing happening online, businesses are turning to advanced technologies to facilitate more interactive and engaging buying experiences for their customers. An upcoming trend is the use of augmented reality (AR) in customer-facing chatbots. Since customers today […]

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Using AR and chatbots to increase customer engagement

Customers seek personalization while shopping for products. With most of the purchasing happening online, businesses are turning to advanced technologies to facilitate more interactive and engaging buying experiences for their customers.

An upcoming trend is the use of augmented reality (AR) in customer-facing chatbots. Since customers today have grown habitual to communicating with chatbots for queries and product purchases, adding AR to the spectrum opens a whole new world of immersive shopping experiences.

Estée Lauder’s Lip Artist chatbot allows you to upload a photo or click a selfie to try on lipstick shades and immediately see the results. Moreover, the bot acts as a personalized beauty consultant – suggests shades based on your skin type, asks questions about your color preferences and the occasions you are planning to wear the lipstick, and makes recommendations or gives surprise suggestions.

Based on what you like, you can click on “Shop Now” to purchase the lipstick from Estée’s website.

The Lip Artist is one among many examples of how AR is increasing customer engagement in customer-facing bots. So, let’s understand what AR is.

What is Augmented Reality (AR)?

As defined by Gartner, Augmented reality is the real-time use of information in the form of text, graphics, audio, and other enhancements integrated with real-world objects.

In other words, augmented reality is a live view of the physical, real-world environment.

Research shows, 10X marketers that employ AR see a 10x increase in engagement time, increasing retention and effectiveness. As such, 7 out of 10 media planners want to use AR to boost advertising and customer engagement.

When combined with chatbots, augmented reality allows brands the unlimited opportunity to interact three-dimensionally with customers and transform the entire customer journey into a personalized, interactive, and immersive experience.

Let’s look at some real-life examples and success stories of companies, which used AR to boost customer engagement in chatbots.

#1 POND’S

Skincare brand POND’S launched an AI-enabled skin-diagnostic chatbot called SAL, available in Indonesia via messaging app, LINE and Argentina, Columbia, UAE, and South Africa via Facebook Messenger.

SAL leverages a combination of advanced AI, AR, and skin diagnostic technologies to help consumers solve skincare problems across four significant areas – uneven skin tone, spots, pimples, and wrinkles.

Recognizing how confusing it can be for customers to pick the right skincare products, SAL provides them a more in-depth insight into their skin type and recommends the most effective products. Customers need to upload a selfie and complete a short quiz on SAL to receive a personalized skin diagnosis and product recommendations within a minute.

#2 Sephora

Beauty brand Sephora’s chatbot for Messenger helps customers make purchasing decisions on their own with its new offering, “Sephora Color Match.”

In partnership with a company that allows consumers to pick out and match colors using augmented reality, Sephora Color Match gives users the facility to hold up their camera to any face or image. Subsequently, the algorithm automatically detects and presents the identified lip color and other matching products from Sephora’s makeup line.

Additionally, customers can hold up their phones to ads and Instagram photos of personalities they admire, and the chatbot will assist them in finding suitable products to recreate the look. However, the feature is not just limited to faces. If users are looking

for matching palettes and products to complement a dress, they may hold up their camera to the outfit to locate the right products.

#3 Madison Reed

Madison Reed, a company that produces hair colors for an at-home hair treatment, talks to its customers via its Facebook Messenger chatbot, Madi. For customers, it’s like having a professional personal hair colorist right at their fingertips.

Customers need to upload a selfie, and using image recognition and hair localization, Madi identifies the primary hair color and secondary hair tones. She then asks questions about the desired outcome and suggests the perfect hair color, which can be purchased at Madison-Reed.com.

#4 IKEA

With IKEA’s Place app, customers can get a dynamic and immersive experience while shopping for furniture, keeping them engaged and convincing them about the utility of the purchase.

A chatbot built into the app assists customers in navigating the technology. The bot helps them point the camera at their surroundings, wherever they want to place the item in their living space. Customers can adjust the piece of furniture according to where they want to put it and test the shape, size, and functionality before purchasing it. In the AR environment created, they can walk around to look at the item from various angles.

Moreover, the bot comes up with suggestions and asks questions to guide the customer during the process.

The benefits of integrating augmented reality and chatbots

1. Unique selling point

A brand leveraging augmented reality in its chatbot stands out from the competition because it offers something no one else does. In such a case, a mere word of mouth is enough to make the brand “the talk of the town” and attract customers.

2. Increase engagement with personalized experiences

By showing customers how a particular product looks on them, augmented reality adds a touch of personalization to the shopping experience. Retailers can showcase their items more effectively, and the client can see the products more clearly and realistically. This leads to customized and immersive shopping experiences for customers and higher engagement rates for companies.

3. Higher revenue

Customers want to make informed purchase decisions. Chatbots that run on artificial intelligence understand customer needs better. Combine it with AR, and the customer has a memorable experience in shuffling through the various suggestions, trying out the different items, and selecting the right products. Since the customer’s decision is informative and smooth, the possibility of return orders declines, leading to increased revenues.

Final Thoughts

As seen above, using augmented reality in chatbots is the way to go for any industry where buyers require visual inspection and a look-test of the product.

The AR-chatbot customer experience model allows users to take a closer look at a new range of shoes, try out a lipstick or eyeshadow, check how a dress looks on them, and get tailored product recommendations before the actual purchase, all of this while sitting in the comfort of their homes.

Such unique and immersive experiences go a long way in generating buzz around the brand and increasing customer engagement.

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

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7 Advanced Chatbot Features To Consider in 2021 https://botcore.ai/blog/chatbot-features-2021/ Fri, 22 Jan 2021 05:23:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=7440 7 Advanced Chatbot Features To Consider in 2021 80% of businesses are expected to have some sort of chatbot automation by 2021. Business Insider The year 2020 has seen an unprecedented rise in the use of chatbots. Amidst the uncertainties caused by the pandemic and changing expectations about how brands should communicate with their customers, […]

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7 Advanced Chatbot Features To Consider in 2021

80% of businesses are expected to have some sort of chatbot automation by 2021.

Business Insider

The year 2020 has seen an unprecedented rise in the use of chatbots. Amidst the uncertainties caused by the pandemic and changing expectations about how brands should communicate with their customers, businesses have quickly adopted AI-powered bots to reduce the burden of their support staff and deliver easy, interactive, and more meaningful engagement to their customers.

No wonder chatbot technology has evolved to incorporate some powerful functionalities that will define the future of customer experience.

Research by Business Insider says, The global chatbot market is anticipated to reach $9.4 billion by 2024.

So, let’s have a look at the seven advanced chatbot features to consider in 2021.

Advanced Chatbot Features to consider in 2021

1. Augmented reality and chatbots

Augmented reality (AR) in chatbots opens a world of immersive, personalized, and engaging shopping experiences for customers.

Gartner defines augmented reality as the real-time use of information in the form of text, graphics, audio, and other enhancements integrated with real-world objects.

POND’S, a popular skincare brand,  launched a skin-diagnostic chatbot called SAL to assist consumers in dealing with common skincare problems across four areas – uneven skin tone, pimples, wrinkles, and spots. The bot leverages AI and AR to get an in-depth insight into the skin type and recommend suitable products. Customers need to simply upload a selfie, fill in a short survey, and the bot delivers a personalized skin diagnosis and product recommendations in less than a minute.

Such unique experiences generate buzz around the brand, boosting customer engagement and driving revenue in the process. Therefore, augmented reality will be a significant chatbot feature to consider in 2021, primarily for industries where buyers prefer a look-test or visual inspection of the product.  

2. Sentiment analysis and emotional intelligence

As the COVID-19 pandemic brought a wave of anxiety, confusion, and uncertainty, organizations recognized the increasing importance of responding to customers with empathy.

Sentiment analysis, therefore, becomes one of the most critical capabilities in a chatbot. Since tone and emotion significantly alter what a customer wants to convey, sentiment analysis allows bots to identify and understand the type and intensity of a customer’s sentiment, including anger, joy, fear, and frustration.

By deciphering words and sentence structures and extracting emotion, the bot can steer conversations, change the tone, or bring in a human agent for support. Hence, emotional intelligence will be a significant feature to look out for in bots in 2021.

3. Text-to-speech and speech-to-text

Another advanced feature that is fast-changing the world of bots is text-to-speech technology. This technology allows brands to develop a voice of their own by enabling bots to speak in a fluid, natural-sounding, human-like voice.

With text-to-speech bots, organizations can provide more engaging, accurate, and quick conversational IVR support.

So, the next time a customer wants to book a hotel room, he/she just needs to call up the contact center and say, “I want to book a hotel room,” instead of going through multiple IVR options. The bot will ask for other details in a human-like voice, book the hotel room or directly route the customer to the next available agent.

Additionally, bots may leverage speech-to-text technology to transcribe audio to text in different languages and variants accurately. In fact, research by Gartner suggests, “by 2023, 25% of customer interactions will be via voice.”

Many organizations have started leveraging Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services to convert text to life-like speech or convert spoken audio to text in more than 100 languages and variants.

4. Agent assistant capabilities

Despite chatbot technology growing at a rapid pace, in some situations, bots aren’t capable of handling customer needs entirely, and the conversation may require an agent handover. A customer may be angry or irritated, the issue may be complicated, or the conversation may involve high-value transactions with a customer at the risk of churning.

A few key chatbot capabilities that will ensure a smooth handover include –

  • Handing over chat transcripts, including details about context and sentiment analysis scores
  • Seamless integration with existing live agent software, including Salesforce, LiveChat, etc.
  • Translating queries for the human agents while routing the communication, in case of multilingual support
  • Agent observation, wherein agents merely monitor bot conversations instead of completely taking charge. In such cases, a bot privately takes agent authorization before recommending the solution to the customer.

5. Human-in-the-loop feedback system

Training, calibrating and explaining AI-enabled systems requires human-in-the-loop architecture.

– Gartner

Chatbots will come with a human-in-the-loop system to continually learn and become more intelligent. Small customer feedback, such as “click here if you are satisfied with the service,” can improve the machine learning algorithms and train the bot.

In addition to customer feedback, agent training plays a crucial role in enhancing bot performance. Contact center agents can classify outliers and exceptions, modify training data, and influence bot behavior.

6. Integration with RPA for end-to-end automation

Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, uses AI and machine learning to perform a variety of repeatable tasks, such as calculations, data entry, handling queries, etc.

RPA-chatbot integration is a powerful combination that can solve significant operational and workflow related issues for organizations. The automation capabilities of RPA combined with the cognitive abilities of chatbots can help enterprises automate processes end-to-end and reduce costs.

An RPA-enabled chatbot can integrate with multiple siloed and legacy back-end enterprise systems. RPA enables bots to retrieve information from such systems and handle more complex requests at scale.

Thereby, chatbots will not only handle queries and find information but also perform transactions on the user’s behalf, going from mere conversation to action.

7. Conversational maturity

Finally, the natural language processing capabilities that empower chatbots to understand the conversation context in multiple languages is an essential feature to consider.

Bots will be able to identify the intent of a query to provide a quick response and proactively seek information, ask clarifying questions, and confirm intent, even if the interaction isn’t linear.

Final Thoughts!

Chatbots have gained traction owing to their ability to provide real-time, on-demand resolutions that consumers are increasingly seeking out.

In light of their growing popularity, organizations must look out for specific features that enhance chatbot capabilities and enable them to deliver engaging, personalized, and more human-like conversations to users. 

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Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code https://botcore.ai/blog/low-code-chatbots/ Fri, 15 Jan 2021 10:33:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=7476 Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code Gartner predicts, Low-code application building would gather more than 65% of all app development functions by the year 2024. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the entire business landscape and compelled businesses to face never-seen-before challenges and develop new workflows. Moreover, an increasing focus on the digitization of the […]

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Why The Future Of Chatbots is Low-Code

Gartner predicts, Low-code application building would gather more than 65% of all app development functions by the year 2024.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the entire business landscape and compelled businesses to face never-seen-before challenges and develop new workflows. Moreover, an increasing focus on the digitization of the industry drove up the demand for text and voice-based bots that automate day-to-day operations and deliver exceptional customer support.

With the IT department dealing with massive resource scarcity and struggling to develop apps for various business problems, enterprises started looking at smart solutions that allow people with little or no coding knowledge to quickly deploy AI-powered bots for a host of business use cases. No wonder many organizations turned to low-code app development platforms (LCAPs).

Low-code platforms are indeed the future of chatbot development. So, what’s a low-code app development platform? A low-code application platform, or an LCAP, is an interactive platform that leverages a visual interface, such as drag-and-drop tooling and pre-configured templates, to empower users to develop and deploy professional-grade bots within days.

Let’s explore further.

Benefits of building chatbots on a low-code platform

1. Infuses agility

The first and foremost advantage of low-code development is the agility that it allows in business operations because a) it’s quicker to build bots with pre-built modules and templates in a visual interface, b) employees, who are experts in their domains, can easily develop and refine their bots without the need to explain their ideas to others (coders). Research has shown low-code platforms can potentially reduce development time by up to 90%.

2. Reduces development costs

Hiring skilled developers proves heavier on the cost side. Low-code solutions require little or no coding knowledge, so professional and citizen developers alike can quickly build and deploy any app, making it economically viable to create intelligent chatbots for different business use cases, including service desk management, IT helpdesk, HR automation, etc.

3. Allows flexible integration

Low-code app development platforms allow integration with various SaaS-based and on-premise enterprise systems, helping organizations get a single-window view of their data.

4. Encourages innovation across functions and levels

Since low-code platforms enable domain/subject-matter experts to collaborate, develop, and customize their bots, they democratize innovation by not restricting it to a core team or group of individuals.

Seven low-code development tools for chatbots

1. Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents (PVA) is a Microsoft software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering in the low-code app development space. Microsoft’s Cloud services host the application; hence PVA significantly reduces the need for a conducive environment to deploy and maintain the bots.

Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services form the SDK to build chatbots using a guided, no-code visual interface, allowing citizen developers to build and deploy chatbots quickly. PVA greatly reduces the need to have the infrastructure to maintain and deploy chatbots as Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Services does all the heavy lifting of providing a conducive environment to host the application.

Read More: Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate – Truly Powerful!

2. Chatfuel

Chatfuel is a leading low-code chatbot development platform for Facebook Messenger. Chatfuel supports many languages and allows integration with several third-party apps.
Chatfuel’s built-in guides and predefined bot templates help create bots for automated customer support and sales and marketing activities easily. An analytics dashboard allows users to monitor and analyze several business and chatbot metrics.

3. FlowXO

FlowXO enables users to build both simple and complex AI bots and connect them to more than 100 different cloud apps. FlowXO provides a visual flow editor, supports multilingual chatbots, and allows integration with popular apps, such as Facebook and Slack. Other features include the ability to send emails and attachments and build chatbot widgets for websites.

4. Botsify

Botsify uses an easy-to-navigate drag-and-drop interface that enables users to build template designs for chatbots. Botsify’s chatbots are used by well-established companies, including Apple and Shazam.

The bots integrate with services, such as WordPress, Alexa, ZenDesk, Google Sheets, etc., and can collate user information, track sales leads, and automate sales chats.

5. BotKit

With a semantic chat interface, BotKit’s chatbots imitate human conversations. The platform boasts interesting features like a visual conversation builder and open source libraries.

Other features include activity monitoring, detailed statistics, and flexible API integrations.

6. TARS

TARS is another low-code bot-building platform that democratizes the process of building chatbots with pre-built templates that are easy to edit and customize.

Other exciting features of the platform include – integration with Zapier, file and image upload, custom branding, API integration, and the option to export data to Excel/CSV.

7. BotCore

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

Fully deployable on Microsoft Cloud, BotCore’s graphical interface with drag-and-drop functionality, pre-built templates, and an integrated Knowledge Graph consisting of multi-functional nodes enable professional and citizen developers alike to create and deploy chatbots in a matter of days.

Some of the powerful features of BotCore include –

  • BotCore leverages Message Definition Language (MDL) to define bot responses
  • Technologies like natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and machine learning enable our bots to understand the context, learn from past conversations, and respond to users in a human-like manner.
  • Seamless agent handover capability allows bots to handle simple requests while escalating the more complex ones to human agents when needed.
  • BotCore will enable clients to build multilingual bots that can be deployed across various channels, giving users a seamless omnichannel experience.
  • Our bots can aggregate the best of Microsoft technologies, including LUIS bots, Power Virtual Agents, QnA Maker bots, and other third-party bot applications.

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

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Top 6 Customer Experience Trends For 2021 https://botcore.ai/blog/customer-experience-trends-for-2021/ Fri, 18 Dec 2020 10:12:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=7109 Top 6 Customer Experience Trends For 2021 2020 has changed Customer Experience (CX) in an unprecedented way for both customers and brands. The previous “nice to have” experience improvements became “must to have” to ensure customers stay engaged. As the world changed dramatically overnight, customer service and experience leaders had to figure out how to […]

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Top 6 Customer Experience Trends For 2021

2020 has changed Customer Experience (CX) in an unprecedented way for both customers and brands. The previous “nice to have” experience improvements became “must to have” to ensure customers stay engaged. As the world changed dramatically overnight, customer service and experience leaders had to figure out how to shift to new operating models to serve customers.

Companies once used to differentiate themselves by their product, service or efficiency. Today, however, being distinct and competitive lies in creating a seamless customer experience across all platforms. Business leaders recognize the competitive edge gained by ensuring superior customer experience and the perseverance required to achieve such standards.

Reports show that post-COVID, for 59% of consumers, a brand’s customer experience is a key deciding factor while making a purchase. Only 38% felt the same pre-COVID.

In a nutshell, customer experience directly influences purchasing decisions and a brand’s revenue in 2021. With that in mind, here are some trends to consider, to deliver powerful customer experiences in 2021.

6 Major Customer Experience Trends For 2021

1. Showing empathy: Building Relationships over transactions

The pandemic has disrupted the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and compelled everyone towards social isolation. Customers are seeking empathy and care from brand interactions and evaluating businesses on a human scale. Salesforce research shows that  71% of consumers cite companies who show sensitivity to the current climate are more likely to earn their loyalty.

This means throughout the pandemic and 2021, organizations need to think beyond just solving customer issues but also consider providing emotional support. Contact center agents need to be provided with fresh guidelines on handling sensitive customer issues and showing empathy.

This also means that customer service leaders should focus more on metrics like CSAT and NPS instead of just AHT.

In addition, customer service chatbots need to be trained with sentiment analysis capabilities. This enables bots to understand customer sentiments and moods and deliver the appropriate response.

2. Providing personalized diagnosis and recommendations

In 2021 and beyond, brands will be focusing more on providing personalized customer diagnosis and recommendations to improve the overall customer experience. Consider Ponds’ (a Unilever brand) AI Skin Advisor chatbot. Considering the skin problems people face amid COVID-19 due to prolonged mask wearing and continued all-day exposure to screens, Ponds deployed a chatbot on Shopee, an e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia.

Ponds Chat Snap Buy

Based on an individual’s headshot photo, the bot identifies key skin concerns like wrinkles or acne etc and recommends the right skincare product. The bot received appreciation from over 98% of customers who interacted with it.

This type of personalized recommendations and engagement goes a long way in improving the overall customer experience.

3. Providing Quick Information

Throughout the pandemic, we have seen a huge influx in customer requests. But a majority of these requests and queries are basic and simple in nature and take a lot of time to answer. Customers who need minor information like “What’s the status of my flight” or “What are the new operating timings of the nearby retail store” or “Does my insurance policy cover COVID-19 costs” etc. are made to wait in long queues before getting their questions answered.

This not only frustrates customers and affects brand loyalty but also decreases the agent productivity. In 2020, we have seen many companies deploy FAQ chatbots to address this issue and this trend is likely to continue in 2021. Chatbots are available 24*7, handle numerous requests at a time, provide instant answers and can be deployed in multiple channels seamlessly.

4. Capturing Customer Feedback and Suggestions

Now more than ever, businesses are looking to increase agility in their operations, product development processes and business models. As a result, customer feedback becomes an invaluable guiding source to make quick adjustments, improve product quality and adapt to changing conditions. While there are many ways to capture customer feedback, companies are now leveraging customer service chatbots. Chatbots can go beyond the usual 1-5 rating and ask the customer to send the specificities of the feedback. With a chatbot, customers can also upload media like photos and videos to provide suggestions in detail.

Based on the feedback, chatbots can also be trained to take follow-up actions. For example, if a customer expresses dissatisfaction for delayed order delivery, the chatbot can apologize to the customer and offer a discount coupon or cashback.

5. Proactive updates on new products and offers

Keeping customers proactively informed and engaged is a crucial part of improving customer experience in 2021 and beyond. Brands should anticipate the needs of customers in advance and deliver the relevant information and solutions without being prompted. This can include notifying customers about new products, latest offers, status of their ticket/order, potential errors and glitches, providing tailored advice, and offering personalized solutions, recommendations etc.

A report by Enkata shows that proactive customer service reduces call volumes by 30% and increases customer retention by 3-5%.

For instance, consider the example of a shopping chatbot deployed by a retail or CPG company. When a customer interacts with the chatbot and shows interest in making a product purchase, the chatbot can send a notification about a potential sale or offer about a similar product.

 

6. Providing Product Usage Help

Another important customer experience trend in 2021, is helping customers understand the different ways they use a product or service. For instance, Knorr, a global CPG company and manufacturer of dehydrated soup and meal mixes, recently deployed a chatbot that provides different soup recipes, tips and tricks for preparation, and personalized ingredient recommendations.

Such customer experience initiatives help companies not only improve the customer engagement and satisfaction but also drive sales and revenue. 

Need further insights?

If you’d like to learn more about the top customer experience trends to watch for in 2021, please feel free to get in touch with one of our customer experience experts for a personalized consultation. You might also be interested in exploring our chatbot builder platform (BotCore) and learn how it helps you build low-code customer service chatbots within a few weeks.

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Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service https://botcore.ai/blog/voice-bot-contact-center-customer-service/ Thu, 05 Nov 2020 11:31:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=7162 Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service 2020 is the year of customer service transformation. The unique challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic caused a wave of uncertainty and panic among consumers. Customers’ natural tendency to prefer voice call support over other self-service channels in times of crisis led to unprecedented […]

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Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service

2020 is the year of customer service transformation. The unique challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic caused a wave of uncertainty and panic among consumers.

Customers’ natural tendency to prefer voice call support over other self-service channels in times of crisis led to unprecedented call volumes and put tremendous pressure on traditional IVR systems, support agents, and their ability to respond and address all queries. This led to longer than usual wait-times, with calls dropping automatically after a few minutes, thus increasing customers’ frustration levels. Moreover, most customers were unwilling to go through extensive IVR menus and frequent agent transfers or repeatedly ask the same query to get the right support.

Additionally, voice-based channels are not only difficult to scale but are costly too, as traditional voice interaction, on average, costs $15 per exchange. Yet, voice as a medium to provide customer support isn’t going anywhere but is undergoing a massive change with the emergence of AI-powered voice bots.

In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2023, 25% of customer interactions will be via voice.

So, let’s explore what voice bots are and why they are the future of contact center customer service.

What are voice bots?

A voice bot is a computer program that understands spoken natural language and uses synthesised voice to converse with people. AI-powered speech recognition technology enables voice bots to recognize users’ spoken queries and respond to inquiries using text or voice.

In other words, voice bots are computers that can speak with people.

These bots are a scalable way to provide engaging, personalized, and interactive human-like support and ensure speedy resolution for your customers. Moreover, they ease the burden of human agents, allowing them to focus on more productive, higher-value work and pressing customer issues.

For example, you want to book a flight. Now, instead of going through the myriad of traditional IVR options, simply call up the contact center and say, “I want to book a flight to New York.” The bot will ask you for other details, including the date of the journey, preferred departure time, and book for you the flight of your choice, or directly route you to the right agent, saving you the long and tiresome drill of a legacy IVR system.

Hence, voice bots shall pave the way for interactive and wholesome conversational IVR in the contact centers.

Essential capabilities of a voice bot

Here, we list down the core capabilities that a voice bot should have to deliver better conversational experiences.

1. Understand the ‘intent’

Voice bots leverage natural language processing (NLP) to comprehend the semantics of the human language, including grammar, synonyms, canonical word forms, and slang.

Customers aren’t always literal in what they utter. NLP helps extract the intent behind user utterance and helps voice bots understand the meaning behind the words. For example, when a customer says phrases like “sure” or “why not,” the bot must be able to understand that they are most probably saying “yes.”

Hence, intent analysis is one of the most significant capabilities of a voice bot.

2. Allow a barge-in

The ability to pause, listen, and speak accordingly, whenever a customer interrupts an ongoing interaction saying, “Sorry, but that’s not what I’m looking for” or “no, I am not interested in this product,” is one of the best features of a smart AI-enabled voice bot.

3. Streaming recognition

Speedy and efficient resolution is essential for every business. Therefore, a bot must be able to interpret and act at the same pace at which the customer speaks. Slow responses and lags may hamper the reputation of a business.

4. Personalization

When a customer calls a business, they are looking for a fast response. For instance, after reaching a contact center, if customers need to identify themselves through details like account number, id, address, etc., it can really add to their frustration levels.

Therefore, optimal integration with the support desk database is vital for the bot to greet the caller by name, know caller history, identify the likely reason for the call based on past interactions and customer persona, and tailor suggestions based on the customer knowledge.

5. Handover to a live agent

At any point during the conversation, if the bot is unable to answer the user issue or if the customer asks for an agent handover, the bot must be capable of transferring the call to the right human agent or subject matter expert.

6. Keep Learning

An AI-powered voice bot must never stop learning. It should leverage its machine learning capabilities to improve accuracy and continuously learn from past interactions.

Advantages of voice bots

With voice bots, you can reap the following benefits –

1. Provide fast resolution to customers

Research by Harvard Business Review has concluded Customers who have a complaint handled in less than five minutes go on to spend more on future purchases.

Therefore, a customer complaint handled quickly can turn into a potential opportunity for earning more profit. Traditional IVRs force customers to go through multiple options and menus, wait for the next available agent, or try again during regular business hours.  However, voice bots offer instant resolution with 24X7 support, even scheduling agent call-backs if needed.

2. Scale up your voice operations and reduce costs

A single voice bot can engage with thousands of customers at the same time and provide personalized support to each user. Moreover, by offloading mundane, repetitive tasks from human agents, contact centers can manage many more support issues than otherwise possible and dramatically reduce costs.

3. Reduce transaction times

When it comes to speed, voice is any day faster and more customer-friendly than typing. Moreover, specific tasks, such as purchases, bookings, and cancellations, can be performed more quickly by bots than humans, hence reducing the overall transaction times.

4. Humanize support staff

Repetitive tasks, the mundane nature of everyday operations, and the pressure to close as many tickets as possible often sap the humanity out of support center agents. With bots taking over most of the repetitive tasks and easing the workload of contact center staff, your support staff can take out the time to deliver human connection whenever needed.

5. Create sales opportunities

Voice bots continuously learn from past interactions and are equipped with natural language understanding (NLU) and synthesis; they can deduce what the customer really means and deliver more contextual, meaningful, and human-like conversations and provide personalized product recommendations. Such interactive voice engagements create opportunities for new sales.

Voice bots - The future of contact center customer service

Voice bots are indeed the future of contact center customer engagement. They lead to an enormous reduction in cost by taking over the resolution of common and repetitive queries at scale.

Moreover, they make personalized recommendations based on the customers’ preferences and previous purchases and enhance revenue through cross-selling and upselling.

The speed, accuracy, and 24X7 availability of voice bots improve first call resolution rates and positively impact customer experience.

At Acuvate, we help clients develop a voice of their own with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore, supporting them in delivering exceptional customer support by converting text to lifelike speech using Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services.

If you’d like to learn more about the top customer experience trends to watch for in 2021, please feel free to get in touch with one of our customer experience experts for a personalized consultation.

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How Chatbots Can Boost The Customer Retention Rate https://botcore.ai/blog/chatbots-for-customer-retention/ Tue, 27 Oct 2020 10:19:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=7137 How Chatbots Can Boost The Customer Retention Rate As the world worked together to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 became the year when businesses were concerned with retaining customer loyalty, even if it meant taking a temporary hit to the bottom line. By putting customer-oriented policies in place, including flexible refunds, pricing, and change policies, […]

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How Chatbots Can Boost The Customer Retention Rate

As the world worked together to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 became the year when businesses were concerned with retaining customer loyalty, even if it meant taking a temporary hit to the bottom line. By putting customer-oriented policies in place, including flexible refunds, pricing, and change policies, and providing 24X7 service, organizations helped customers sail through the crisis.

As uncertainty loomed, contact centers became a significant touchpoint for anxious customers seeking answers, information, comfort, and support. AI-enabled customer service chatbots gained widespread adoption. Businesses leveraged chatbots to reduce wait-times and provide consistent support and quick information at scale and lower costs.

However, in 2021, as recovery and bottom line become extremely critical, businesses will now focus on leveraging chatbots to build customer loyalty, drive retention, and improve revenues.

Capabilities like omnichannel engagement, conversational IVR and sentiment analysis will become essential in delivering exceptional customer experiences and retaining brand loyalty.

In fact, a study by Harvard Business Review has concluded

increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

So, let’s explore how chatbots can boost customer retention rate in 2021.

Beyond Customer Service and Support: Developing a winning customer retention strategy with chatbots

While cost reduction and automation of inbound customer service requests are the main goals of deploying chatbots, a shift in focus to other use cases, including a decrease in customer churn and increased conversion rates, has gained traction.

1. Omnichannel customer engagement

Businesses today are leveraging multiple channels to reach out to their customers. In line with the increased usage of messaging apps and social media platforms, chatbots can now integrate with channels, like Facebook, WhatsApp, email, websites, mobile apps, voice assistants like Alexa, and Cortana etc., to assist customers in locating products and finding answers to their queries.

Omnichannel bots help businesses reach where their customers are. Using technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU), omnichannel bots understand and retain context and provide holistic, consistent, and meaningful support to customers across a host of channels.

Such wholesome customer experiences help reduce churn and boost retention.

2. Personalized engagement and recommendations

Chatbots collect data during their interactions with customers and analyze such information to craft buyer personas and identify customers who are on the verge of ending their relationship with your business.

Such data is critical in understanding needs, retaining customers, and increasing revenue. 

  • For customers who are on the risk of leaving, chatbots can push special offers via different channels to re-engage them back with the brand
  • Chatbots can also be used to recommend other products to your existing customers, based on their interests and past purchasing behaviours, to increase retention and enhance revenue. For example, Consider Ponds’ (a Unilever brand) AI Skin Advisor chatbot, on Shopee, an e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia.
Ponds Chat Snap Buy

Based on the customer’s headshot photo, the bot identifies key skin concerns like wrinkles or acne etc and recommends the right skincare product. The bot received appreciation from over 98% of customers who interacted with it. This type of personalized recommendations and engagement goes a long way in improving the overall customer experience and retention.

  • Chatbots can be trained to ask customers for referrals and reward most loyal customers with discounts and coupons

3. Making purchases easier

By using chatbots, businesses can provide the purchasing facility directly from the chat interface. Your bots can recommend products, lead customers to your online store, and make payments easier.

When there is simplicity in carrying out purchases, your existing customers will keep coming back to your business, and you may also convert potential leads.

Chatbots make the buying process more seamless and engaging by educating customers on product features, comparisons, how-to videos etc.

4. Going local with multilingual bots

Customers prefer to interact with chatbots in their native tongue. Moreover, they trust brands that offer support in their native language more than the ones that don’t.

By deploying a multilingual chatbot which can interact with users in their preferred language, you can accelerate your localization efforts by understanding regional nuances and cultural subtleties, make your customers feel valued and understood, and allow issues to be resolved in the shortest time interval. Therefore, multilingual bots play a significant role in acquiring and retaining customers.

5. Asking customers for feedback

Every time a customer completes an online interaction, the chatbot can ask for short feedback, like, “Are you happy with our services?” or “What are the areas we should work on?” with multiple options for each question.

If customers don’t feel satisfied, the bot can ask them the reason. Data collected from such feedback can help improve customer service and go a long way in increasing customer retention.

6. Respond to customer queries 24x7

One of the most basic ways for businesses to increase customer retention is to swiftly respond to customer queries. A chatbot can provide quick and accurate answers to customer queries in real-time, within seconds of being contacted.

According to a report by Hubspot, 90% of customers cite instant response as a critical factor when it comes to customer service.

With chatbots, your organization is assured of round-the-clock customer service, thus supporting customers at their convenience, even outside business hours.

Get Started

According to research, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 3x to 35x higher.

By providing the following benefits, chatbots help boost your customer retention rate –

  • Giving quick and relevant answers to customer queries
  • Enhancing customer reach through omnichannel engagement
  • Improving CSAT levels with highly interactive and personalized conversations
  • Boosting the ability to recapture lost customers with customized messages and tailored offers
  • Providing personalized diagnosis and recommendations
  • Delivering localized experiences with multilingual capabilities
  • Collecting customer feedback to ensure better support in the future

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy AI-enabled chatbots with our enterprise chatbot building platform, BotCore.

BotCore’s core capabilities include –

  • Minimum coding requirements, graphical nodes, visual templates, and pre-built connectors empower you to quickly build and deploy chatbots across different channels with a single configuration.
  • BotCore’s chatbots support multiple languages, like French, German, Italian, etc., so you can reach and engage a broader consumer base.
  • Through automatic handling of API requirements, BotCore’s chatbots can easily connect to various channels, such as Facebook, SMS, email, WhatsApp, etc.
  • BotCore’s machine learning (ML) capabilities allow chatbots to learn from past interactions and retain context to provide more interactive and meaningful engagements.

If you’d like to learn more about the top customer experience trends to watch for in 2021, please feel free to get in touch with one of our customer experience experts for a personalized consultation.

The post How Chatbots Can Boost The Customer Retention Rate appeared first on BotCore.

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Transforming Omnichannel Customer Service With Chatbots https://botcore.ai/blog/omnichannel-customer-service-chatbots/ Mon, 19 Oct 2020 09:31:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=7129 Transforming omnichannel customer service with chatbots With the onset of COVID-19, consumer buying worldwide shifted to digital platforms. Digital platforms are increasingly being used to interact with brands, view products, get information, check prices, and make purchases. Moreover, with the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, they expected a super quick and highly efficient customer service to […]

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Transforming omnichannel customer service with chatbots

With the onset of COVID-19, consumer buying worldwide shifted to digital platforms. Digital platforms are increasingly being used to interact with brands, view products, get information, check prices, and make purchases. Moreover, with the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, they expected a super quick and highly efficient customer service to resolve their queries. They no longer tolerated traditional service approaches like frustrating IVRs, frequent agent transfers, or having to repeat their questions again and again to get the support they required.

Today’s customers desire convenient services through a variety of channels. For example, they may check a product’s features on Facebook, send an email to request more information, make purchases through a website, and seek technical assistance through IVR.

Therefore, an omnichannel customer strategy that integrates all communication channels has become the foremost priority for organizations. It is not only crucial for companies to be present on a particular channel; rather, it is also imperative to adapt to the unique formatting of each customer touchpoint and coordinate communication across channels to create a personalized and holistic brand experience.

A study by the Aberdeen Group revealed that organizations with a sustained omnichannel engagement strategy retain an average of 89% of their customers. In comparison, those without one retain an average of 33% only. Moreover, companies with omnichannel strategies experience 23 times higher rates of customer satisfaction.

An effective way to deliver fast yet personalized omnichannel experiences is through AI chatbots. So, let’s find out how organizations are transforming omnichannel customer service with chatbots.

Omnichannel Chatbots: Build Once, Deploy Anywhere

Customers expect their demands and needs to be met, even when they use different channels to communicate, and that’s where omnichannel chatbots come into the picture.

An omnichannel chatbot needs to be built just once and can then be deployed across multiple channels, including email, customer-facing websites, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, mobile apps, and even voice assistants, such as Alexa and Google Home, and works seamlessly across all channels.

Enterprises today are using low-code chatbot builder platforms to build and deploy omnichannel chatbots. This means business teams can implement chatbots within a matter of a few weeks and little reliance on IT teams.

Omnichannel chatbots leverage technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU) to comprehend customer queries, learn from past interactions, and store information from each user in a centralized database.

Once the data is collected, the bots access this information in real-time to deliver personalized conversational experiences to customers. Since bots retain the context of the original conversation, customers can easily switch from one channel to the next without the need to start over.

Omnichannel bots make customer interactions smoother and more consistent by –

  • Functioning seamlessly across virtually all channels in the digital landscape
  • Engaging in personalized conversations by understanding each customer’s individual needs and situation
  • Accessing real-time data and ensuring information consistency across all channels
  • Solving simple to more complex queries
  • Adjusting to new information and customer preferences over time
  • Escalating queries to human agents when needed.

Benefits of omnichannel chatbots

1. Improved customer satisfaction

Omnichannel chatbots help organizations increase CSAT levels in more ways than one. Keeping up with the increased use of messaging applications and social media platforms, bots can now be integrated with channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, etc. Bots can then assist customers in locating the products that suit their needs, answer questions regarding payment, delivery status, etc., carry out simple transactions on the customer’s behalf, or solve other queries. Or they may transfer the request to a human agent or schedule an agent call-back if needed.

Moreover, bots can handle multiple requests at once to provide customer support at scale, 24X7, and at lower costs.

In addition to delivering passive customer interaction, wherein bots only engage with customers when contacted, organizations can stay a step ahead by proactively reaching out to customers regarding new products or issues they might be facing and improve brand perception in the long run.

2. Fast response

An omnichannel bot can provide an immediate response, within seconds, on any channel it is deployed. According to an Inside sales research, there is a 10x reduction in the odds of retaining a customer, even if you wait 5 mins after the lead makes contact. Given these stats, it becomes prudent for all organizations to provide swift and accurate responses to customers, both current and potential.

By leveraging its machine learning capabilities and drawing insights from already stored data, an omnichannel bot can provide quick, personalized, and consistent answers to customer queries in real-time.

3. Increased revenue

If customers receive exceptional service, they remain satisfied and loyal to your brand and buy more. According to a Harvard Business Review report, a 5% increase in customer retention amounts to an increase of up to 95% in the company’s annual earnings.

The wholesome, interactive, and engaging experience offered by omnichannel chatbots can thus accelerate business growth.

4. Data collection

Omnichannel bots collect customer information from various channels and store all of the data in a centralized database. Such data provides insights into customer buying behavior, past interactions, requirements, etc., allowing companies to plan more focussed and strategic marketing and sales initiatives.

Go Omnichannel Today!

Consumer behavior is evolving, and establishing new ways to connect with them has become more critical than before.

By adopting an omnichannel strategy with the help of chatbots, companies empower customers to engage with them on the channel of their choice and create more meaningful, effortless, and successful user experiences. Establishing consistent support across all channels leads to enhanced customer satisfaction, higher brand loyalty, and greater revenue.

On top of that, the data you collect can help you establish more targeted and improved outreach and sales practices.

At Acuvate, we help clients build and deploy omnichannel bots with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore. BotCore’s core capabilities and features include –

  • With minimum coding requirements and pre-built connectors, it is easy to deploy chatbots, and also differentiate responses across channels by using channel-specific interface elements. A single configuration is enough for deployment across multiple channels.
  • BotCore’s chatbots support multiple languages, like French, German, Italian, etc. so you can reach and engage a wider consumer base.
  • Through automatic handling of API requirements, BotCore’s chatbots can connect to various channels, such as Facebook, SMS, email, etc. You need to simply click on the required checkboxes, and the deployment is done.
  • BotCore’s machine learning (ML) capabilities help chatbots retain the context of the conversation, allowing users to switch channels without the need to begin the conversation from scratch.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our enterprise chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation. You may also be interested in exploring our chatbot builder platform (BotCore).

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How Chatbots And Human Agents Together Will Transform Contact Centers https://botcore.ai/blog/contact-center-chatbots/ Tue, 13 Oct 2020 08:55:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=6995 How Chatbots And Human Agents Together Will Transform Contact Centers As chatbots are gaining traction, their various benefits for customer service are being extolled by business leaders across the globe.  However, we are still not at a point wherein human intervention in customer service processes can be completely eliminated. In such a scenario, how can […]

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How Chatbots And Human Agents Together Will Transform Contact Centers

As chatbots are gaining traction, their various benefits for customer service are being extolled by business leaders across the globe.  However, we are still not at a point wherein human intervention in customer service processes can be completely eliminated. In such a scenario, how can chatbots be used to seamlessly work with human agents to streamline and transform customer contact centers?

The Role Of Chatbots In Customer Service

Good customer service is such an important aspect for the success of business today that companies often go to great lengths to establish the most efficient and effective customer contact centers. While contact centers were traditionally driven by human agents trained to effectively handle customer queries and grievances, automation and AI technologies are also making their way to the table. For most companies with a focus on automating and streamlining a part of the customer service process, chatbots are already on the radar.

Chatbots are essentially conversational AI softwares that use Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to understand the ‘intent’ behind a question and respond back with the most appropriate answer. According to Gartner Inc, 25 percent of customer service and support operations will integrate virtual customer assistants (VCA) or chatbot technology across all engagement channels by the year 2020. This number has gone up drastically from less than 2 percent in 2017.

Before discussing how a co-existential model of humans and chatbots can be leveraged in a contact center, it’s important to understand the different capabilities and benefits of a chatbot.

The Benefits Of Using Chatbots In Contact Centers

Chatbots today can simulate human-like conversation and resolve simple and many complex customer issues. Especially chatbots can easily take over handling simple tasks such as sending an instant response to a customer eg: ‘Okay, we will look into it.’, or answering Frequently Answered Questions (FAQ),  from human agents. This greatly improves agent productivity as usually most customer service questions are low-level and repetitive.

Responding immediately is a very important determinant for customer satisfaction. In this regard, chatbots help companies garner satisfaction and trust from their customers.

Another benefit of using chatbots is that they can be used to handle customer care at odd hours of the night. Unlike for humans, time is not a parameter applicable to chatbots.

If you were to look at the benefits of using chatbots in contact centers, the most important factor is the reduction in cost. In fact, CNBC reports that chatbots are expected to cut down business costs by as much as $8 billion by the year 2022. Some of the economical benefits of adopting chatbots for customer service are:

  • Reduced Labour Costs – Organizations that have integrated chatbots as a first line of service in their customer service team have seen a considerable reduction in labour costs. While a human chat agent can effectively chat with about three customers at once, efficient chatbots can handle an unlimited number of interactions simultaneously. This means that a chatbot could be employed to handle as many customer concerns as possible, transferring the service process to a human agent only in case of very complex queries.
  • 24/7 Presence – Customers today are extremely demanding due to which it is a good idea for companies to have round-the-clock customer care. Because let’s face it, customers pay for more than just the product. They pay for good service too. But in order to employ human agents for 24/7 service, the cost required is huge. So what can a company do to provide good customer service WHILE cutting down on costs? Use a chatbot. Using chatbots to handle after-hour queries with an option to escalate to a human agent only when required, is practical. This way, customers trying to establish contact do not feel deprived either. The company too is happy as no additional resources need to be hired.

    And the greatest thing about chatbots is that unlike humans they don’t charge by the hour. Whether you have implemented a chatbot for 9 hours in a day or 24, it costs the same.

  • Lower Training Costs – Customer care agents need constant training in order to keep them updated with ever-evolving products and processes. Additionally, every new hire also needs to be thoroughly trained. But the cost of training these resources can quickly add up and get out of hand. Chatbots on the other hand are capable of constant learning. Even in case of newer data, an update can be made to the centralized chatbot builder platform and revision cascades to the overall chatbot operation. They also pick up on customer behaviour patterns to deduce what the best response to specific questions might be.

According to Gene Alvarez, Managing Vice President at Gartner, more than half of the global organizations have already invested in automated solutions such as chatbots for customer care, as they realize the advantages of automated self-service. Gartner research also reports that organizations report a reduction of up to 70 percent in call, chat and/or email inquiries after implementing an automated solution such as a chatbot. According to the Aspect Consumer Experience Index, 70 percent of millennials report positive experiences with chatbots, and many prefer chatbots for the convenience and immediate gratification. Along with increased customer satisfaction, a 33 percent saving per voice engagement has also been noted.

 

When Is Agent Intervention Needed?

While chatbots can seamlessly handle simple queries and to an extent complex queries as well, there many arise situations where the issue can be resolved only by agents.

This is where human intervention becomes essential.

Imagine a scenario where a customer is in distress and needs immediate help with something. While a human agent can understand their emotion and urgency, a chatbot cannot.

Another scenario could be during a new product/service launch. Let’s say your company has launched a new product/service. There’ll be a spike in help requests from customers who’re still trying to figure it out. If your existing chatbot is not trained to answer these new types of questions, agent intervention will be required.

There could also be situations where a customer is trying to solve a rare problem personalized to him/her and reaches out for help. In such cases chatbots may not always provide the best answer.

Human Agents And Chatbots - A Coexistence Model

Essentially, organizations must look at fostering a coexistence model with chatbots working in line with human agents and augmenting productivity. Chatbots can be used as the first line of agents to the existing customer service process and to fulfill basic, preliminary tasks such as aggregating user data, answering repetitive questions, sending relevant information and taking down the details related to customer concerns.

In case of an escalation or upon a customer’s request, the chatbot can also handover the conversation to a live agent. This concept is called “agent handoff”. Ideally any customer service chatbot should also provide an option to switch to live chat. It should also be intelligent enough to understand the context of the conversation and suggest customers to chat with a human agent.

In a nutshell, here are a few situations a chatbot should transfer the conversation to an agent:

  1. Customer directly requests to chat with a agent
  2. Critical and time-sensitive issues
  3. Complex conversations: The bot should be intelligent enough to understand it can’t provide the right answer
  4. User’s sentiment: If the customer sounds frustrated or angry
End User Graph

Learn more:  Human Hand-Off In Service Desk Bots

This process not just ensures a quick response time from the customer care team to the concerned customer, but also makes the work of human agents much simpler. While quick response and efficiency is a chatbot’s USP, human agents can bank on their emotional quotient to win customer trust.

Human Agents Training Virtual Customer Assistants

Training, calibrating and explaining AI-enabled systems requires human-in-the-loop architecture

Gartner

An AI system needs a human-in-the-loop feedback system to constantly learn and become intelligent. And throughout its lifecycle, an AI system interacts with different types of people who influence its intelligence. In the case of consumer-facing chatbot, even the smallest customer’s feedback like “click here if you are satisfied with the solution” can help improve the machine learning algorithm of chatbots. In addition to consumer training, contact center agents can also classify outliers and exceptions and help modify the chatbot training data and behaviour accordingly.

Educate Your Agents About Chatbots

A concern about chatbot implementation among your agents is the perceived threat they pose to their employment. Although we are still a far way off from completely doing away with human staff in contact centers, the existing workforce feels threatened. This is a demotivating factor for the employees, and something that the organizations need to factor in when trying to bring in chatbots.

While most contact center staff may look at chatbots as their competition, it is not the case.

Educate your agents about how chatbots can solve low-value customer issues and make their work more productive and streamlined. Demonstrate the capabilities of the chatbot so they can better understand its functioning.

The Future

Sooner or later, the implementation of customer service chatbots will become imperative. Chatbot adoption can help organizations provide round the clock service to its customers, partly reducing the workload on its human customer care agents while cutting down on staffing costs. Essentially, chatbots can help organizations provide better customer care with fewer resources.

Although we cannot completely eliminate the human touch from customer service, chatbots can be used to cut down on human intervention as much as possible. This can be achieved by using chatbots to manage a larger volume of customer needs while reserving only the most complicated issues for human agents.

Knowing the potential that chatbots today possess, the question begs to be asked; Can chatbots completely replace human customer service? At this point, no. But of course, chatbots do have a bright future, with more and more organizations implementing them in multi-operational capabilities. Although they might not oust the human workforce in contact centers, chatbots sure do reduce operational costs and improve process efficiencies, making them a valuable addition.

Even at the most rudimentary level, contact centers that embrace the coexistence of chatbots and human agents, will surely deliver superior customer service.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our enterprise chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation. You may also be interested in exploring our chatbot builder platform (BotCore).

Additional Reading:

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A Comprehensive Guide For Conversational AI https://botcore.ai/blog/conversational-ai/ Thu, 08 Oct 2020 07:28:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=7021 A Comprehensive Guide For Conversational AI Planning to implement conversational AI in your organization? Read this comprehensive guide to get a full understanding of conversational AI, how it works, and its capabilities and use cases. What is Conversational AI? Conversational AI is a set of powerful technologies that empower computers to comprehend, process, and respond […]

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A Comprehensive Guide For Conversational AI

Planning to implement conversational AI in your organization? Read this comprehensive guide to get a full understanding of conversational AI, how it works, and its capabilities and use cases.

What is Conversational AI?

Conversational AI is a set of powerful technologies that empower computers to comprehend, process, and respond to human utterances and text/voice inputs naturally. Used in conjunction with chatbots or voice assistants, it helps organizations deliver meaningful and personalized customer and employee engagement economically on a large scale.

Why Conversational AI?

The conversational AI market size is expected to grow from AUD 6 billion in 2019 to AUD 22.6 billion by 2024, at a CAGR of 30.2%, during 2019-2024.

As per Gartner,

With Conversational AI, an organization can benefit from personalized, context-aware, and differentiated customer and employee experiences. Global organizations leveraging conversational AI technologies like chatbots, virtual assistants and voice bots are significantly reducing support costs, streamlining internal operations, improving agent productivity, and delivering powerful customer service. The scope of conversational AI is vast; the channels are rapidly expanding. You may experience conversational AI through the following means-

  • Social media platforms – Facebook Messenger,, WhatsApp, Twitter
  • Enterprise channels – Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, Web
  • Web and mobile messaging apps
  • Voice devices – Amazon Alexa, Google Home
  • Contact Center – Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system

Additionally, advances in NLP and machine learning, the availability of vast amounts of data, flexible app integrations, and low-code bot-building platforms have made conversational AI a force to reckon with.

How Conversational AI works?

Conversational AI uses a plethora of advanced technology components, including natural language processing (NLP), intent and entity recognition, machine learning, natural language generation, dynamic text to speech capabilities. Below we present a walkthrough of how these technologies make conversational AI a reality –

1. Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a component of AI and is the ability of a computer program to understand human or natural language as it is spoken/written. NLP helps a bot/virtual assistant understand the semantics of the language being used, including synonyms, canonical word forms, grammar, slang, and logically respond using natural language, consistent with the user’s query.

Learn More:  Understanding NLP and Its Need in Enterprise Chatbots

2. Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a technology that deciphers the context and meaning behind the user’s words. With NLU, the AI assistant can easily understand the user’s query, even overlooking grammatical errors, shortcuts, etc., and remember the context throughout the conversation.

Contextual awareness is necessary to recall information over interactions and hold natural, human-like back and forth conversations.

NLU goes above and beyond scripted conversational technology that involves giving a pre-programmed response to a particular phrase or keyword.

Natural Language Understanding extracts intent and entities – precisely what the user is trying to achieve (intent) and elements that define what is required to accomplish the task, such as dates, time, numbers, and objects, also known as entities.

Example – I am trying to find a restaurant that sells blueberry cheesecake.

In the above query, the intent is to “find.” The relevant information (entities) required to fulfill the user’s request are “restaurant” and “blueberry cheesecake.”

3. Training Models

- Machine Learning

Machine Learning is a subset of AI that studies algorithms and statistical models, giving computers the ability to perform a specific task without being explicitly trained to do so. With machine learning, bots rely on patterns, inferences, human-agent conversations, and historical interactions to learn and improve their performance.

- Fundamental Learning

Fundamental Learning ensures input information always produces the same output. It determines intent from user utterance using semantic rules, such as grammar, sentence structure, word match, language context, etc.

- Knowledge Graph

Knowledge Graph groups key domain terms according to similarities and differences. The model then associates them with context-specific questions, synonyms, and ML classes.

- Natural Language Generation

After understanding the user’s intent, the conversational AI assistant uses natural language generation to respond in a textual or voice output that is easily understood by the user.

Capabilities of Conversational AI

Through conversational AI, conversations truly feel human-like. Just as humans remember context throughout the conversation, a conversational AI chatbot retains context from one response to the next. Because of its conversational ability, interactions don’t feel scripted. You can hold conversations about anything – as long as the bot has the data to build the conversation.

Below we take you through the various capabilities of conversational AI –

  • Context Management – The most significant capability of conversational AI lies in the fact that interactions will always have the human touch. Conversational AI allows bots to remember critical details from past dialogue, user preferences, and client information, making it easy to deliver personalized user interactions. 
  • Dialogue Management – Human conversations are seldom straightforward and are layered with twists, turns, and context-switching. Examples include but are not limited to pausing tasks, changing entities at any point in time, and processing multiple entities in a single message. Conversational AI allows bots to hold both simple and complex conversations by handling dialogue turns effectively. 
  • Omni-channel experiences – Conversational AI’s distinguishing feature lies in its ability to allow users to start a conversation on one channel (for example, website) and complete it in another (maybe, Facebook Messenger) – without losing context or continuity, so customers receive consistent support. 
  • Real-time personalization – Depending on the user context, needs, and profile, conversational AI enables AI assistants to provide personalized information, products, offers, and other services. 
  • Multilingual support – Conversational AI supports multiple languages, including Italian, Dutch French, German, Spanish, etc. – allowing you to expand to global markets and serve more customers and employees from different geographical locations.

Learn More: Chatbot In Different Languages: A Guide To Multilingual Chatbots

  • Sentiment Analysis – Tone and emotion can significantly alter what you want to convey. Conversational AI identifies, extracts, and signals the type and intensity of a user’s sentiment, allowing bots to steer conversations, change the tone, or bring in human agents for support.

Learn More: Understanding The Role Of Sentiment Analysis In Chatbots

Approaches to Conversational AI

Conversational AI can take one or both of the following approaches –

  1. Reactive Engagement – It can respond to a customer’s query by providing an easy path to find information and answers without reaching out to a human agent. 
  2. Proactive Engagement – It may anticipate the user’s demand in advance and push personalized and contextual information, thus creating opportunities to establish new relationships, intervene at critical moments (for example, when a customer toggles between two product options), and support users 24×7.

Advantages of Conversational AI

By incorporating conversational AI into everyday organizational functioning, you can reap the following benefits –

  • Reduce cost per contact – You can reduce the cost to contact depending on the human-agent calls deflected to conversational AI powered channels, thus improving service resolution and human agent utilization and productivity. 
  • Increase revenue via cross-sell and up-sell – Through proactively reaching out and engaging with customers, conversational AI enables you to create personalized customer experiences, recommend the right products, notify about promotions, up sell, cross sell and build a loyal client base.
  • Uncover data-driven insights – Conversational AI gives your business a competitive edge by providing valuable customer data that can be used for product innovation, improving customer service quality, and personalizing marketing campaigns. 
  • Reduce churn – By providing instant, accurate and 24/7 support for resolving customer issues, conversational AI helps reduce customer churn.
  • Improve employee productivity – Conversational AI improves employee satisfaction and motivation in more ways than one, some of which include –
    1. The virtual agents can complete mundane, routine tasks, allowing agents to focus on critical and high-value work
    2. The AI bot can draw-up information from the enterprise systems like CRM that helps human agents serve customers quickly
    3. Employees can easily access necessary data insights from analytics systems, thus empowering them to take more data-driven decisions.
  • Scale efficiently – With conversational AI operating 24×7, you can serve more customers and employees across business units and geographies, even outside your organization’s working hours.

Learn More: 10 Powerful Benefits Of Chatbots In Customer Service

Conversational AI: Customer and Employee Use Cases

1. Employee Processes

- IT and Security Management

The IT helpdesk is often inundated with routine questions.  As soon as a request is raised, IT chatbots help the user do basic troubleshooting and in most cases fix the issue and thereby reduce the employee downtime.

If the issue isn’t resolved or the user isn’t satisfied with the outcome, bots provide the option to connect with a support agent – thereby leaving the more complex queries to human agents. This leads to faster resolution times, improved incident management, improved security, better handling of outages and ensuring that employees are kept informed with steady and timely alerts.

Some of the use cases include:

  • Check the status of tickets
  • Answer common troubleshooting questions like VPN or password not working
  • Ask instructions for common IT issues
  • Reset passwords for devices and network
  • Talk to a live agent (human-handoff)
  • Raise tickets
  • Fill form fields via conversation
  • Access the knowledge base
  • Check on the pending case reports
  • Look-up case-related information
  • Receive information on – Incident notifications, New change request notifications, Task notifications, Access request notifications, Asset request notifications and Outage alerts

- Sales

AI-enabled sales virtual assistants can integrate with data warehouses, CRM, BI and LOB Systems to perform tasks such as creating new leads, updating lead status, getting visual reports in multimedia formats, updating CRM records etc.

Use cases include:

  • Check the lead status
  • Ask pinpointed prospect-related queries
  • Check on the sales KPIs
  • Get pin-pointed answers of any information available in the CRM or BI systems.
  • Fill lead details
  • Send email of the desired dashboard
  • Set and get alerts about dip or rise in any sales KPI.
  • Receive notifications about change in lead’s status
  • Access reports available in the CRM, BI or LOB or DWH systems.
  • Get links to the desired dashboards

- Marketing

Conversational AI marketing assistants can gather data about potential customers that equips marketers with essential information to design their products and advertising strategies. They can be integrated with various social media channels and used to reach out to customers of various demographics.

Following are the use cases:

  • Lead generation
  • Lead qualification
  • Book sales meetings
  • Schedule demos/consultations
  • Suggest relevant content based on user’s website activity
  • Capture email addresses and other visitor details in a simplified manner

- Intranet Assistant

Employees can use the company’s intranet chatbot to perform simple actions such as checking on internal company updates, accessing documents, applying for leaves etc.

Use cases include:

  • Proactively take the announcements and news in the intranet to the employee
  • Get intranet information via natural language questions
  • Get links to desired intranet documents
  • Content authors can update content with a chat interface
  • Get personalized alerts and timely updates
  • Perform tasks like leave requests, travel settlement requests, IT requests etc.

- Human Resource

AI-enabled virtual assistants can be used at different stages of an employee’s life cycle – right from recruitment and onboarding to engaging the employee and fostering retention, in order to optimize the whole process.

Use cases include:

  • Delivering updates about the status of an application
  • Responding to FAQs, thereby saving the recruiter’s time and efforts for other tasks
  • Conduct and record feedback surveys from the candidate about their recruitment process and gain insights on any areas of improvement
  • Reduce recruitment time by qualifying and disqualifying candidates swiftly at scale
  • Automate the manual and administrative recruitment work
  • Streamline and speed up the process of collecting and recording KYC documents, tax forms, etc. by tracking the same for employees and reminding them to submit the required documents on time
  • Share standard operating procedures and company policies, and severely reduce the HR workload by handling the process and queries online

2. Consumer Processes

- Banking and Financial Services

Conversational AI in banking aims at delivering personalized customer services to improve customer satisfaction and engagement. Some of the use cases include:

  • Checking the account balance, transaction history, credit limit etc.
  • Help in upsell
  • Finding the nearest ATM or branch
  • Inquiring about different offerings and products
  • Generating a mini statement for the desired time period and the interest rate report
  • Updating contact information
  • Connecting to a live agent (human hand-off)
  • Transferring money from one account to another
  • Suggest money saving ideas
  • Generating bill payment alerts and personalized financial advice
  • Resetting the card PIN

- Retail

CPG and retail companies are increasingly using conversational AI to transform customer experience.  Following are the use cases in the retail sector –

  • Product exploration and discovery
  • Product recommendations
  • Check the shipment status
  • Add items to cart
  • Place orders
  • Book appointments
  • Connect to customer support agents
  • Provide product related information, and alerts on a new product launch, and suggestions on discounts or coupons or any other sales offers

- Insurance

Insurance companies may use conversational AI to handle routine customer questions, address minor insurance related challenges, provide quotes, automate the claim process, and reduce call center costs.

Therefore, some of the use cases in insurance are –

  • Help in filing a claim
  • Answer scheme and plan related questions
  • Provide recommendations to prevent loss
  • Provide guidance for choosing the right plan
  • Send Insurance documents of the customer
  • Send personalized quotes to users

- Healthcare

AI-powered virtual health assistants and health bots offer users personalized access to health-related information and natural conversational experiences.

Providers, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies can use conversational AI for certain healthcare-specific use cases, including –

  • Inquire about the status of an insurance claim
  • Ask queries about health plan pricing, benefits, and services
  • Triage patient issues with a symptom checker
  • Find general information about conditions, symptoms, causes, etc.
  • Schedule doctor appointments
  • Patient registration, delivery of post-op instructions, etc.

- Education

Chatbots are changing the face of education right from personalizing education, helping people learn new languages, spaced interval learning, student feedback, professor assessment, essay scoring, acquaint students with school culture and for administrative formalities.

Uses cases include –

  • Handling queries related to the university and courses during registration, assessment related questions, tuition fees, time tables, scholarships, grades etc.
  • Get university policy documents, enrollment certificates, academic information, disability and other personal information
  • Provide course and administration related information
  • Access course documents
  • Handle university registration
  • Send feedback about professors, courses etc.
  • Update contact information
  • Register for courses
  • Fill applications
  • Apply for permissions

Getting Started with Conversational AI

The technologies that support conversational AI like NLP, machine learning, conversational interfaces and advancing at a rapid pace. As virtual assistants and chatbots become more popular across the globe, your customers expect powerful self-service conversational experiences from your brand as well.

In order to stay competitive, enterprise can no longer ignore the business value delivered by these technologies. Laggards in this space will fail to keep pace with the evolving customer and employee needs and get left behind.

Here are some tips for organizations getting started on their conversational AI journey:

  • Defining the strategy – Understand how conversational AI can be integrated into your organization. Capture the right use cases by collaborating with different business units.
  • Build a powerful business case – An enterprise-wide conversational AI journey involves cross-functional stakeholders. Spread awareness internally on the benefits of conversational AI and clearly demonstrate the ROI.
  • Evaluating solutions – Choose the right enterprise conversational AI platform that helps you build, deploy, manage and train virtual assistants. You can read market reports from industry analysts like Gartner to compare different vendors.
  • Assess your readiness – Determine your existing human and technical resources and identify the gaps to be filled.
  • Define Metrics: Clearly quantify the business value the project delivers. Establish realistic metrics like increased CSAT, reduction in cost per contact, reduction in support costs etc.
  • Launch pilot projects: Pick a high-value use case and launch a pilot project. Monitor the virtual assistant performance over time and document the lessons learned.
  • Scaling and optimizing – Continuously scale, improve, and optimize conversational AI technologies and look for opportunities to streamline workflows.

Free bot workshops like Acuvate’s Build-A-Bot program helps you get a subject matter expert opinion to plan your bot journey, identify specific use cases within your enterprise and evaluate different technologies. Acuvate provides a 1 day bot strategy workshop within your company premises for both business and IT leaders.

Introducing BotCore

Over the past several years, we have helped several enterprises build & launch chatbots to meet the needs of their employees, customers and vendors. We leverage our enterprise chatbot builder platform – BotCore to build, deploy and manage custom chatbots for companies across industries.  BotCore is fully deployable on both on-premise and cloud environments.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our enterprise chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation.

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