Customer Service Bots Archives - BotCore

Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service

Abhishek Shanbhag — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 11:31:00 +0000

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.

The post Why Voice Bots Are The Future Of Contact Center Customer Service appeared first on BotCore.

How Chatbots Can Boost The Customer Retention Rate

Abhishek Shanbhag — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 10:19:00 +0000

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.

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.

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

Manage High Call Volume During COVID-19 Using AI & Call Deflection

Rakesh Reddy — Mon, 25 May 2020 05:45:00 +0000

Manage High Call Volume During COVID-19 Using Call Deflection & AI

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the unique challenges it has posed, has engulfed customers in a wave of fear and uncertainty and put organizations in a jiffy.

There has been a sharp spike in the volume of calls as anxious customers seek support on a variety of issues.

A majority of customers consider call support as a flexible channel of communication as it allows them to verbally explain and negotiate with the agents. Moreover, customers prefer calling for urgent matters, including cancelled flights and refunds, health insurance coverage, timings of convenience stories, appointments for COVID-19 tests, loan approvals, and much more.

Particularly, contact centers in industries like banking, airlines, retail, and healthcare have been experiencing a nightmare with the unprecedented surge in call volumes.

Organizations are facing a myriad of challenges, such as -

Contact centers are ill-equipped to deal with the huge increase in the volume of incoming customer calls and chats, which has burdened their systems, their agents, and their ability to respond and deflect calls from the queues.
The Washington State Department of Health’s coronavirus hotline experienced an average wait-time of 10 minutes with calls dropping 20 minutes after the customers were put on-hold;

Due to the inherent tendency to use call support in times of crises, customers are abandoning self-service channels and instead directly calling and requesting agent support.
A lot of questions and requests are repetitive and basic
Voice-based channels are not only expensive but also difficult to scale
There has been a shortage of staff as support agents fall sick and are unable to continue work.
Many US airlines have requested their customers who do not have flights within the next 72 hours to wait until closer to their trip before calling up the contact center;
Adding more agents is not only expensive; but also not feasible at a short notice.

Reducing Call Volume With Call Deflection and AI-Enabled Virtual Assistance

To deal with the above issues and reduce contact center call volume, organizations can use a call deflection approach driven by AI chatbots. Call deflection involves diverting incoming customer calls to alternate means of answering questions like self-service and digital channels e.g. chatbots.

AI Chatbots can handle an unlimited number of requests at the same time, provide instant support, and decrease costs for the organization as lesser employees are needed to handle customer queries. Moreover, they can answer routine customer questions 24×7, without the need for human support.

A combination of call-deflection and AI-enabled virtual assistance can improve the productivity of contact center agents, while simultaneously managing the surge in the volume of calls.

Irrespective of whether your IVR is based on legacy technology or deployed on the cloud, it is possible to shift the incoming call traffic to a text-based channel.

When the customer is ready to engage via text, the virtual assistant can converse with the client using natural language processing to handle simple requests, such as leading the customers to the required information. Or it can enable them to self-transact. Or it can be an extensive bot that offers complex capabilities, like drawing up the required background information to provide personalized solutions to customer queries.

The purpose of deflecting incoming calls is that a bot can handle customer requests that are basic and repetitive, and thereby it eliminates the need for agent involvement. The request will be transferred to an agent only when a customer specifically requests the transfer or the bot determines the conversation is too complex for it to handle.

Learn More:

The 2 Types of Call Deflection

Proactive and reactive call deflection are the two ways of diverting calls to text-based channels –

Proactive call deflection

Proactive call deflection is an approach in which measures are taken to prevent customers from calling to the contact centres in the first place and instead drive them to proactively use self-service digital channels. This involves:

Setting expectations and keeping customers informed about service hours, availability of certain services and the possible alternatives.
Driving awareness about self-service messaging channels and creating opportunities for customers to adopt them.

Proactive deflection, when supplemented with automation, allows customers to engage in a two-way interaction with a chatbot to resolve issues without waiting for agents. Thus, customers can operate in a self-serve mode for routine queries, and be directed to human agents only for more complex ones.

Reactive call deflection

A reactive approach to call deflection starts once customers call the contact center. On calling the contact center, the customers should be allowed to select the channel of their choice.

Customers may then opt to resolve their issue in a self-serve mode, with the help of AI-enabled chatbots enabled in messaging channels like SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp etc.

An alternate way of doing this is using Conversation IVR systems which leverage Natural Language Processing to interact with customers via voice and resolve their queries.

Steps involved in Reactive Call Deflection Supported by AI chatbots

Deflection – Customers call the contact center. When faced with long queues, they opt to divert their queries to a virtual assistant channel. Once the call ends, customers get a link to open a virtual agent and continue their conversation.
Automation – The customer opens the chatbot on his/her device. The virtual assistant can answer FAQs or carry out simple tasks. If faced with a more complex query, the bot captures customer information and/or schedules call-backs before forwarding the request to a human agent or offline processing.
Integration – The virtual agent should integrate with any existing live chat platform to allow escalation to a human agent, when the VA can’t handle the request.

Benefits of Call Deflection supported by AI

A study by Gartner indicates that, “As much as 40% of today’s live volume could be resolved in self-service channels.” Here are some benefits of using call deflection supported by AI.

Improved agent productivity
A self-service fix costs 80-100 times less than a live interaction
Chatbots can provide instant assistance to customers even beyond the working hours
They can handle unlimited requests at the same time
A chatbot can work in close tandem with live agents to handle complex queries;
Call deflection and AI reduce the incoming call traffic, leading to shorter wait-times. This avoids customer frustration;
Improved CSAT and customer experience at lowered costs

Get Started

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented increase in the number of customer calls to contact centers. To ease the burden off support agents, organizations can implement a combination of call deflection (proactive or reactive) and AI-enabled chatbots.

Such automation enables customers to self-serve and provides them with a 24X7 interactive experience at significantly lower costs. It also allows the support staff to focus on the complex queries, leaving the chatbots to handle routine asks.

We, at Acuvate Software, are helping clients deliver superior customer experiences through our intuitive, no-code bot-builder platform called BotCore.

BotCore presents several benefits –

The intuitive, no-code interface allows the quick implementation of AI chatbots
It can seamlessly integrate with existing legacy systems and AI services
It also allows the connection of existing bots across different departments
It is deployable on both on-site and cloud environments
Chatbots can be designed to simulate highly complex conversations

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

The post Manage High Call Volume During COVID-19 Using AI & Call Deflection appeared first on BotCore.

Take Your Chatbots To The Next Level With These New Capabilities

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 13:25:36 +0000

Take Your Chatbots To The Next Level With These New Capabilities

The adoption of chatbots in enterprises has grown exponentially in the last decade and today, we can see organizations of all sizes using bots for a variety of use cases and functions. A report by Markets and Markets shows that the chatbot market will be worth $9.4 billion by 2024.

The chatbot technology has evolved greatly in the past decade. Bots today are equipped with a host of new capabilities and have become more sophisticated. In order to gain greater business value from bots and use them in multi-faceted ways, it’s imperative for organizations to upgrade their bots. Without further ado, here are some significant and modern capabilities you should equip your enterprise chatbot with.

Explore these New Chatbot Capabilities

1. DataOps with chatbots

A large amount of data is captured from conversational technologies like chatbots, which are a crucial channel for gathering data. Data analytics employs new approaches like DataOps to leverage data that is captured through chatbots. This data can be analyzed and integrated with the other sources of internal and external data for better marketing and customer service.

2. Chatbot – RPA Integration

Integrating chatbots (front-office bots) with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can enable them to navigate through back-end enterprise systems that don’t have modern APIs. RPA enables chatbots to retrieve information from these systems and handle more complex and real-time customer/employee requests and queries at scale. RPA bots can perform more mundane tasks without routing them to a human agent.

By combining the power of automation from RPA and cognitive intelligence of chatbots, organizations can take their customer and employee experience to the next level, improve productivity, reduce costs and increase competitive advantage.

3. Make chatbots repeatable

Companies deploying chatbots for their business processes need to standardize chatbots and make them consistent across all channels – for instance, chatbots deployed on a company’s social media pages cannot be different from the one deployed on their official page.

4. Voice Bots

The next generation of AI assistants in the enterprise is the voice-based virtual assistants. Enabling chatbots to interact through voice relieves the agents and customers from the need to use devices (like mouse and keyboard) to interact with business applications.

According to Gartner, By 2023, 25% of employee interactions with applications will happen via voice, up from almost 3% in 2019. Voice bots can deliver more personalized responses with contextual understanding, speech synthesis, voice recognition, and natural language processing.

5. Incorporation Of Payments Within Chatbots

According to reports, 67% of US millennials said they are likely to purchase products and services from brands using a chatbot Incorporating automated payments in the process paves the way to easier purchasing during online shopping as it eliminates the need to visit a website, as chatbots will be able to handle the entire purchasing process.

6. Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis empowers chatbots with the ability to understand the emotions and mood of the user by analyzing their text or voice input. This helps chatbots to drive the conversation wisely and deliver appropriate responses. The purpose of sentiment analysis is to provide a personalized experience and make chatbots effectively respond according to the customer’s mood.

Using this technology you can understand customers’ perception of the brand, enable seamless agent handoff, improve upselling/cross-selling and deliver memorable customer experiences.

7. Improve the ability to conduct complex conversations

A key driver of user adoption is the chatbot’s ability to understand complex responses that could have multiple intents. Chatbots should predict not only what customers want but also any key information they might have forgotten.

This could be achieved by upgrading your dialog systems with new features like knowledge graph, contextual understanding, topic switching, sentiment analysis, personality, etc.

8. Handling escalations using chatbots

Intelligent digital assistants can be trained to easily escalate a customer issue to a human agent using rules or failure conditions. Other options include a built-in live chat support app for your agents or you can integrate your existing live chat software as well.

Chatbot technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated and organizations should keep up with it in order to ensure improved user experience. In 2020 and beyond we can see more intelligent chatbots that can integrate with disparate systems, understand intent better, conduct more complex conversations and deliver meaningful responses.

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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The post Take Your Chatbots To The Next Level With These New Capabilities appeared first on BotCore.

How chatbots help you reduce customer service costs

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 13:27:00 +0000

How Chatbots Help You Reduce Customer Service Costs

As businesses today incorporate AI and automation technology into their customer service workflows and day to day business in general, chatbots are a high-value addition to the mix. However, what business stakeholders really want to know are the different ways a chatbot implementation can reduce customer service costs and expenses. And let’s face it, money is one of the most crucial factors that drive business decisions. Today, we explore how chatbots can help considerably cut down on customer service costs.

chatbots – how can they help you?

A chatbot is a computer program or an artificial intelligence tool that conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. chatbots are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner and are used in dialog systems for various practical purposes including customer service, information acquisition and getting tasks done.

Chatbots are primarily of two kinds – scripted bots and ai bots. while scripted bots as the name suggests, follow a predefined stream of conversation, ai bots or intelligent bots use ai and natural language processing (nlp) algorithms to understand the ‘intent’ behind a question and respond back with the most appropriate answer possible.

Large and medium sized companies today have a customer base which is diverse, fragmented and presented all over the globe. providing excellent customer service is imperative for companies to gain a competitive edge, increase customer retention and loyalty.

With companies having established an air of accessibility with the help of social media, email, and instant messaging services, customers now expect a quick response at all hours of the day. but these communication channels do not come cheap. even back in 2017, forbes had assessed that customer service was a $350 billion industry. factor in the number of new companies and businesses that have permeated the market in the past two years, and you can imagine what that number must be today. with organizations working towards having leaner companies and cutting down costs, automated tools that can provide similar, if not greater customer service, that human resources could, have become all the rage. one such automated solution is the use of chatbots.

According to gartner ,inc, 25 percent of customer service and support operations will integrate virtual customer assistant (vca) or chatbot technology across engagement channels by 2020. this number has gone up drastically from less than 2 percent in 2017! according to gene alvarez, managing vice president at gartner, more than half of the global organizations have already invested in automated solutions for customer service, as they realize the advantages of automated self-service, together with the ability to escalate to a human agent in case of complex situations. 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.

But, do chatbots produce considerable and consistent savings?

yes, they do. here’s how.

chatbots – effective money savers

Some of the most prominent ‘money saver’ abilities that chatbots possess, are:

24/7 presence

Let’s imagine a scenario where you are using a video production tool for a project due tomorrow. after hitting ‘save & close’, you are suddenly unsure as to where the video has been saved. in spite of frantically trying to locate it, you are unsuccessful in doing so. panic hits and you immediately search for the tool’s customer service details. you don’t really care that it is 2 in the middle of the night; you need help, and you need it now.

In such a scenario, a perceptive company would ensure that 24/7 customer support is available for just these type of cases. however, if a company in an attempt to cut down costs, has done away with round-the-clock support, well, they better be ready for the customer’s wrath the next morning. the truth is, customers today pay for more than just the product. they pay for good service too. hence, it is crucial that companies provide it. so what can a company do to provide good customer service while cutting down on costs? use a chatbot.

The greatest thing about chatbots is, 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. hence using chatbots to handle after-hour queries, 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.

reduced training expenses

An area of concern for most companies is the constant training of customer care agents. as newer products are added to the company’s portfolio, older processes reformed and new resources hired, training and updating becomes imperative. but this a cost that can quickly escalate and get out of hand. chatbots on the other hand are capable of constant and automated refinement. even in case of newer data, an update can be made to the centralized system and revision cascades to the overall chatbot operation. chatbots are actually in constant improvement mode as they get trained through user queries and form patterns to understand what the best response to respective questions might be.

helping increase company revenue

Chatbots are not just good at ‘saving’ the company’s money, but are also capable of ‘increasing’ revenue. how is this done, you ask? well, most companies today use chatbots for more than just user help. chatbots learn from past conversations from users and provide proactive and personalized product/service recommendations to customers. this personalization in customer experience helps drive sales and revenue.

optimizing workforce costs

Let’s face it, competent labour does not come cheap. while staffing still remains one of the biggest expenses globally, it is also the hardest to cut down. especially with respect to customer care, companies that have tried to have fewer resources man the field, have faced not just customer wrath, but also employee burnout. additionally, telephonic customer service has an added disadvantage; fewer resources mean a longer wait time for the customers, obviously meaning a heftier phone bill. so, essentially companies can end up spending more on phone bills than saving on staffing. but, imagine if a chatbot was to be used as a first line of service? while a human chat agent can effectively chat with about three customers at onc, 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 in case of very complex queries.

in conclusion

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. this technique is capable of drastically cutting down on customer service costs. in fact, cnbc reports that chatbots are expected to cut down on business costs by as much as $8 billion by the year 2022. now that is a number worth taking seriously.

If you’d like to learn more about enterprise chatbots please feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants for a quick consultation!

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The post How chatbots help you reduce customer service costs appeared first on BotCore.

7 Actionable Tips To Reduce Contact Center Call Volume

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 13:09:43 +0000

7 Actionable Tips To Reduce Contact Center Call Volume

Providing a great customer experience while reducing call volume and costs is the ultimate goal of any contact center. Over the years, contact centers have invested in various types of customer-facing technologies – right from IVR, CTI, CRM, ACD to AI. But in spite of deploying these technologies, most organizations are not able to improve operational efficiencies, enhance CX or maximize their ROI.

Most organizations today believe that technology alone is the solution to reduce costs and by focusing solely on implementing the technology they allow CX and their core operations to take a hit.

But there are ways in which the number of calls that a contact center receives can be reduced while ensuring good customer experience and better business growth. In the following section, we discuss the top 5 tips to reduce call volumes in your contact center.

7 tips to reduce contact center volume

map the customer journey

The first step in cutting down inbound call volume is to determine why customers are calling the contact center in the first place. This includes recognizing the most common issues that customers are facing with respect to a product, process or service. Often, it is a bunch of similar reasons that tend to lead to the majority of inbound calls.

Once the most common reasons behind inbound calls are established, we can use customer journey analytics to map the customer service journey. Analytical data gives us an insight into the effectiveness of the service provided by the agents in the contact center as well as recognize the pain points faced by the customer.

Using customer journey analytics helps assess the information that is readily available to customers, determine the ease with which customers can reach out to the contact center when required and establish the top reasons why customers call-in. Armed with this information, companies can take the primary steps required to reduce inbound call volume.

measure customer effort score (CES)

Customer Effort Score refers to the ease of customer interaction and getting a resolution for a request. High-effort experiences include switching between channels, repeat interaction, transfers, etc. Tracking CES helps you reduce call volume and costs whilst improving customer experience. According to Gartner, low-effort experiences reduce costs by decreasing up to 40% of repeat calls. Gartner also recommends asking this single question to measure CES.

focus on multiple channels and provide self-service options

Use different channels for communication and promote these channels evenly. Assign KPIs for each channel. Allow customers to choose their options. Enable smart self-service options across web, mobile, and telephone. Some self-service best practices include:

Highly visible and updated FAQs
Customized CRM portals
Strong and NLP enabled knowledge base solution
Self-help links integrated into web pages that lead to the respective help document(s).
Online community discussion portals

A more modern and efficient self-service option through which customers can look for answers is via Chatbots and conversational IVR systems. Chatbots today can be deployed from handheld devices such as mobile phones and tablets as well as from the desktop. They are increasingly being integrated in social media applications such as Facebook, as well. We will learn about chatbots in detail in the next section.

using AI chatbots

Chatbot adoption in contact centers has grown exponentially in the past couple of years, across industries. According to Gartner, 25 percent of customer service and support operations will integrate bot technology across their engagement channels by 2020; this statistic used to be less than two percent in 2017.

Chatbots today are powered by conversational AI, NLP, and machine learning, and offer the same conversational experience as communicating with a human agent. In contact centers, they are deployed as the first line of support in order to handle tier-1 interactions. The 24/7 availability and an easy-to-use conversational interface of chatbots make them an efficient self-service option for customers. Chatbots reduce the number of calls that human executives have to handle, without compromising on the customer experience.

Learn more: 10 Powerful Benefits of Chatbots in Customer Service

chatbot agent handoff

Although chatbots are great at handling customer interactions by simulating human-like conversations, a common misconception that customer service leaders may have is that a chatbot alone is sufficient to handle customer service. But the truth is that there may be scenarios where the customer interaction needs to be handed off to a human agent.

In such a scenario, the chatbot must be able to identify the need for human intervention and seamlessly transition the interaction to the appropriate agent. In this way, the inbound call volume can be cut down by fulfilling basic, preliminary tasks such as aggregating user information, and recording customer concerns with the help of a chatbot. Only those tasks that absolutely need human intervention can be routed to the human agents.

Learn more: Human Hand-off in Service Desk Bots

conversational IVR

Chatbot technology in call centers is also intended to replace traditional IVR systems that tend to be a major pain point for customers looking for quick and effective issue resolution. Unlike traditional IVR systems, conversational IVR uses NLP and Machine Learning to understand the content of customers’ speech and enables dynamic and hassle-free experiences. Customers no longer have to navigate through the complex navigation menu of a traditional IVR.

ensure first call resolution ( fcr)

A major factor that contributes to increased inbound call volume in contact centers is that most issues are not resolved in the first call, requiring multiple calls to ensure resolution. This leads to calls adding-up while also being detrimental to customer satisfaction.

Essentially, customer satisfaction is directly related to the First Call Resolution (FCR) rate of the contact center. One of the ways to ensure FCR is to frequently measure CSAT with the aim to improve it.

optimize in order to reduce repeat calls

When contact centers receive calls regarding issues with certain ineffective customer-oriented processes, they must have a resource in the backend team to modify or improve these processes and related self-help pages accordingly. By improving pages and processes based on support calls, contact centers can reduce the occurrence of repeat calls for the same issues in the future.

Reducing call volume is key to reduce business costs in any contact center. And this involves streamlining and automation of processes and intelligent orchestration of work.

If you want to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our customer experience and AI experts for a personalized consultation.

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