Customer Service Chatbots Archives - BotCore Enterprise Chatbot Fri, 15 Mar 2024 09:57:44 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://botcore.ai/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cropped-favicon-32x32-1-70x70.png Customer Service Chatbots 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.

Further Reading:

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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.

Further Reading:

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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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]]> Take Your Chatbots To The Next Level With These New Capabilities https://botcore.ai/blog/take-your-chatbots-to-the-next-level-with-these-new-capabilities/ Fri, 29 Mar 2019 13:25:36 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=4847 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 […]

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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.

Read More: How Voice Assistants are transforming the enterprise workplace

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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]]> How chatbots help you reduce customer service costs https://botcore.ai/blog/how-chatbots-help-you-reduce-customer-service-costs/ Mon, 28 Jan 2019 13:27:00 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=3985 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 […]

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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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]]> 7 Actionable Tips To Reduce Contact Center Call Volume https://botcore.ai/blog/7-actionable-tips-to-reduce-contact-center-call-volume/ Wed, 16 Jan 2019 13:09:43 +0000 https://botcore.ai/?p=3972 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 […]

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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.

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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:

  1. Highly visible and updated FAQs

  2. Customized CRM portals

  3. Strong and NLP enabled knowledge base solution

  4. Self-help links integrated into web pages that lead to the respective help document(s).

  5. 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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