Customer Service & Chatbots

Customer support is a vital part of any product or service offering. It could present challenging as well as rewarding situations. Given the repetitive nature of work, sometimes even well-trained support staff could find it difficult to manage.  A motivated support team is bound to provide extreme customer satisfaction and vice versa.

Technology has been all pervasive and it now provides solution for customer communication as well. Chatbots have now become a household name. They offer some respite to the customer support teams.

WHAT IS A CHATBOT?

Chatbots are simple and effective artificial intelligence (AI) systems that interact with humans using text or voice. To create your chatbots, you can either use a ChatBot Visual Builder or upload a ready-made, task-specific template which can be customized as per your requirement.

Bots deal well with answering repetitive questions and guiding visitors on a website. They can answer multiple questions simultaneously and find proper answers immediately. A quick chat response ensures that the visitor’s problem will be taken care of. This will also prevent visitors/clients from looking for help at your competitors who are just a click away. 

Here are a few examples of how Chatbots could compliment customer support

Chatbots for responding before/after working hours

Your support team could be the best in the world, but as human beings, they too deserve a short break, maybe to go on a holiday. Or they may get stuck in traffic on their way to work/back home. There could also be unforeseen reasons that could prevent you from offering 24 by 7 support.

In such a situation, you could use a bot. A chatbot can inform visitors about support executive’s absence and give information about office working hours as that will make it easier for prospects/customers to contact your company.

Chatbots can also register the contact details and questions of the prospect/customer, so that you could respond/revert to them at the earliest. Promptly writing back to such queries also helps in building a relationship.

Chatbots for feedback

“Your feedback is valuable to us…” is a common phrase among business feedback mechanisms, but what’s the point if a customer can’t actually say what they want, especially if it can’t be rated on a score. Chatbots can provide a better feedback loop and improve the customer relationship, while providing better data to the business.

Customer feedback is a critical component for any industry to aspire to achieve customer service excellence.  These inputs help them find out about customers’ preferences and fine tune their products/services. One recent example is a feedback application that a leading South Asian Airline is providing which includes the ability to add photos alongside text feedback and ratings to highlight the passenger experience.

It is always easier to gather feedback from customers using a survey bot. These are preferred over online surveys because chatbots can have names, can thank a customer and give a personal touch which would make it appear to be more of a conversation rather than a survey.

Chatbot for booking / scheduling an appointment

Irrespective of whether you run a cinema mall, clinic, restaurant or any other customer centric business, booking appointments is a key task in your daily schedule.

Therefore, it is in your best interest that you find time and place for those who wish to use your products/services. Imagine if your prospects/clients were to come to your place and wait for hours before they got an appointment, or imagine if your prospects/clients found your telephone lines busy and could not schedule an appointment? That would be a poor commentary on your customer service and may result in losing potential customers/clients.

However, imagine how things would be if your Chat bot could do the following?

This is where a chatbot for booking appointments would come in handy as it would ask about customers’ preferences and provide additional information that would help to schedule an appointment/reservation.

Chatbots, in addition to automatically book meetings can also help organize them in your calendar with reminders. They can hence do the heavy lifting, while you focus on your business.

Chatbots for Digital Marketing

The chatbot has the ability to take care of all the things right from asking about the customer’s needs to answering queries the customer might have. You could use chatbots to handle different kinds of tasks including engaging clients on your website and educating them about your products and company.

According to our internal research, 57% customers preferred live chat to get their queries answered. The chatbot would help attract new customers, encourage a person to leave their contact information thereby enabling organizations to follow up on leads and sell more products.

Chatbots can handle proactive customer engagement and send follow up messages. Also, they can help in announcing a new offer or a new product launch.

What is in it for you?

To summarize, chatbots offer multiple benefits to help achieve business goals and can be used for a wide variety of applications due to the following factors:

• Available 24*7
• Saves time
• Is quick and agile
• Cost-effective
• Can gather and analyse data

There are multiple chatbot platforms that allows you to build, manage, integrate, train, analyse and publish your personalized bot in a matter of minutes.

So, the essence of growing business exponentially, lies in the two C’s, namely Customer Service and Chatbots! Some of the top industries benefiting from chatbots are retail, insurance, healthcare, hospitality, finance, and even government. The efficiency and cost savings are added attractions So, if you are still considering whether to use chatbots or not, by all means, try them out!