With websites taking over brick and mortar stores, there is a lot of effort taken to improve on customer service. Almost always during online sales, personal interactions (even mail/phone conversations) do not happen. And until recently, customer relationships in e-commerce sites involved appointing one responsible account representative to handle questions or concerns. That’s not the case anymore.
Today, the savvy customer resorts to Twitter and Facebook to register his displeasure with an organization’s service. This puts the customer’s dissatisfaction out in the open, detracts other potential customers and makes sure that the organization gets back to the customer at once. Otherwise, their reputation is questioned.
Facebook has changed the customer-engagement game with the advent of Facebook Pages. Then, Twitter feeds followed. Thus, social media customer care was born. Now, organizations are getting help from artificial intelligence (AI). Tech savvy companies are now exploring chatbots for messaging platforms. When Facebook released a bot development platform for Messenger, thousands of bots came online. Today, bots like Kik, Slack, Snapchat have taken over customer service platforms. So, does your business need a chat bot?
The answer is Yes.
Studies suggest that more than 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human by 2020. Chat bots will take over to be the most used AI consumer application in the next few years. Customer service can be manned by chatbots for most queries and requests. Several small to mid size organizations are already using chatbots to engage their customers through self-service and innovative relationship-building programs. Know about The 6 fatal mistakes of customer service.
Among well-known industry giants, several have gone the chatbot way to take orders. Food chains like Taco bell allows customers to order on Slack Chat. Sephora lets customers order their beauty essentials via Kik. Ticketmaster uses an Inbenta built chat widget, an expert in natural language processing for customer support and enterprise e-commerce.
So, the trend is definitely showing a favourable path to using chat bots in customer service platforms. If you don’t use chat bots today, remember that your peers are. And you might lose loyal customers to dynamic and inventive competitors.
How to go about with the idea of chat bots?
Start off with chatbots as a simple and sensible way to replace customer-support systems. This is a good entry point for chatbots in any business. Natural language processing or NLP attributes can help you create custom bots that can be trained to be the brand persona you want it be. It can seamlessly integrate with your existing communication systems. Common queries like ‘How do I reset a password’, ‘Can I use my discount coupon on this product?’ or ‘How can I sign up for your loyalty program?’.
Customers also give positive reviews to shopping sites that have a personalized chat experience. Seldom do they realise if it is a live agent or a chat bot at the other end. Services like these can enhance business relationships and create brand loyalty amidst customers.
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