Businesses have always had a robust customer support strategy. Contact centers have been at the center of this strategy for time immemorial. Customer expectations are rising and how! This puts brands under tremendous pressure (and opportunity!) to create hyper-personalized customer experiences to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
In the past few years, Conversational AI has disrupted the contact center industry. This has given brands an opportunity to rethink their customer service strategy. It’s expected that 20% of customer service interactions will be handled by Conversational AI agents by 2022. The market for this technology is expected to grow from $4 billion to $15 billion by 2024 .
In this article, we’re going to look at what are the advantages of automated customer service and how a customer service chatbot can boost CSAT and NPS and at the same time reduce customer support costs.
What’s the scope of a Conversational AI Platform?
Let’s start with understanding what a Conversational AI solution is a programmatic and intelligent way of offering a conversational experience to mimic conversations with real people, through digital and telecommunication technologies.
The technologies which are at the backbone of a sophisticated Conversational AI solution are Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Sentiment Analysis, Machine Learning, and the most important component: empathy.
Customer service chatbots are capable of providing a truly omnichannel CX (Web, WhatsApp, Facebook, In-app), and uncovering key business metrics with an analytics platform. Language has always been a barrier while communicating with your customers but a multilingual chatbot can create conversations with your customers in any language!
How does a customer service chatbot help?
1. Customer Assistance
A. Customer Support
As mentioned above, the customer service chatbot can be deployed across different channels, hence providing brands an opportunity to create an omnichannel CX. AI-powered chatbots are capable of delivering service 24/7 which means that there’s always someone (not really) to answer customer’s questions anytime! This is significantly cheaper than having live agents with rotational shifts.
If the customer support query is complex or beyond the scope of the chatbot, there is a seamless process to hand off the query to a live agent based on their skill sets and current workload. This also helps the customer support agents to focus on customers which require a detailed solution for their difficult problems. This is where the magic happens! The marriage of AI and traditional customer service is the way forward.
B. Conversational Commerce
Conversational Commerce has revolutionized eCommerce. Over the years, brands have realized the true potential of messaging platforms. Conversational AI is being leveraged by some of the largest brands to provide shopping assistance to customers. This is indeed a great opportunity to reduce costs incurred for hiring sales agents and training them. A robust conversational commerce tool is capable of providing superior customer service than a sales agent.
You can truly understand user requirements and provide expert-like guidance to nudge visitors ahead in the buyer’s journey. An intent-based recommendation engine helps you automatically match user requirements with your product catalog, descriptions, customer reviews, and other historical data to offer relevant buying guidance and increase conversions. Know more about how Haptik’s Conversational AI platform can help you sell seamlessly across all messaging platforms.
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2. Agent Assistance
Support agents need vast amounts of customer information to provide the assistance that customers need.
Conversational UIs (user interfaces) can monitor the conversations — whether by voice or chat — the agent is having with a customer and provide relevant information, screens, or prompts by intervening at appropriate times.
This reduces the hold time and there is no need to transfer the call to another agent because of not having access to enough customer knowledge. This results in a superior CX, lowered support costs, and high employee satisfaction.
3. Data, data & more data
We’ve all heard this statement countless times: Data is the new oil. Organizations store every piece of information derived from customer interaction including transaction history, past interactions, transcripts of calls, and chat sessions. This is an invaluable piece of information that can be leveraged to create hyper-personalized customer experiences.
A Conversational AI can monitor all types of conversations to gain a better understanding of customers’ needs, customer’s behavior, and creating a powerful system of predicting customer’s next set of actions.
This is a crucial step in maximizing customer satisfaction as now the agent as well the customer service chatbot knows everything about the customer and is in a position to make a decision that will be centered around the customer and his needs!
Leveraging Voice Chatbots and Multilingual Capabilities of Customer Service Chatbots
A. Voice Chatbots
From messaging apps to AI-powered chatbots, there are a number of mediums and platforms that can facilitate conversational commerce. But one platform in particular has emerged in recent years as a favorite among consumers and brands alike — voice assistants.
Voice-based platforms offer the added advantage of getting things done completely hands-free through simple vocal commands. And one of the things people most like getting done through voice assistants is online shopping!
A key appeal of conversational commerce is its ability to virtually replicate the experience of visiting a store and being guided by a helpful and knowledgeable sales assistant. From the comfort of their homes, customers can explain what they’re looking for in simple terms, enquire about prices and product features, ask follow-up questions, and even get personalized recommendations based on their shopping history and past behavior!
Voice assistants make this experience even more frictionless and interactive. At a time when consumers spend a large chunk of their lives typing or sweeping their thumb across mobile screens, voice-based platforms reduce screen interaction and offer a more convenient hands-free experience.
Unlike interacting with purely textual chatbots, which can feel like talking to a machine, interacting with a voice assistant can feel like having a conversation with a friend, making the experience feel even more personalized and engaging. Voice assistants also provide speedy responses and significantly reduce the time taken for checkout.
B. Vernacular Chatbots
A multilingual chatbot i.e. a bot that can converse with users in multiple languages, can be a tremendous asset to any organization. This particularly holds true in a highly linguistically diverse country like India. The digital revolution in India has exponentially broadened the Internet user base in the country to include large numbers of non-English speakers, who vastly outnumber English language speakers in the country.
A vernacular language chatbot would be particularly useful to a business seeking to make inroads in a specific regional market and/or build brand awareness among potential customers who speak a particular language.
Know more about Haptik’s Linguist Pro platform which helps you build chatbots in the language of your choice.
[Webinar] Building the World’s Largest Vernacular Chatbots
To Sum Up
Every brand aims to provide the best in class customer service. Haptik’s Conversational AI platform is the most powerful tool that these brands can leverage to automate customer service and deliver that CX that will turn your customers into brand loyalists. In this blog, we tried to cover the advantages of a customer service chatbot, but if you want to know how we can help you reduce your customer support costs, boost CSAT and NPS, then get in touch with us!
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How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.