From voice-enabled interfaces to AI-powered virtual assistants or chatbots, Conversational AI is changing the way we live, work and communicate. It is changing the way businesses support their customers, whether helping them with their queries or purchase decisions. Adding a Conversational AI to your business changes the whole business model.
As per Gartner report, by 2021, 15% of all customer service interactions will be totally taken care of by AI, an increase of 400% from 2017. Yet, customer support is just a small part of the business success story.
Better customer service is directly proportional to business success. When businesses slide their service standards even to a minute level, they face negative consequences with serious repercussions on the overall business. Tragically, small trades like plumbing and heating services, gyms and personal trainers, laundry and many others, fail to meet the customer expectations in terms of response time, or overall customer experience. The factors that result in a negative effect on customer service are insufficient support staff, lack of real time support, or unable to respond in a timely manner to customer needs.
Let’s take an example, usual micro to small trade businesses consist of 1 to 20 people and there are days when all of them have tasks that they must attend to, so what happens when a customer calls in for an emergency service? no one is there to respond.
Result: Angry customer = loss of service
One missed phone call can be a huge blow to your company’s image and reputation. Customers may leave bad reviews on established websites which can be damaging to your business. Unfortunately the world we live in, society concentrates on the negative before the positive therefore you should be doing everything possible to give your business a positive corporate image. Thanks to the internet, customers nowadays are more likely to do some research about your business before availing themselves of your services or products. If they see a negative review, it will most likely drive them away. Aside from online feedback, poor customer service can get around through the word of mouth. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes: why would you continue dealing with a business that can’t help you when you need them?
Web forms vs Phone calls
Computer-mediated forms of communication are important in this digital age. However, it has been found that most people still prefer using their phones to contact businesses because of its personal touch. An unanswered phone call is a missed opportunity. Did you know that even just one unanswered phone call can significantly affect your revenue? Those missed phone calls are likely to be from potential customers.
Studies have found that the callback rate of people whose calls you’ve missed is very slim. If you’re lucky, customers may just complain, but still stick with your business. Unfortunately, though, most customers will simply walk away and turn to your competitors if their calls are left unanswered. With every phone call you miss, you provide your competitors with more leads.
In order to achieve a better customer experience, some businesses will try to do whatever it takes to keep their customers happy. They might hire dedicated customer agents to attend to phone calls or respond to emails to book services and so on, but that will again cost them a lot of money, maybe an office space, or additional IT infrastructure.
Sounds a lot right! What if there was a solution that could help these small tradespeople increase customer experience and increase sales by leveraging Conversational AI? Indeed, there is: Swifter AI, whose mission is to provide AI driven customer service and tools so that businesses that don’t have front-office staff and physical phones can deal with customer intake and payments, while also paying attention to all incoming calls. With powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) and omnichannel features, Swifter AI helps small trades implement effective customer communications at low costs.
Here’s How we Help
Customer service is the backbone of any business and phone calls still play a very important role in this day and age. When you deliver excellent customer service over the phone, not only do you boost your customer satisfaction and loyalty, but you also ensure the success of your business. This is why Swifter AI can help you with excellent customer service to ensure the success within your business even when you are extremely busy.
Integrating Swifter AI’s assistants in your small trade businesses has massive benefits.
24/7 Customer Service
Think about the time when you had to wait for a long time for a locksmith to come and fix your entrance door. You couldn’t step out of your house the entire day.
Wasn’t it frustrating?
Long waiting times can be annoying for customers.
If you want to provide a customer with a quick appointment for any services you need to ensure that someone or something is there to answer the calls 24/7 irrespective of any time or day. Fortunately, conversational AI technology can be incredibly helpful in this regard.
They can be available to tackle customer queries 24/7, even from different time zones.
To get started, all you need is Swifter AI, that has a range of out of the box AI agents that can work in minutes with no programming knowledge required. The platform comes with a custom merchant profile.
For instance, you can define your own business account with general information like name, contact details, description and create your own list of services and appointment types that customers can book with you.
And Voila! The AI receptionist will do the customer engagement for you.
Wider Engagement
Convenience should be prioritized when it comes to customer experience. What if customers could directly book appointments or make calls without having to switch platforms?
With Swifter AI-driven solutions, it’s possible to do that.
You can reach more audiences by connecting with your customers across multiple channels like on your website or Facebook page, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Facebook Messenger and many other popular platforms and devices.
Scheduling Appointments
Using Swifter AI you can be in control of your appointments. Your virtual AI receptionist will only book appointments for you when you want and you are free and you’ll receive, in real-time notification by email or SMS. You can also synchronize events with all major calendar platforms like Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar and others.
FAQs
How often were you customers misdirected with a response to their questions? No more with Swifter AI. You can instruct your AI agents how to respond to customers. You can start from a predefined set of questions and answers and customize them as you like. Your receptionist will be trained to your business specificity.
Full control over your budget and customers “sentiment”
One of the most important aspects is the ability to manage the AI agent usage over and view your current expenses. Together with our ‘top up account’ feature it gives you more control over the costs as you go. Acquire the advanced ability to see in real-time all the conversation with your customers over the telephone or any other communication platform. Get a glimpse of how the discussion went on, with our built-in sentiment analysis tool. You’ll know exactly the customers’ feedback instantly.
Ready to take a Conversational AI leap?
Conversational AI will stay to help your business support customers, give them a unique experience and ultimately help your small business settle into a profitable business.
If you’re ready to get started or just want to see how it works, you can register for free by following the link below:
Conversational AI: An opportunity for Small Businesses was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.