People want to become the best version of themselves — so as to say, they seek validation and the strength to break down barriers that hold them back from the life they want. By helping to bridge that gap, you’re empowering others to walk their own path while allowing your brand to
stride alongside them.

The most important ways to make your chatbot memorable rely on the programmers’ ability to
ensure the right responses come at just the right time.

1. Write To Their Future Self
You have the power to awaken people to channel their ideal self through speech. Chatbots, when properly developed, can work to draw your customers into a state of activity. They’re not just consuming content anymore — they’re actively seeking something, something that you’ve
instilled with value. That something might be a solution, or it may be an optimization, but how they view it starts with you.

If you can help them see how your offerings fit into their ideal life, it will be far easier to connect with them and sway their hearts.

Speak Like They Are Already There
In seeking to speak with their future self, an excellent way to start is simply addressing them as though they’ve already found some footing in the life they want to lead. By directing their focus to their future self, you’re helping them find the path to where they want to be. You’re effectively helping welcome them into their ideal tomorrow, today.

Guide Them To Their Future Self
Though you may speak to their future self, you still must guide them into that tomorrow. Freelancers, for example, would benefit from an educational conversation with a chatbot. Perhaps it could hold a short discussion regarding the niche(s) they are considering during a
pivot.
https://pixabay.com/photos/doors-choices-choose-open-decision-1587329/

2. Build The Bot With Your Brand Voice

When you’re seeking to influence others, you must ensure that your chatbot mirrors the voice of your brand seamlessly. If the bot is off-beat, people will sense that disparity. When people sense disparities, their subconscious begins searching for others with greater prejudice. Seeking out reliable web design services is the first step to ensure your site mirrors your brand.

Once your site has been aligned, you can start to pull key phrases and important sentiments from your site content. Using specific phrases and sentiments is a simple but effective way to ensure you’re speaking the same language across all of your brand assets.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

Be Genuine, Every Time

If your brand doesn’t match your voice, that little voice in your users’ ears will tip them off. Further, it will search for any other discrepancies with added fervor. Fortunately, you have a lot of options when you’re building the chatbot for an established business. On the other hand, the chatbot can play a major role in forming the brand for younger companies.

https://pixabay.com/vectors/webinar-video-call-cam-chat-zoom-5395416/?download

Bridge Your Brand With Their Life
Don’t be afraid to step into the thick of things and really work to help your customers. Service is one of the terms that gets tossed around, but it develops a unique meaning with each company. You can bridge into others’ lives in countless ways, but some companies do it better than others.

eBay, among others, has stood out since COVID shut a notable part of the world down.

Sometimes you have to slow your selling pressure and reinvest in the community that is — or will be — supporting your own business model. Chatbots can be a wonderful way to achieve this, even if it’s something as simple as asking a user about their day and well-being.

3. Tell A Story That Delivers Value
As your users incorporate your brand into their lives, they’re going to attach to your brand for one reason or another — based specifically on which problem you solve or benefit you provide. Ensure your brand story, as told by the chatbot, aligns with your real offerings in order to ensure your story retains value for users. If the story differs notably from your real offerings, users will
encounter notable frustration when they buy-in and realize they didn’t get what they wanted.

Solve One Problem, Really Effectively

Some businesses are able to solve several issues at once, though most businesses that do so are pre-established and already have a well-built brand to lean on and support the cash flow needed to develop additional solutions. Smaller businesses generally see the most success in
solving a single issue very effectively.

By keying in on one specific point, your business will be able to develop a far more comprehensive solution than a generalist company who sorta-but-not really serves the need. In fact, finding online communities that are experiencing frustration like that can provide great information about new and emerging market opportunities.

Don’t Hesitate To Really Connect
In an age where computer screens have replaced virtually all forms of interpersonal socialization, connecting with users is now among the top focal points for brands. It makes sense because many people are living much of their life from behind a screen. ZoomsGiving, ZoomsMas, and Zoomintines Day replaced the holidays, underpinning much of the modern retail cycle.

Online retailers were able to swoop in and capture a massive amount of commerce while also helping limit the number of people in physical stores, and therefore help to stop the spread of COVID.

In order to make your chatbot unforgettable, you must accomplish three things. You need to speak to your users’ future selves, help them find their path into that ideal tomorrow, and solve one specific problem that is keeping them away from that tomorrow. In doing these things, you’re building a lifelong loyal customer.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

---

3 Absolutely Essential Ways to Make Your ChatBot Memorable was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Earlier this year, I had a task to create a knowledge bot for an enterprise level platform. The users were primarily the employees of the organization and intention was to use the knowledge bot to share the offering and usage of platform.

There are quite a lot of frameworks in the market (each with its own pros and cons) hence it is very important that one selects the right framework depending upon the kind of bot that you are targeting to create. In case of creating the knowledge bots the typical requirements are –

1. The main purpose of the knowledge bot is to provide the information about the offering via a guided chat. If the user wishes, he should be able to come out of the guided chat and ask adhoc questions about the offering and go back to the guided chat.

2. The knowledge bot should be able to perform simple tasks like booking a demo of the product.

3. Knowledge bot should provide the Right information about the selected domain (in this case platform offering) correctly in the first time rather than covering a very broad domain with answers which are ~70–80% correct.

4. While it should provide ability to perform NLU and understand user asks but the overall criticality of those asks is limited. As such generally there is little requirement of contextual chatting for the case of knowledge bot.

I started evaluating the available chatbot frameworks in the market on the parameters of cost, flexibility, ease of use, maintainability, scalability, ease of development, future extensibility, integration, community support and zeroed in on below 2 platforms –

i) Rasa — “Rasa is the leading conversational AI platform, for personalized conversations at scale. With Rasa, all teams can create personalized, automated interactions with customers, at scale. Rasa provides infrastructure & tools necessary for building the very best assistants — ones that meaningfully transform how customers communicate with businesses.” — from Rasa’s site.

— Salient features include —

• NLU based, default NLU engine provided is open source.
• Comes with both open source (limited features) and paid enterprise license (more features).
• Creation of Chatbots more inclined towards Developers.
• Supports advanced features like calling external API, Intent Identification, Slot filling etc.
• Can be embed into website. On-prem/Cloud deployment. Creation of chatbots using stories and training data (developer oriented) is not via web-based GUI framework.
• Good community Support.
• Platform is built around AI with training data being key to improve performance. Not a flow based so bit of black box.

ii) Botpress — “Botpress is an open-source platform for developers to build high-quality digital assistants. We have put together the boilerplate code and infrastructure you need to get a chatbot up and running. We propose you a complete dev-friendly platform that ships with all the tools you need to build, deploy and manage production-grade chatbots in record time.” — from Botpress site.

— Salient features include –-

• NLU based, default NLU engine provided is open source.
• Comes with both open source (limited features) and paid enterprise license (more features).
• GUI based creation of Chatbots.
• Supports advanced features like calling external API, Intent and Entity Identification, Slot filling etc.
• Can be embed into website. On-prem/Cloud deployment but provide web interface.
• Good community Support.
• Primarily Flow based with support for NLU capability. Debugger support and control.

The main strength of Rasa lies in its NLU engine and the contextual chatting experience it offers. By contextual, I mean each input from user is taken in context of the ongoing conversation and then responded. However, training the bot to get those conversations right requires lot of efforts, compute and skills and as the conversation domain increases, the total number of stories needed to be written increases exponentially.

On the other hand, Botpress uses a mix of AI and rule-based engine to create the chatting experience for the user. It is not so strong on the contextual conversation but has a rich GUI offering for providing guided information.

While being a Senior Data Scientist, my initial feel was to go with Rasa (you know the contextual AI offering does sound attractive) but once I evaluated pros and cons in relation to the task at hand, I found Botpress to be more suited for creating knowledge bot with combination of rule based guided tour and NLU based adhoc questions (QnA feature of Botpress) given the time and resource constraint that we usually have in IT projects.

Below are the features that Knowledge bot developers should look in the bot framework. I have also mentioned how Botpress fulfils those.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

Ease of development — How fast can you get a basic version of your knowledge bot up and running. Does it require very specialized skill set or even the citizen data scientists can work with it? How easy it is to do a rebranding of the bot?

With Botpress, you can get a basic knowledge bot up and running using its GUI with absolutely no coding in a couple of weeks. It also offers simple way to brand the bot by just changing the style sheet. It provides widgets such as cards and carousal to share the information in a GUI rich manner.

Integration — Bots always need to be integrated with the main portal and must support other channels (e.g. Microsoft Team) as well. While selecting the bot framework we should see whether these integrations are natively provided and can be done with minimal efforts.

In Botpress, Integration with the main site is very easy with just a single script to open the bot in an iframe. It also provides integration with other channels such as Facebook, Telegram, Microsoft Teams and Slack to name a few.

Future Extensibility — While the initial knowledge bot might start with a limited scope, the fact is that the scope will keep increasing once the management realizes its benefits. The bot might not longer be limited to providing information but would also be expected to do simpler tasks like booking a demo etc. Hence it is important that the bot framework that one selects has support for these features.

Botpress provides extensions to write custom code to call backend APIs to perform complex tasks. The features such as Intent, Entity and slots are used to capture intention of the user to do a particular tasks by identifying the right Entity, capture the required values using slots and then have your custom code call the back end API to perform the tasks. These tasks could be ranging from sending an email to booking a conference room or a flight ticket or ordering a pizza.

Scalability — Often you would be required to build the knowledge bot for internet traffic and hence it is very important that the bot framework that you select can be scaled.

Botpress has a cluster based horizontally scalable architecture. One can leverage a load balancer to distribute traffic amongst bots.

Maintainability — As with all IT projects, it is never a deploy and forget scenario. We live in the world of DevOps where there is a continuous deployment of the application into the production. Hence it is of paramount importance that the bot framework does have a model that deals with scale and complexity especially when you are looking for a GUI based development.

In Botpress, the development happens by means of creating a flow chart, the structure is modular. It has the capability to create sub flows with entry and exit point defined for the sub-flow. This way we can create the knowledge bots using many simpler, smaller flows instead of one big flow.

NLU — While guided flow is good for providing the information, that alone is not enough. The main intention of providing a bot is that user should be able to chat as if there is an individual sitting behind the bot. This means that bot should be able to understand the nuances of language and provide a proper response.

In Botpress, there is an QnA module which allows you to cater to random questions that the user might ask about the product. You can provide multiple questions against an answer and train the Botpress NLU engine to neutralize the questions against semantics and grammar. While the NLU engine is not as powerful as Rasa’s I found that its fits the purpose. We had around 110 answers to be trained against ~1100 questions. After training, I found that the NLU engine did a decent job and got us the right answers more than 97% of time. Botpress NLU engines makes use to 2 services –

a) Duckling — For extraction of system entities which make it more robust during implementation of tasks based on entity and slots (e.g. ordering a pizza or booking a flight ticket).

b) Language Server — This provides the word embeddings and has support for multiple languages.

Context Switching — The transition between asking Adhoc questions and taking a guided flow should be seamless. The flows should not be very long, provide a break points to user where he can ask the questions and then go back to flow whenever required.

With the use of ‘flow wide transitions’ feature provided within Botpress, the context switching between a guided tour and random questions can be implemented easily. Also, from the question and answer section Botpress gives ability to go back to a node which is part of guided tour hence taking the user back to guided tour.

There are other features of Botpress such as multilingual ability, Dockerization, Human In the loop, using 3rd Party NLU, SSO integrations, Clustering, Monitoring and Altering, Strong community support which can make the overall experience more robust.

Summary — Next time you wanted to build a knowledge bot in a short span of time, consider a bot framework that leverages both the rule based and NLU powered engines. Botpress is a strong contender for the same especially if cost and ROI is a decision-making factor.

Abhinav Ajmera

Senior Data Scientist, Atos

The opinion of the author are personal and author is in no way associated with Botpress.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Knowledge bots was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Businesses are now expected to respond to and solve customer queries instantly to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Customers no longer wait for businesses to respond. They need their answers, and they need them now.

Businesses need to evolve to meet changing customer demands. They also need to scale their operations to cope with the increasing volume of customer engagement through digital channels.

The customer service industry has been revolutionized. The innovation responsible — conversational automation via chatbots.

Scaling customer conversations through automation is an essential business strategy to save costs, engage customers, and maximise revenue.

According to Userlike, 91% of consumers expect to engage with a business through a chatbot. With such an overwhelming demand for messaging, businesses can no longer delay chatbots as a priority.

Below we’ve shared why your business needs to make a chatbot its top customer service priority.

→ Free Guide: 5 Steps to Creating the Perfect Digital Conversation

Contents

1. Consumer Readiness: Customers Want to Engage with Chatbots

2. Organisational Squeeze: Chatbots Reduce Costs and Increase Revenue

• Reduce Cost to Serve
• Maximise Revenue
• Beyond the Hype Phase

Consumer Readiness: Customers Want to
Engage With Chatbots

To quote Queen; “I want it all, and I want it now,” sums up how the modern consumer operates.

They want immediate and accurate responses to their queries and constant up-time no matter the time of day. They also want simplicity. In our VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world consumers simply have too many things competing for their attention.

The use of chatbots has grown by 92% since 2019, making it the communication channel with the largest growth in recent years. This is not surprising. 66% of consumers prefer communicating with brands via messaging applications, according to Twilio.

Much of this stems from the popularity of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s engaging. While originally a personal channel of communication, consumers expect to connect with businesses in the same way. Leading brands have been quick to adopt this approach — and they’re reaping the rewards.

Modern consumers will only deal with a human if they have to, or because they’ve been told to. The large majority are steering clear of call centres. Connecting with businesses through messaging channels is a strong preference that is only growing. Businesses need to adjust to this change in behaviour. Failure to do so will propel adopters of new digital channels forward even further.

The best businesses don’t wait until they are ready to meet consumer demands. They make decisions and take action based on what their customers are telling them. They adapt and move fast. Consumers are not only ready to use chatbots, they want to — they expect it. Leading businesses see this, take initiative and deliver early. Is that you?

The businesses that don’t prioritise a chatbot, or who constantly delay, will only see others rise above them. They’re essentially giving competitors an advantage that is difficult to claw back.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

Organisational Squeeze: Chatbots Reduce Costs and Increase Revenue

Regardless of their business, somewhere in most organisational strategies you’ll find one of two things, decrease the cost to serve and increase revenue.

Managing these successfully is the difference between life and death for businesses, so naturally, these are a priority for any business leader

Decrease Cost to Serve

Chatbots enable businesses to decrease their cost to serve. They do this by automating conversations at scale. Where humans can only serve a single customer at once, a chatbot is capable of conversing with unlimited volumes of customers at any point in time.

Gartner suggests that over 40% of today’s live volume could be diverted to self-service channels such as chatbots. Research suggests customer service reps spend 80% of their time solving the same 20 enquiries. Most of these are low value, repetitive tasks that are costly for businesses to solve with a human. By automating these with a chatbot, businesses solve customer queries faster — reducing their cost to serve, and allow reps to spend more time on higher value tasks.

Example of a chatbot managing a return enquiry and using an address lookup feature to find the customers nearest store.

According to IBM, chatbots save businesses up to 30% in customer support costs. With customers expecting 24/7 support, staffing a contact centre around the clock is extremely costly for businesses. Chatbots are available 24/7 and provide an always-on framework to give customers the support they need, without the same level of expense.

Maximise Revenue

Businesses who engage their customers with chatbots are benefiting from increases in sales and revenue. Forbes reports that chatbots have increased sales by 67% according to business leaders. They empower businesses to deliver additional sales channels and automate lead generation.

As consumers demand more personalised buying experiences, businesses are adopting AI to provide a deeply engaging experience that is tailored to each customer.

By taking into account previous buying and engagement history, chatbots can automatically identify which products and services are most relevant to up-sell or cross-sell for a particular customer.

Example of a chatbot upselling an additional item, and adding it to their ecommerce cart.

Businesses are increasing basket sizes, and maximising revenue as a result. Salesforce has reported that when shoppers follow AI-powered product recommendations, their average order value increases by 14%. The proof is there. As e-commerce volumes explode, chatbots act as a digital sales assistant, guiding buyers to their next purchase.

Chatbots also have high engagement rates of nearly 98%. Not only do consumers engage with this channel, they interact to a deeper level than with many others. High conversation completion rates mean consumers see more of what businesses are sharing with them. This gives businesses a greater chance to convert and close potential buyers.

Beyond the Hype Phase

Chatbots are not a new innovation, they’ve been around for years. Some of the early stage bots may have put companies off including them in their strategy as developers navigated the possibilities of this technology. Today’s bots are more mature. They’ve evolved and have proven themselves time and time again to be an integral piece of the customer service puzzle.

Gone is the hype-phase. Businesses can no longer overlook the importance of a chatbot to the success of their business. Customers expect them. The use cases are there. The value is undeniable. And it’s only going to increase.

Don’t delay. Make a chatbot a priority for your business today. All it takes is a conversation with an expert to set you on the right path.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

---

Why Chatbots Are A Top Customer Service Priority was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Are you a business owner? Does your business really need chatbots?

The answer to the above question depends on the type of business and the intensity of innovation and technology that drives you. In recent times, we have seen how businesses are desperate to introduce chatbots! Today, the tough competition makes it mandatory for every business to adopt innovative technology.

Businesses must catch a unique trend to be early enough to grab profit immensely and maintain a successful algorithm for the long term. For a couple of years, AI chatbot and chatbot development have emerged as the most followed trend.

Making a chatbot in Amazon Lex and making a chatbot in Twilio are vastly different endeavors, Lex involves making a chatbot through a more AI-based approach, and with Twilio we can make a simple question-answer bot, don’t get me wrong both approaches have their pros and cons which we will be looking at in this article. Firstly, we will be looking at Lex.

Amazon Lex(v1)

Firstly, in Lex there are intents, they denote the intention of the user, which are sophisticated functions that activate when the user enters some sample utterances. Secondly, there are sample utterances which are a part of intents, they do the work of deciding based on what user enters which intent to call, if you enter some sample utterances the AI will make sure if someone enters something similar then also it will trigger the intent. Then there are slots, which are used to store user input in different variables.

They already have some predefined slot types which are very useful in case you want to take a standard input like Date, Time, Name, Phone Number, Email, etc. They are really helpful because the user can enter in any format and it will convert it to a single format which is super useful and you don’t have to worry about taking input where the user has multiple choices to enter the same thing, for example, we need the user to enter data there are many formats in which a user can enter a date. Lex understands every format there is without any extra effort. This helps a lot when making a standard bot.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

Twilio Bot

In Twilio bot the way to make a chatbot is very different than Lex, what do I mean by that? I mean that in Twilio everything has to be done by creating a flow chart as in how should a conversation will flow, this is done through a set of drag and drop options whatever you want you can drop it from the list and integrate it with the flow

chart. There are various options like send a message, send a message and wait for a reply for the user to enter something, then then you can perform different things based on what they enter. This way you can customize the flow however you want. It gives you incredible flexibility on how you want your chatbot to behave.

I’m an AWS expert and AWS Certified Architect, AWS Certified Sysops Administrator and AWS Developer Associate. I take up AWS assignments as well. You can reach me at Linkedin.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Designing a Chatbot with Amazon Lex and Twilio Chat was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Chatbots for Learning: Can AI-Powered Chatbots Drive a More Sustainable Society?

There is an abundance of uses for chatbots, the most common being used for business support like customer support and sales. Here at Noodle Factory, we use it to create chat-based learning environments.

Currently, chatbots are impacting sustainability as there’s an increasing number of chatbots supporting research in sustainable and environmental causes.

Let’s look back at Earth Day and celebrate by learning how integrating chatbots in businesses can encourage sustainability in our society.

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[link] [comments]

Email, phone calls, and chat. Is one truly better than the others?

Does any of them create customer experiences superior to the ones made by others?

Read on to find out which channel claims customer support glory.

Email

Emails have been an integral part of customer support infrastructure for decades. To say that the email is dead would be a lie.

But, it does have its limitations. Depending solely on email is a sure-shot path to frustrated customers.

Email Advantages

Details

Emails allow your customers to describe the issues they’re facing in greater detail. Your customers will think the email through and check to see whether they’ve missed anything.

They even allow your agents to explain the solution in depth.

Less intimidating

A phone call can be somewhat intimidating, especially if the customer is an introvert. With email, such customers don’t need to worry about that. They just need to type it out and shoot it over.

Record

Customers do not usually get access to recordings and transcripts of phone calls. They have no record of their conversation with the company.

This changes with email.

Everything is documented.

It makes customers more comfortable interacting with your support staff. They feel secure knowing that they have a record of the conversation that would help them in case of a future dispute.‍

Attachments

It allows your customers to add attachments like images, videos, documents, etc., to elaborate on the issue that they’re facing.

Your agents also have the option to send attachments that guide customers towards the resolution of the issue or prove that it’s been resolved.

Flexible

Customers don’t always have the time to deal with an issue as soon as they notice it. They’ve got other things to take care of.

Informing you about the issue over an email gives them the flexibility they need.

They get to tell you about it before it slips their minds, but they don’t need to carry on the conversation with your team immediately.

It allows them to go about their day, do whatever they need to and then come back and deal with the issue whenever they have the time.

‍

‍

Email Disadvantages

Clarifications become troublesome

Here’s an example.

I recently enrolled in an online course but could not find a particular e-book in the portal’s resources section.

Since they didn’t have a chatbot, I dropped them an email on a Saturday night.

Problem 1: I got a reply on Monday. Not even Monday morning, but around 4:00 pm.

Problem 2: They need more details from me.

So, I replied to their email. And they got back to me a day later.

They’ve asked me to check another section of the portal, which I already checked. So, I attach a screenshot of the portal and reply.

On Thursday, I received an email asking me to confirm more details. I did. And by Saturday, I still hadn’t received a reply.

I’m fuming.

That’s a significant disadvantage of email support. Clarifications can stretch the conversation too long, delaying resolution and frustrating your customers.

Delivery issues

Quite a few of the emails you sent may never end up in your customers’ inboxes.

Customers’ inboxes might be full. The email address entered into your form could be inactive. For all you know, the service provider decided that your email sounded a bit too spammy.

If many people decide that your emails are spammy, you could even end up on an email blacklist.

There’s a lot that can go wrong. You can’t afford to leave it up to chance.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

Response time

There seems to be a disparity between the company’s idea of the ideal response time and its customers.

Customers expect replies to their emails within an hour. But, most companies tend to reply within a 12-hour time frame.

That’s ridiculous. But it gets worse.

62% of companies just don’t reply to their support emails, period.

Guess what that feels like — a nightmare.

Your customers are left to fend for themselves. They have no idea of when you’ll reply to them if you respond to them.

Now you’re creating both — confusion and anxiety.‍

‍Phone

This one needs no introduction. We all have stories about phone customer service, good ones as well as bad ones.

So, let’s dive right into the pros and cons of phone support.

Phone Advantages

Real-time conversations

These conversations don’t need to be spaced out. Your customers don’t need to wait for hours to get a reply.

It’s immensely reassuring.

Your customers won’t have to sit around waiting for a response that may never come. Your agents can guide them through the solution right over the phone call.

Immediate clarifications.

Phone and chat both excel here.

They spare your customers the torment that I went through with the email situation.

Need more details? You’ll get them on the spot.

Your customers won’t have to send them and wait a whole day for your team to reply.

Potential for empathy

While emails can feel too formal and impersonal, phone calls allow your agent’s personality to shine through. They allow your agents to be empathetic towards your customers.

It makes your customers feel like you genuinely care about them.

Displaying empathy leads to an increase in customer trust and could even result in a growth in sales.

Phone Disadvantages

Lack of scalability

Sure, phone calls let you have deeper conversations that bring out the human element, but you can’t scale them up. Your agents can only converse with one customer at a time. That’s it.

Got more requests flowing in? You’ll need to hire more agents.

Waiting on hold

Forcing customers to wait on hold could practically be considered torture.

Firstly, it convinces your customers that you have no respect for their time.

Secondly, when you put customers on hold, they have no choice but to wait. They don’t know how long it’ll take to reconnect, so they can’t do anything else during that time.

And guess what. Your customers know that there are better options. They know that there are alternatives to this torturous wait. So if you’re still forcing them to twiddle their thumbs till you find a moment to talk to them, they’re most certainly going to hold that against you.

Requires commitment

When a customer gets on a call with you, it requires them to commit time and energy to resolve the issue. Quite often, they don’t have any time to spare during your team’s working hours.

In such a situation, they need to be able to leave you a message and open your reply whenever they have an opportunity.

No context or records

Customers generally don’t have access to transcripts of past phone conversations. That can be frustrating. But that’s not half as bad as your agents not having context.

If there are no records of past conversations or the records cannot be easily accessed during current discussions, your agents are in a tough situation.

They will end up asking your customers about something that the customer has already briefed your team on. That is bound to annoy your customers.

Even when a new agent comes in or a call is escalated, these records need to be available. According to Accenture research, 89% of customers get terribly frustrated when they have to repeat themselves to multiple agents.

The language barrier

You’re missing out if you don’t support your customers in their own language. The problem with phone customer support is that you can’t scale up multilingual support without hiring new agents or training existing ones.

IVRs are annoying

Nobody likes navigating through an IVR. Most people hate it. Personally, that’s one of the main reasons I avoid calling up customer support.

But it isn’t just me.

4 out of 10 Americans told Aspect that they would rather scrub a toilet than try navigating through an IVR.

Chat

Chat support overcomes a lot of the limitations that emails and phone calls have. It does this by combining automation with the human touch.

Intelligent AI chatbots work together with live chat agents to give you speed, personalization, and warmth in the same solution.

Chat Advantages

Provides convenience

As soon as a customer initiates a conversation, they have an intelligent bot attending to them. If the query is complex, it’s auto-routed to the agent equipped to handle it.

Customers don’t need to waste their time navigating through an IVR or hopping through multiple agents before they reach the one that can help them.

It even eliminates buyer resistance by answering product-related questions in real-time, without delays. In fact, 44% of customers in a Forrester study felt that live chat is the best feature an e-commerce website could offer.

Eliminates the language barrier

Chatbots empower your support team to engage with customers in their own language at scale without hiring more agents.

In an ICMI study, 71.5% of customer service managers reported that their CSAT scores rose when they engaged customers in their own language. 58.4% of these customer service managers even noted that it led to a rise in customer loyalty.

With an Engati chatbot, you get to engage with your customers across the world in 50+ languages.‍

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Support customers over the channel they prefer

Customers get support over the channel they want to engage with you over.

If they are comfortable with WhatsApp, that’s where they’ll get support.

Are they more active on Facebook? Engage them over Messenger.

Maybe they enjoy the privacy that Telegram offers. You can chat with them there too.

Engati allows you to chat with customers over 14 channels. But that’s not all.

You get to see all the conversations in a one-view inbox and stitch them all together. This ensures that your agents always have context about past conversations across every channel.

The result? Your customers will never need to repeat themselves.‍

‍Real-time clarifications

Like phone calls, chat allows for instant clarifications and follow-ups. But, it offers another advantage. It empowers you and your customers to send attachments.

This allows your customers to elaborate on their issues and makes it easier for your agents to explain the solution.

Potential for empathy

Your live chat agents can pay attention to your customer’s disposition and adjust their tone accordingly. They can even be more empathetic towards them and show your customers that they have their backs.

But this is not just limited to live chat.

With sentiment analysis, your chatbot can judge your customer’s mood and respond appropriately.

Scalability

Chat support truly gives you personalization at scale.

Your AI bots can handle all the repetitive customer interactions on their own, tweaking them for individual customers.

But your agents aren’t stuck handling one customer at a time either.

Live chat allows them to converse with multiple customers simultaneously, allowing you to serve more customers faster without hiring additional agents.

Journey mapping

Engati Live Chat allows you to see where the customer landed on your website, which pages he/she navigated through, and which page they decided to contact you from.

It helps you identify which of your pages lack clarity and need improvements.

Builds emotional relationships

Live chat allows you to build and nurture personal relationships with your customers. It helps increase their trust in you and reduces churn.

Your customers need to feel emotionally connected to your brand.

A study published in the Harvard Business Review found that customers who were highly satisfied but didn’t have an emotional connection to the company were 18% less profitable than those with an emotional connection.

However, those that were highly satisfied and had a strong emotional connection were 52% more profitable than those that were highly satisfied but not fully connected.

Live chat can help you create these emotional connections.

Saves time

Chat solutions save time for both — you and your customers.

According to Inc., 42% of customers prefer live chat because they don’t need to wait on hold.

Econsultancy says that 79% of customers prefer chat because it gives them instant responses.

Blibli, one of the pioneers of online shopping malls in Indonesia, has seen great results with chat support.

By deploying their Engati chatbot on Messenger, they increased their response rate by 86%, reduced their response time by 80%, and saved over 631 hours in support time.

The verdict

While email and phone support can be handy, customers tend to prefer chat support.

That doesn’t mean you should completely shut your email and phone support programs down.

It means that you need to complement them with chat support.

Give your customers the option to choose the support channel that they want to engage with you over.

This article about the “Chat v/s Email v/s Phone: The winning customer support channel” was originally published in Engati blogs.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Chat v/s Email v/s Phone: The winning customer support channel was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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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3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

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!

Want to develop an Intelligent Virtual Assistant solution for your brand?

GET IN TOUCH

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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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.

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