Chatbots take care of simple customer concerns so that employees have more time for complex cases. When customers turn to a company for service, they expect fast response times and solutions, regardless of their channel. However, agents can only handle a certain number of cases at a time. How do you scale support? It is where customer service chatbots come in
These chatbots are powered by an expert system (AI) to answer common customer questions. They help customers resolve simple questions and issues quickly and free up staff to handle complex human interactions.
How To Create Effective Customer Service Chatbots
Tackle simple, repetitive tasks that don’t require an agent’s soft skills and experience. For example, suppose a customer asks how to reset a password or wants to know an estimated delivery time. In that case, a customer service chatbot answers the question quickly by automatically accessing the relevant information. At the same time, your staff members can focus on solving complex problems and building relationships with customers.
If your company is starting to invest in a chatbot, you should first identify the most common tasks and customer queries to determine what should be automated. Consider the following six suggestions when planning your first AI-powered chatbot implementation.
1. Personalize each greeting
Program chatbots to take values like “first name” for customers already logged in to ensure chatbots greet them naturally. You train your client service representatives to be friendly, greet customers by name, and frequently identify their status or level of service. Your AI user interface can do the same things within your chatbot.
2. Switch from static to conversational form
Most clients don’t want to fill out a form online and then wait 24 hours for a response. An AI chatbot for customer service that dynamically asks different questions based on the customer’s input is more engaging. It also helps resolve the client’s concerns faster. Even when an agent eventually steps in to help, the information gathered by the chatbot is already available to them in their console.
3. Create interactive FAQs
Thanks to natural language processing (NLP), chatbots recognize the language used in everyday interactions and make it easy for your clients to get the answers they want. Instead of asking customers to visit your FAQ page, let chatbots bring the answers to your customers. Load your top-level FAQ questions into your AI interface, including all follow-up questions and their corresponding answers.
4. Deploy chatbots for additional channels
You’ve probably enabled the service for some digital channels – such as mobile messaging, webchat, and social media – so your customers can contact you in the way they prefer. But the average customer today uses
Multiple channels to communicate with businesses. There are many ways to evolve customer service to meet ever-changing expectations. Start by digging through your analytics to find out which channel is driving the most traffic for your business, and then identify the ten most common requests. Save staff time by programming your chatbot to answer these queries.
5. Engage customers with rich text and content
Plain text is suitable for answering simple questions, but rich text – including bold, italics, fonts, font sizes, and font colors – provides the wow factor. Imagine being able to insert images or even interactive menus into a chat conversation. Based on customer questions, your chatbot will display a product menu, a selection of knowledge articles, or further customer support options – all within the chat.
6. Embed process automation into chatbots
Allow your customers to help themselves by giving them step-by-step instructions directly in the chat. Ask your team what tasks customers can easily do themselves – these are the tasks your employees can do with their eyes closed (e.g., replacing a lost credit card). Once you have identified a few simple tasks, program chatbots to guide the customer from start to finish. The chatbot may still need to pass the conversation to an agent for complex problems. But the agent is well prepared as chatbots gather information to help them resolve each case quickly.
Scale your customer service with chatbots
Your customers will appreciate that customer service chatbots provide quick and efficient solutions to their questions and concerns. Meanwhile, your staff can focus on complex customer service challenges instead of answering frequently asked questions. And you can quickly scale support to handle an increase in requests whenever they come your way.
Artificial intelligence is helping to reshape the customer service landscape and provide a helpful boost to traditional customer service. Chatbots will never replace traditional live customer service, but if your business is ready to offer more options to its customers, chatbots may be the way to go.
Chatbots offer powerful, hands-on support that provides valuable information to your customers while freeing up your staff’s time by automating repetitive tasks.
Adding chatbots to your customer service offering will help your business become more tech-savvy and provide your customers with another helpful, easily accessible channel for assistance with simple, everyday problems.
Customer service chatbots have certainly gained popularity in the last few years, but they’re not entirely new. According to Google Trends data, search volume around ‘chatbots for customer service’ has grown by 19 times since 2011, when people first started realizing their value. Have you looked at our Customer service chatbots?
For more information, please visit Chattbotz.com