Customer expectations are higher than ever, and the chatbot has increased these significantly. Your customers now want an immediate response from your brand. They want you to give them fast and reliable customer service across all your channels…and that includes messaging applications.
Chat Bots are the new customer care teams and this newly enhanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology can give you a serious business edge if correctly implemented. You can now identify and resolve a variety of your customers’ issues in a cost-effective way without wasting any of your resources. You can make a bot for free without any coding.
To help you in your quest to provide your customers with the best support you can offer, I’ve highlighted a few things you should keep in mind when implementing your customer care chatbot.
The chatbot has evolved
Over time, chatbots have become more human-like. Gone are the days where your bot chooses from a list of predetermined questions. Today, with the help of AI, your bot is able to think for itself rather than just choose from a list that could be irrelevant to your customer’s questions.
With Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook jumping on the bandwagon, you can now integrate your bot into your messaging channels, offering your audience a more personal level of support. Despite some chatbot kinks still not being worked out, the advancements in this technology means you should watch this space for any new features you could use.
Chatbots are at the heart of your products and services
Chatbots are no longer just automated answering machines with limited conversational options; you can now give them a level of freedom with a specific focus. This focus should always be on your customers and your products or services.
Be sure to limit the scope of what your chatbot can do. Although you’d love it to eventually stand in as a human member of your customer care team, it’s not possible for this to happen overnight. Focus on your products and services, and slowly expand its knowledge by feeding it more information over time.
Bot and humans work perfectly together
The perfect customer support has the right combination of human and chatbot interactions. You can’t expect your chatbot to know everything, and if they don’t answer your customers relevantly, you may see some frustrations.
Chatbots are not yet ready to take over the role of humans. Instead, think of them as a way to enhance your customer care services. To get the most out of your chatbot, you need to design one that, if overwhelmed, can be taken over by a human member of your team.
Not all bots are the same
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as copying another company’s chatbot and pasting it to yours. You need the right chatbot for your business, and to do so, you need to make sure it has the right technology and intelligence to do the job.
You need to understand your customers’ needs, which means you have to integrate your chatbot with customer records and other important data to make sure it offers personalized responses to your audience.
You can learn and adapt
As with any technology, you can learn and adapt your chatbot to slowly make it the perfect customer care tool for your brand. To ensure your chatbot is able to answer your customers’ questions and automate the correct responses, you need to make sure your chatbot is exposed to:
- All the relevant internal processes flows
- Your specific customer journey maps
- In-depth information about your products and services
As you grow the number of interactions between your audience and your chatbot, you will quickly gather important data that will allow you to refine it. The information you gather from these conversations will work in your favor in two ways:
- You will be able to provide your audience with incredible, personalized customer support.
- You’ll gather important feedback from your customers that will enable you to improve the very products that your chatbot is supporting.
Finally…
Although the chatbot technology has come a long way, there is still so much to keep up with and learn about. Some key rules to follow to ensure you are giving your customers the best support you can via your chatbot include:
- Be engaging
- Provide numerous options for efficiency
- Give your chatbot personality with avatars
- Always give your customer the chance to talk to a human member of your team
By gathering a strong understanding of how this technology is evolving, giving it all the information you have about your products and services, having a human touch to back it up, and learning from all the data you gather, you’ll be able to provide your customers with great support while staying one step ahead of your competition.
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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