A company with excellent customer service has the potential to significantly improve revenue, reduce customer churn, and increase their overall business success.
Almost 3 out of 4 customers nowadays stay loyal to a company because of their great support, and nearly 50% will stop purchasing from a company due to low support standards.
Now that we know that customer service is vital for a thriving business, let’s look at how you can integrate chatbots with your current customer support team to improve your service.
What is a chatbot?
Chatbots are artificial intelligence that can replicate a real-life human interaction. They can interpret human language and, based on these triggers, produce a specific and correct response.
Many businesses have adopted chatbots as their first point of contact with customers. Let’s take a look at why.
Task prioritization
There are various ways to get the most out of your customer support agents. This can include anything from improving communication through the implementation of messaging apps available on both iOS and Android devices to workflow automation.
One of the most crucial techniques you can use is prioritizing the critical tasks and automating the simple ones.
Chatbots are a great way to quickly and efficiently handle simpler customer service requests, while more complex issues are directed to your human agents. This makes the process faster for your customers and helps keep your customer support agents more involved in their jobs.
Automating these repetitive tasks is vital for your overall workforce productivity. Statistics show that employees interested in their daily activities are more productive and produce over 20% more profit. Not only that, but this increased engagement reduces employee turnover, which can be good for your bottom line.
Data collection and insight production
Businesses that prioritize data collection and monetization are likely to be far more successful than ones that don’t. Data enables you to understand your company, industry, market, and – most importantly – customers. Making money from your data doesn’t always mean selling it directly.
Chatbots are, after all, robots. This means they have the ability to continually collect data points such as:
– Response times
– Chat keyword collection
– Abandoned chat information
– General customer habits and preferences
– Customer support agent effectiveness and resolution percentage
All of these statistics and data points can be analyzed, and actionable insight can be created to help inform future company decisions and improve your customer support. Crucially, this means your agents are more informed and can provide a higher level of support.
Consider this scenario. You’re a company that provides software and application advice for small businesses. You inform customers about where they can find, for example, the best employee management software.
Collecting and analyzing data will help you understand your customers and produce better support structures, such as a more detailed FAQ page. This will increase customer engagement and overall satisfaction.
Integration with daily activities
Imagine you’re a customer who just bought a cloud-based phone system like 8×8. You reach out to customer support to ask some technical questions. You get passed around to several agents and have to repeat your issue each time. This is one of the most annoying parts of customer support.
As mentioned above, chatbots pretty much keep a record of everything from average wait times to consumer behavior. They also log all conversation transcripts. This is important because customer conversations can be directly transferred onto the agent, meaning they’re instantly informed about the customers’ wants and needs.
Over 70% of US customers believe that support agents should already know all the information when they are transferred.
Making the customer feel special
Another significant advantage of integrating chatbots with customer agents is the increased potential for personalization. Whether you’re a small business that creates secure file sharing apps or Google, making your customers feel valued is essential.
Statistics show that:
– Over 90% of customers prefer companies that provide a personalized experience.
– 90% of customers are happy for companies to collect information and data about them if it means the experience will be more personalized.
– Almost 2 out of 3 customers will stop using a company’s services if their interactions are not personal.
Chatbots have the technical capability to treat every customer as an individual. They can also summarize the key points about the customer and transfer this information over to the customer support agent, who can then provide a more personalized experience.
Chatbots don’t just assist customers
Customer support agent recruitment can be a difficult time for a company. Customer service is a crucial element to any business, and the staff you hire must be up to the required standard.
It’s essential to develop healthy practices. This can include creating company policy questionnaires. Of course, every company is different, and new employees shouldn’t be expected to know everything. So, the questions should be lenient – just make sure it’s relevant to customer support and the services you provide – cloud computing, for example.
One of the most effective ways for you to onboard new employees is by leveraging chatbots for recruitment. Chatbots can guide new customer support agents through basic company practices, specific technology they will be using, and even recreate real-life customer practice scenarios.
Not only are chatbots more efficient than manual onboarding, but they ensure that every new team member goes through that same onboarding process. This significantly reduces the need for any paperwork or spreadsheets.
Chatbots aren’t just for new employees either. Customer service is ever-evolving, and existing staff should also be regularly retrained. Chatbots can use the data they have been collecting to present common scenarios and company weak points. This can help to upskill your agents and significantly expand their customer support capabilities.
To sum up
Chatbots are not here to replace or undermine customer support agents. In fact, they have the ability to complement each other, improve productivity, and increase employee engagement.
The winners here are the customers who will receive much higher quality service, which will increase their chance of becoming loyal to the company. Let’s quickly recap how chatbots can help your customer support agents:
– Automating repetitive tasks and prioritizing more difficult ones will keep your employees more engaged and reduce turnover.
– Data collection is at the core of a successful business. Use chatbots to understand your customers better and to create a more effective service.
– Agents and chatbots should be working hand in robotic claw. This means collecting information from the chatbots, transferring it to the agents, and creating a more personalized experience for the customer.
– Chatbots can help your new employees settle in and refresh your senior employees’ memory about company practices and general weak points.