How an AI-powered Chatbot Can Take Your Business to the Next Level?
As tiny or invisible as it may seem, customer service is crucial to any business. It is the most decisive part of any customer journey. A prospect may get deflected due to poor or delayed response here. A buyer may walk away with disappointment or frustration- thus, passing on that negative feeling to many other prospects. A great upselling opportunity may be lost just because the customer service assistant was not sharp enough or fast enough to capture a pivotal moment in the interaction.
Despite being perceived as a cost center, customer service can be an important revenue center and a marketing turning point for any business. But for that to happen, a customer service assistant has to fulfill some challenging but critical criteria:
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Be intuitive enough to predict a customer’s priorities, expectations and frustrations
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Be swift sufficient to grab the inflection points that lead to higher sales and cross-selling opportunities
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Be intelligent enough to spot where precisely a mistake or issue happened
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Be data-armed to furnish the information a customer is looking for proactively
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Be insightful for the requisite degree of personalization and precision when dealing with a prospect or a buyer
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Be able to pull out any data that can satisfy or stimulate a customer in the buying journey
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Be available all the time without mental fatigue or human exasperation
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Be disciplined, rigorous, and meticulous in dealing with information
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Be flexible and capable of handling any volume of requests
Enters AI – for speed, scale and impact
Now all these criteria are too much for human assistants to master or promise. Exhaustion, errors, and communication gaps will leave human customer service delivery loopholes. Plus, human assistants would need to be augmented very strongly with data if they have to fulfill the endless barrage of complaints, revenue opportunities, and operational requests that a typical day entails.
How about using an AI-driven chatbot here? Empowered with artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing, bots have established themselves as great ways to hear a customer and interpret the user intent, and process requests or supply prompt relevant answers. They are proven methods of helping customer service departments achieve all those elusive metrics they have always wanted to excel in, like:
- Precision
- Proactive stances
- Intelligence
- Data-powered decisions
- Customization
- Journey mapping and visualization
- A stronghold on the ‘why’ and ‘where’ of specific customer pain-points
- Ability to integrate various channels and experience points across the journey
- Seamless delivery of service
- Non-fragmented approach to data and customer issues
- Round-the-clock availability
- Excellent execution capabilities
- Error-free and consistent delivery
- Ability to collaborate with humans for amplified customer experiences
AI chatbots – far and deep now
Several organizations – especially across verticals like banking, hospitality, healthcare, e-commerce, and finance- have started unlocking these strengths and elevating their brand’s customer service experience.
- A recent report from Monster.com hints that chatbots can empower customer support services to enhance customer engagement, with more and more organizations adopting chatbots. They were augured to empower about 45 percent of organizations’ customer support services by 2022.
- As Gartner also seconds, by 2022, 70 percent of white-collar workers will regularly interact with conversational platforms. And by 2027, chatbots will become the primary customer service channel for roughly a quarter of organizations, as forecasted by Gartner.
- Its January and February 2022 Customer Support and Service (CSS) survey unraveled that 54 percent of respondents are using some form of a chatbot, VCA, or other conversational AI platform for customer-facing applications.
- As per Juniper Research, by 2024, consumer retail spending via chatbots worldwide will reach $142 billion.
- In healthcare alone, the Global Chat-bots Market would be growing from $312.1 million in 2022 to $780.82 million by 2027 (As per a report from ResearchandMarkets).
Conversational AI is on a surge. An analysis by Deloitte of patents in conversational AI shows that as we evolve in this direction, chatbots can handle higher levels of demands and complexity. The rapid adoption of conversational AI could be underpinned by innovations in the various steps of chatbot development. They have the potential to hasten the creation and training of chatbots and enable them to handle complex requests—with a personal touch efficiently – explains this analysis. It found out that a significant chunk of conversational AI is improving the training process, with around 20 percent of patents in the Deloitte survey related to this. Plus, they are also achieving higher degrees of sophistication in engagement and personalization.
But as highlighted in the Gartner survey, too, many CSS leaders struggle to identify actionable metrics, thus, minimizing their ability to drive chatbot evolution and expansion and limiting their ROI. So just picking a chatbot will not do the trick. One would need an appropriate chatbot deployment strategy. One would need solutions that minimize customer effort and improve chatbot usability. The chatbots selected should be compelling in areas like completion rate, minimal abandonment rate, request handle time, and unique context.
The prudent chatbot choice – here’s the formula
Try to design your chatbot roadmap with all these factors in mind. Go for AI and chatbot assistants that come packed with,
- Comfort with complexity
- Understanding of context
- Customization ease
- Smooth execution and integration
- Augmentation of humans across all touch-points
Try to choose solutions architected on a strong RPA backbone to bring productivity, accuracy, speed, efficacy, compatibility, and scalability. The right partner would be able to arm you with software bots that profoundly pack RPA and AI so that you get chatbots that work round the clock, leading to faster turnaround time and a better service experience for the customer.
You can let your customer service department continue the old way or unlock new possibilities of high sales, high conversions, fast complaint resolution, and high customer word-of-mouth – all by investing in intelligent chatbots. A happy customer walks in via a URL or a door, but s/he stays in only because of excellent customer service. Own that edge.
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