How can you make your business feel human 24 hours a day without additional manpower?
Your reach has extended into the global audience – who sleep and play at different times throughout your day. The tolerance for administrative processes has weakened significantly and your customers expect clear answers within a quick response time.
The solution to managing your customer support better could mean turning to technology to help you automate some of the frequently asked questions that your consumers might have. In order for this to work, businesses need to drill down and consolidate a set of commonly asked questions and simple responses.
You might wonder what happens in the event that the Chatbot does not recognise the query. Fret not – most businesses automate the escalation process as well so that the query can be redirected and relayed to customer support personnel in your company. All in all, you know your consumers best – and business owners typically have a good sense of the type of queries that need the human touch and can programme the escalation accordingly.
When the Chatbot is well integrated, you can retain the personalised touch that comes with human interaction and perhaps even enhance it to drive traffic, conversion rates and create a better user experience. Here are some reasons why a Chatbot will bring you benefits in the long run:
Round The Clock Representative
For most businesses, the website is usually the first platform that customers visit to acquire information or get in touch with the company’s personnel. For consumers, the website is a quick and easy access point to get a sense of the business before investing time and effort to go down to a physical store or office.
By deploying a Chatbot, business owners can provide live support for their customers round the clock. Because of the immediacy of a response, it is easy to understand why consumers would prefer this platform of customer support over being put on hold over the phone for hours – for example, in the event of a technical glitch. Waiting for a response over email, which is highly dependent on working days and time zones, can generate more frustration in a situation that was meant for service recovery.
Save Wisely – To Spend Elsewhere
The automation of repetitive, mindless administrative work can save you big bucks in the long run – especially when you can foresee in the horizon how you would much rather spend this money instead. A Chatbot can drastically reduce the cost of engaging a sales or technical agent to manage responses manually – especially so when after-hour labour fees are added to the bottom line.
Factoring into consideration training costs of your personnel and the potential aggravation that your frontliners may create (that results in more recovery … and more business losses), the value of your savings may be measurable beyond dollars and cents.
Be smart about the deployment of your resources if there is efficient technology to support it. If you can cut out the time and effort spent on the mundane, your employees can be redirected to a more challenging and thus more meaningful scope of work.
Qualitative Data Collection
With the transcript from the Chatbot platform, analysts can actually pick out trends in the types of queries that your consumers have. By picking out the frequency of certain key words reoccurring, business owners can actually gather significant insight into some of the major concerns of their consumers – what’s working well and what isn’t.
This allows you to take a more proactive rather than reactive approach, identifying gaps quickly and issuing fixes for bugs in a timely manner. Monitoring trends are often second priority to operational personnel such as customer service representatives who are more concerned in solving the problem present before them. If your people can’t help you with Big Data, why not let the Chatbot do it for you?
Empower Your Agents
Rather than viewing the Chatbot as a threat for your customer service agents, reassure them that the programme can actually supplement and support their work, if and when the issue needs to be escalated to their attention.
Through the qualitative data collection, the Chatbot will actually be able to add on to the bank of commonly asked questions and answers. This provides your agents with supplementary solutions that exists within the database for them to fall back on. That’s right – the programme can actually improve the quality of your customer support system by polishing up on the professionalism of your customer service representatives directly.
Use this to win over your agents – the Chatbot is their friend, not their foe.
Acquire Leads
Last but not least, connecting with your consumers via the Chatbot usually requires them to provide some personal data or contact details in the event that further follow up is needed. This can actually extend your outreach because you successfully managed to add them to your database.
From there, you can work on converting the consumer (if he or she has not already made a purchase) by sending out targeted and relevant emails with offers that might interest them. If you fail to do so, you can still have some sense of the kind of curious customers that you are failing to convert – and how you can choose to target this demographic.
Overall, this grants business owners the opportunity to take a simple enquirer and turn him into a repeat customer. The targeted way is the smart way to do business. While the Chatbot’s purpose is originally to provide customer support, it can actually contribute significantly to your digital marketing strategy.
At Krome, we specialise in website design and development services. If you or your client are interested in creating a site, it’s time to tell us about your project or have a chat about what we can do. You can contact us here.