Today more and more companies are using Chatbots to better customer experience because how you make your customers feel is a much bigger differentiator, than the product or service you offer.
Surpassing customer expectations with each engagement is the new benchmark in the industry.
So it won’t matter how great your product is or how efficient your service is, if your customer’s emails are rutting in the dark corners on your inbox, or if they’re trapped in the black hole of your IVR [Interactive Voice Response].
They’re certain to move over to a competitor that treats them better.
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, people will never forget how you made them feel” – Maya Angelou
And with a finite number of working hours and employees, you have a limited competition against large enterprises with 10x more resources.
This is when you can utilize chatbots to better customer experience without burning many resources, to engage, deliver, and delight the customers.
By 2020, 85% of the customer interaction will be handled without humans, says a report by Gartner. And these are not the metrics of the future.
A lot of websites are using chatbots to better customer experience and reported in 150% more leads than conventional methods.
How to utilize chatbots for better customer experience?
Chatbots can be used to make human interaction with an organization seamless, where a chatbot can answer the most common user problems without the use of the human intervention.
There are a number of ways in which you can use a chatbot utilized to better customer experience, based on the customer journey, requirements and industry;
Chatbots as support agents
People are already familiar with chat support, but there are only a limited number of hours when a support agent can be there for assistance.
Also, you must be familiar with those 15 minute hold time, just to get your very basic queries answered.
Or going through an email chain for over a week for something similar.
With chatbots, a customer can get the information they’re looking for without wasting their time in time-consuming customer support mediums, or going to twitter to rant about it.
Another benefit of having chatbots for customer support is 24×7 customer support, which is either difficult and definitely costly with humans.
And in cases, the query is complex to be handled by a bot, it can be transferred to a chat support executive.
Chatbots as an account manager/ Personal Assistants
So, you logged into the dashboard of a vast tool, and come across an hour-long introductory video on how to use the tool or a large number of user instructions.
Not many people actually go through them, only to later dive into those long and boring FAQ pages, which offer very little help compared to the time it takes to find the solution.
Adding a chatbot in the software itself as a personal assistant can go a long way for software companies.
Instead of those text-filled FAQ platforms, or a vast library of videos, using chatbots to answer your customer’s FAQ in an easier and more accessible.
Assistants can also be tailored based on the client’s industry or business type to give a more personal and smart experience.
Chatbots for feedback collection:
No metric tells you better about your business than the voice of the customer.
Using chatbots to collect feedbacks can tell you how your customers feel about your brand and help you work on the areas that might be unsatisfactory.
Instead of using a long scary survey form, and asking users to spare anywhere from 2 to 15 minutes, use chatbots to collect feedback about your business. As the surveys involve some cognitive load, which holds back people from actually filling them out.
So instead of asking your customers to spare their time, use an interactive approach to improve your services and user experience.
Chatbots for lead generation:
Lead generation is one of the major goals of an online business, as it’s the start of a potential buyer’s journey with your organization.
Instead of putting lead generation forms and link every here and there on your website, use chatbots to capture leads and user information while solving their problems.
Often first time visitors of your website are more likely to seek help from a chatbot, than trying to navigate through the web pages.
This is the time where along with providing assistance a chatbot can be seamlessly used for lead generation.
Chatbots for product suggestion:
E-commerce websites to integrate their websites with chatbots, to become their customer’s personal assistant.
A few pre-set options can be defined in the chatbot which is triggered by specific keywords to help people explore new styles or collections or the one that suits their needs.
Here you can also explore the power of AI chatbots by allowing them to make suggestions based on a user’s browsing history.
Chatbots are not a technology of the future, they are here right now and can help you improve customer experience manifolds, with the implementation of this simple technology.