Chatbots: The Customer Service Success Story
For years, outsourcing was seen as a way for any company to wash its hands of the pain that was customer experience. Chatbots not only allow companies to make huge savings on outsourcing but to take responsibility for their customer service in new and exciting ways.
Chatbots are fast becoming synonymous with customer service, both the basic level of quality offered in the early generations, and the ability to engage and retain customers with new AI bot technologies.
That might sound a little glib, but when you are told by many workers/investors/insiders that when PLCs, Fortune 500 companies and Private Equity firms acquire a business, the first thing they usually do is strip out the customer support or run it down to the bare bones, this has to be good news.
For the business it allows them to treat customer service as a valued part of the overall IT service, and not just another piece of wood to cut in the name of efficiency. For the customer that means better service than being left on hold in the vague hope that an operator will be with you shortly.
There are plenty of examples of chatbot success stories from businesses large and small. And as automation takes over in the customer service environment, soon it will be a lot harder for the strip-em-and-sell-em merchants to vandalise a company’s hard-won reputation for customer support.
Why there is an AI in Customer Service Team
When it comes to building a quality customer service bot experience, most vendors are on their third or fourth generation of service solution to sell to businesses. These have moved on from the script-based efforts of early bots to adopting natural language processing to better understand what the customer is asking, and what mood they are in.
Bots can also manage voice calls, with Google’s Duplex, Voice Assistant or services similar to Apple Siri, engaging with all types of customer. The better bots can adapt their tone to soothe or jolly up a customer, while others can seamlessly transfer the chat over to a real human agent if the bot is struggling, or the person seriously requires help. AI bots can also learn from past and current conversations about what approaches work and what doesn’t.
Managed or automated learning can help the bots get better, helping the company provide ever-better support without extra outlay. Bots can also help with retentions and upselling, a key aspect of many businesses, finding out what will help the customer stay or what extras they would like, only putting them through to a retentions agent if nothing seems to work.
These relationships with the existing customer services enable the workers to focus on the high value or tricky cases, letting the bots deal with the easily-solved calls. This helps startups build their customer service team up at low cost, mixing digital and human efforts at the right speed and without wasting money, while enterprises can take more time over how they evolve their departments or outsourced efforts.
The Future of Customer Service
There are still plenty of people against bots in customer service. The trouble is, bar legal disclosure, most won’t realise they are using bots as they become more realistic. And, once people get used to dealing with a bot, with the ever-growing level of successful outcome, then they will be more ready to deal with others.
That is taking place against a background of bots starting to dominate Facebook Messenger interactions, appearing on smart home devices, in office or travel kiosks and taking over from email on apps, websites and other forms of communication.
Basically, bots will soon be everywhere, and so useful and successful that they will become part of the digital furniture. From a digital concierge in a hotel to robots in restaurants, although that might just be Japan for you, bots in many forms will be taking over the customer service role.
Whatever your business, you need to be prepared for that future, running bots now, with AI bots in development and testing to ensure they successfully meet your customer needs, and those of the business. Building a bot is not a throwaway exercise, it requires planning and careful consideration with your existing customer service teams. Any business that treats bots like a cheap win, like those big buyouts that sacked most of the CS-team, will only find unhappy customers which, in a connected world will rapidly lead to a dying reputation and loss of trade.
