How can Chatbots add Value to Customer Experience?

Chatbots Can Automate Repetitive Tasks, Personify Brand Image And Deliver Support Services On-Point Without Ever Taking A Day Off   

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up? Roll over to your phone, switch off the alarm, check your messages, skim through work emails, run through your calendar notes for the day? There’s a certain level of the normalcy of interacting with your smartphone to help you make all the important decisions of your life; be it making dinner plans with your best-friend or buying health insurance for the family.

This is exactly why the enterprise has been wise to tap into this habit. Imagine if talking to your customers was as easy as the back-and-forth banter with your friend?

Chatbots make this possible. They offer human-like familiarity without the human-error. That is why more and more forward-thinking businesses are opting for chatbots as a tool to elevate Customer Experience.

A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation through multiple portals; email, Chat messenger, Facebook, Twitter or through live-chat on your website. A chatbot’s ability to function across multiple avenues gives you the freedom to curate the content that will reach your customer at each touch-point. Moreover, a customer can choose a mode of communication he/she is most comfortable with.

Most importantly, chatbots open the gates to a two-way conversation between business and customer. This is imperative to support services; a crucial step for a customer to decide whether he/she will make a repeat purchase. According to a study conducted by SurveyMonkey, 69% of people prefer talking to a chatbot for quick communication with brands.

Industries like Healthcare, E-commerce, and Telecom are moving sharply towards adopting chatbot technology to offer 24/7 customer service. They offer the added advantage of handling high volumes of inquiries while keeping call center staff to a bare minimum.

Read More: Luminoso’s Natural Language Platform Reshapes How Companies Listen To Customers

There’s a definite benefit to overhead costs. Chatbots can’t be bored or ill-tempered or take too many sick days. So, businesses can do well to migrate repetitive tasks or requests like explaining the features of your new product, for example, to chatbots. This leaves employees with more time to focus on more valuable jobs at hand while ensuring that your relationship with your customer is on-point.

Brands are defined by the experiences they deliver. Technology meets creativity with the way chatbots are used to further brand messaging. You can choose to design the personality, language, and tone that your chatbot will use when addressing customers to be in sync with your brand image. Responses can vary from straightforward, pleasant and charming to downright zany. This feature can come particularly handy to cajole customers into completing otherwise mundane tasks like filling up a form, giving feedback or creating a referral.

There is a reason that Forrester coined the phrase “age of the customer”. Customers today want brands to offer them more value, higher possibilities of personalization and aren’t disillusioned about marketing mechanisms at play. Further, they are spoiled for choice, technologically forward and self-aware. What do you offer the customer who has everything? A chatbot buddy who will find out what your customer wants next.

Here’s what the industry experts had to say about using chatbots to enhance the customer experience

Alexandre Debecker, Chief Growth Officer, Ubisend

“Chatbots enable us to enter a new level of creativity. Companies can go beyond iconography, colors, and images and play with language, persona, and tone of voice — at scale. Developing a chatbot’s personality is important. After all, your chatbot may become your customer’s first contact with your company. You need it to align with your company’s culture, and it brings a whole lot of fresh internal decisions to the table.”

Roy Pereira, CEO, Zoom.Ai

“Our automated assistant is entirely conversational and gathers data from each singular interaction and connected corporate accounts. Thanks to our intelligent backend, your assistant is increasingly able to offer better and more customized help. That data enables Zoom.ai to understand people’s likes and dislikes, often better than a real person can. As AI bot technology develops, it will both become much better at figuring out human meaning and the little unpredictable details that can arise from and throw a wrench in even simple tasks, and at the same time grow immensely in scale.”

Ram Menon, Founder, and CEO, Avaamo

“A Small Talk library specifically enhances the customer experience around making conversations more natural and smoother.”

Read More: CareThrough Announces Conversational Chatbots For Better Care For Patients