Why Your Contact Centers Need Chatbots: They improve the Customer Experience

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As technology grows, so do the options we have to help our business grow and keep our customers happy. Many of these advances are entering the business landscape in forms of automation powered by artificial intelligence. One major advance, that has been taking the world by storm are Chatbots, a term I’m sure you have read, heard and seen countless times. Current technology has now paved the way for them to have an incredible business impact across industries & roles, especially in customer service & contact centers. The Salesforce Einstein Bot, in particular, has come a long way from its first announcement back at Dreamforce 2017.

While chatbots can almost build a business case for themselves, until that day comes, during this March "Why Wednesday" series we will walk you through three key reasons why chatbots can positively impact your customer service centers.

The first reason, chatbots improve the customer experience.

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Chatbots can help dissolve a variety of barriers or blockers to the customer experience, like long queue times, complex processes for simple questions, 8-5 service centers, and lack of non-phone related channels, to name a few.

Today’s customers live in a mobile-first world, which also means that customers expectations have changed. Customers expect a personalized experience from the brands they choose to love anytime, anywhere. This puts a lot of stress on business owners. Do you hire more evening shift employees? How do you maintain and nurture return rate and customer loyalty in this ever-changing digital landscape?

One solution is a conversational chatbot. Chatbots can help alleviate the strain the digital world and customer expectations are placing on business owners. Chatbots are the 24/7 virtual face of your brand working day and night to assist your customers.

Take a look at this illustration.

Today’s customers can stay on the phone for an average of 20-30 minutes just to check the status of their order, or reset their password. This not only is a frustrating and irritatingly long process for the customer, but it also bogs down your agents (we’ll touch on this more in a later post).

Employing an intelligently designed conversational chatbot installed on your website, Messaging Channels, Facebook, etc. can help handle high volume, easy questions, empowering your customers to self-service, giving them immediate answers and saving them time.

But a chatbot can’t handle every imaginable question a customer could ask nor should it. A chatbot is like your agent’s secretary. They collect the name and email of the customer, answer as many questions as they can and if the customer has a more complex question they can seamlessly transfer the customer to the agent. The Salesforce Live Agent Console enables the agent to see everything the chatbot (or the secretary) and the customer talked about and offer immediate service. Keeping customers happy, turning bad experiences into good experiences and encouraging customer loyalty.

Lastly, a chatbot improves the customer experience through personalization. I know what some of you are thinking, how a chatbot powered by math provide any type of personalized experience? But it can, and it does.

Let’s take a high-level hotel example:

Sarah is staying at Flash Hotels and wants to know if she can check in early. She engages with the bot on the hotel website and the bot asks for her name and confirmation number. Once she types her information in, the bot recognizes who this person is. She is, in fact, a Premier Member. The bot can leverage all the information the hotel has already collected about Sarah.

The bot may respond back something like

“Hi Sarah! We are so happy to have a premier member stay with us. Your room is available for early check-in and we’ll make sure that all your preferences are in the room prior to arrival. Also, it looks like you have an upgrade on your account. Would you like to redeem it at this location?”

The chatbot can leverage previously collected information to identify customers or members and customize the conversation, maintaining a seamless white glove service from chatbot to agent.

There you have it, reason #1 on why your contact centers need chatbots. Tune in next week via our social channels or back here on the blog for the next reason in our Why Wednesday March Series.

*note: if you'd like to learn more set up a discovery call or demo with our team of experts by clicking on FlashBot down below or the button up top.