“Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line and someone will be with you shortly!” The customer continues to hold for some time, gets frustrated and finally drops. All familiar scenario, isn’t it? In the era of instant messaging, the idea of a call centre and waiting for getting your turn seems outdated. However, 74%* of the current customer interactions in the US happen through call centre primarily because a mobile phone is the search medium and the search naturally extends to calling the number on the search result page.
However, this is quickly changing. With messaging and chat becoming the most popular medium of human interactions, many customers are expecting the availability of chat-based interactions to get their simple queries resolved or tasks like appointment bookings done. So how do businesses respond to this?
The answer is simple and well known. Businesses today need to implement a multi-channel strategy to interact with their customers faster and chatbot becomes the natural choice for the same.
Four channels to enhance the interactions with customers
- Text-based interaction with a chatbot – This is the most cost-effective and efficient method where the chat can happen on a website BOT or on a messaging app like FB messenger, Skype or WeChat. The BOT understands the context of the questions and provides relevant answers. Here the effective design of questions and natural language processing makes an important. In case the BOT is not able to answer the question, it transfers the chat to a human agent.
- Voice BOTs – Voice bots come in two varieties, first one where the customer gives voice interactions but the bot converts voice to text and responds with a text message. The second is voice BOTs like Google assistants or Alexa who can converse using the predefined persona and answers using voice medium. This is typically useful for people not so comfortable using chatting and helps them to get answers to their queries faster.
- Human Agents for chat – Typically when the complexity of interaction goes up, the chat can be smoothly handed over to a human agent who then can understand the actual customer need and then provide a necessary resolution
- Call Centre Representatives – No, the call centre reps will not go away but they will now be tasked with very complex interactions which need human problem solving and creativity to offer the solutions.
Advantages of chatbots
- Enhanced customer experience – With waiting and being in a queue, the customers can get their queries resolved faster. Also, it does not need any special experience about navigation or information organization like it is needed for website
- Better availability – Chatbots are available 24×7 and on weekends and holidays as well. This gives a business an easy customer interaction channel which is available round the clock.
- No need to download an app – Customers can easily complete their transactions through a chatbot on the website or in their native messaging app like WhatsApp, Wechat and more.
- Media-friendly – Customers can easily upload pictures and videos during the interactions, for example, broken or incorrect product shipment.
With these advantages and improved technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the BOTS have surely arrived. So it’s just time before you will speak with a bot and maybe you will not realize it!
Flologic Automation provides a huge range of chatbots in various horizontals as well as verticals. To contact us regarding chatbots email us at sales@flologicautomation.com