Why every customer care team should start using ChatBots?
It’s only been a little over 12 months, since the concept of chatbots has gone truly mainstream. Announced at Facebook’s 2016 Developer Conference F8, chatbots have come a long way. Whilst relatively new in the Western world, chatbots made their first appearances in 2013 — on China’s leading social media and messaging platform WeChat.
For context, chatbots are defined as follows
A chatbot is a computer program which maintains a conversation with a user in natural language, understands the intent of the user, and sends a response based on business rules and data of the organisation. A user interacts with a chatbot via a mobile messenger (such as Facebook Messenger, Skype, WhatsApp or Slack), SMS, or website. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is typically embedded in a chatbot to help it better understand the context of the conversation.
A widely adopted use case for chatbots to date has been seen in the field of service provisioning within verticals of (highly) predictable enquiries / requests (think flight / hotel booking requests or indeed FAQ type enquiries).
Purpose of this article is to provide the art of the possible (and a bit beyond) of chat bots today and how they have found their way into many daily tasks across industries.
Regional cut of most used social media & messenger platforms — note the complete difference for China.
INSIGHT NO. 1: Consumers are busy and want their complaints, enquiries and questions addressed quicker, more easily and in a form that can easily be fitted into day to day activities. Messenger based conversational interfaces are quickly becoming the channel of choice for consumers to engage with brands.
89% of global consumers rate their overall perception of bots as “positive” or “neutral”
Today, the most common way for a customer to get their questions and concerns resolved, is to call the customer care centre.
Making a call is both, time consuming and also more often than not far from the most convenient form of communication and interaction. In parallel, consumer behaviour has shifted significantly towards messaging for person to person communication rather than calling someone directly. Besides that, most customer care centres have waiting times, often providing details via (tedious) IVR systems. Even when there is close to zero holding time, getting to the right customer care agent involves listening to a handful of instructions and dialing a few additional numbers. In short: far from frictionless, easy and delightful. Especially when consumer is already worried, frustrated or plain angry about having to get in touch with a contact centre.
The rise of messenger platforms and with them the increasing popularity of chatbots, has opened an additional communications and engagement channel between brands and consumers, which is growing in popularity — across all consumer segments. Chatbots come with the huge advantage of instant availability and a high degree of contextualisation — making it a significantly stronger channel for customer care.
INSIGHT NO. 2:Bots can get to the bottom of customer’s queries faster than agents can
Key driver for the difference in speed of resolution is predominantly down to
- call centre infrastructure (i.e. how information is stored in knowledge hub systems and tools available to the agents)
- the guided UI — question & answer journey — chatbots are lending themselves to
Against the backdrop of increasingly time-poor consumers and constantly growing expectations to one-touch resolution in the the context of customer care, this is a big bonus. Admittedly, this super streamlined ‘remedy journey’ will largely be dependant on the maturity of the bots in question, but a lot of steps we put in the way of an agent today are just not needed for bots. For example, the moment a customer starts chatting with a bot, the bot will know everything about the customer without having to ask a single question. If the customer needs to be bounced to a different bot agent, it can happen instantly without any explicit input from the customer.
INSIGHT NO. 3: Bots can get back to customer without needing any reminders or phone calls
A lot of customer complaints today require the contact centre agents to call back the customers when there is an update available. This is a tedious job as the human agents would need to keep a track of a number of things like status of the complaint, the best number to reach the customer on, best time to call the customer. If the call goes unanswered, another attempt is needed. On one hand, this offers a personalised customer experience. On the other hand, missed calls or calls at a wrong time would end with a more annoyed customer.
With a completely automated back end system in place, bots can be told programmatically when a status update is available on the customer complaint, and bots can send a message to the customer on the same thread on which the customer raised the complaint in the first place.
INSIGHT NO. 4: Sharing knowledge among bots is a zero time and zero cost affair
The call centre industry has always tried to optimise itself. They do it by going through the past records of customer complaints, how the complaints were addressed and use that knowledge to build training for the staff. This is a slow, time consuming and expensive process. And often out of date by the time the agents have received the relevant training. Wouldn’t it be great if learning from one human agent from a previous customer’s complaint can be instantly transferred to all the other human agents?
Here come the bots: each bot powered session is a (slightly) different form of executing instances of the same bot code. What one instance learns from their previous handling of a case can be instantly transferred to all other instances of the bot agents. This can happen at no extra cost and without any human intervention.
INSIGHT NO.5: Bots can help transform contact centre agents into “customer happiness agents”
When all regular customer complaints are handled by bots entirely, the human agents have significant more flexible time and mind space to deal with more complex complaints. Traditionally, less frequently occurring complaints is where the lion share of friction and bad customer experience is rooted. It is just as frustrating for agents, who are trained to run through a playbook, often within a tightly defined request handling time metric, as it is for customers, to forcefully resolve an issue — mainly because time’s up! With handling of repetitive questions and complaints being taken care of by bots, agents can be up-skilled to deal with such “out-of-the-playbook” complaints more effectively.
Closing remarks
The bot industry is still in its infancy — that said, it’s come a long way since first introduced at mass scale by Facebook in 2016. Also, a few instances of the above outlined services are not (yet) entirely possible with the technology we have today.
What is clear however are the following indicators:
- Overall, chat bots have seen a significant rise since FB first introduced them in 2016
- The sheer volume of brands / B2B service providers who have joined the conversational commerce and customer care channel (=conversational UI) is indicative itself that this is more than just a trend
- Messenger platforms + automation = bots
A winning formula in today’s time poor consumer and streamlining and cost reducing business world
But at the same time, the research in this space is happening at an unprecedented rate. A record number of funded startups are working towards building technology that is going to leap the world forward earlier than we imagine. The key for any business to take advantage of all this is not to leave themselves out: test, learn and iterate!
