Chatbots in Customer Service, Are you getting what you’re paying for?
Customer Service, things are changing
Today’s consumers are expecting a certain level of service, companies like Chick-fil-A, Amazon, Trader’s Joe, Thrivent Financial and Wells Fargo, among others, have already raised the bar, Quality, Value, Customer Expectation, Customer loyalty are all key indicators that consumers are researching and asking about, before even approaching your brand for a product or a service, and any red flag or alarm will result in complaints, negative feedback, or even worst, churn.
Where to start?
The Keyword here is your Customers! Understand your customers and their personas to be able to understand how to better serve them; Customers are already using new ways to get tasks done, digital assistants on smartphones, such as Google Assistant or Siri, Alexa in living rooms and smart homes, and others, the fact that people are relying more and more on automated systems, digital assistants, or Chatbots is opening a new era for Business-Consumer interaction.
Customers today are driven by a global “always-on” economy, the convenience of a 24/7 service, from online shopping, paying the bills, filing insurance claims, looking for information on a scholarship or asking about the safe use of prescription or over-the-counter (OTC) medicines. Which means that your company is entitled to provide your customers with an “always-on” 24/7 service that is convenient, easily accessible via a smartphone or a website over text, scalable to adapt to seasonal spikes, and at the time cost-effective for your company. A bit tricky no?
Chatbots for Customer Service
So here is where Chatbots were introduced to help firms and enterprises perform the routine functions essential to running the business and communicating with consumers, increasing organizational efficiency and worker productivity. In addition, to help simplify the process of finding and consuming information, improving customer loyalty, offering an easy-to-access, simpler, anytime/anywhere, personalized service. Or simply, the type of service today’s consumers expect.
What to Look For?
There are Chatbots Platforms that are designed to make it easy for enterprises and developers to build, host, and manage bots. Bringing instant value to employees and customers. Top-ranking platforms provide a complete, customizable, secure, and cost-effective framework that ensures a consistent and scalable process for building bots without the need for expensive hosting, time-consuming coding, or complex custom software, platforms such as botique.ai, for example, offer businesses an interface to build, deploy, and manage AI Chatbots with a simple UI, no use of code for building & training the Chatbot, and seamless integration.
What to Look for: in an AI Chatbot Builder platform?
- How easy and intuitive is it to learn and use?
- How long does it take to deploy and train?
- What kind of support will you receive during and after implementation?
- How long does it take to build & deploy chatbots using the solution?
- What is the pricing and pricing structure in relation to the most important features?
What to look for in a Customer Support Chatbot?
A powerful NLP engine; allowing your chatbot to process text, find and understand the semantics, syntax, and grammar of a sentence in order to process user requests and identify intent and parameters for executing tasks.
OmniChannel: The platform should allow you to deploy your bots where your customers are — from social media platforms to popular messaging apps, websites, and more.
Support on-premise and cloud deployments: based on your operational, security, and compliance standard, you might need to consider a solution that will allow you to select the appropriate deployment option.
Integration: the chatbot platform should provide the ability to easily and securely connect to business systems (Content, Customer Relations, Management Systems) web applications, and websites.
Learning: The Platform learning capabilities should consists of both, Supervised and Unsupervised Machine learning skills. As a Customer Support Agent, there are certain questions and procedures that need to be taught to the Chatbot to follow according to business need, still, as a Chatbot solution, it is imperative for it to be able to self learn and develop its conversational skills on the go, thus the ability to learn both ways is important!
Multilanguage Support: The platform should allow you to deploy your chatbots in the language of choice of your customers, especially when if you’re a national or international brand, Chatbots that are able to understand and communicate in multiple languages (and detect language switch within a conversation) provide a better user experience for your consumers and avoids making them feel left out when engaging your brand.
Administration and User management: The platform needs to allow you to manage roles and permissions to control who can use, manage, and deploy chatbots and access administrative consoles.
Analytics: Customer Satisfaction is all about understanding the data from your customer’s behaviors and journey, thus the platform should allow you to easily track chatbot usage with comprehensive reporting and analytics, learn what customers are asking or what they are searching for, and present the data neatly.
The Bottom Line!
Understanding the must-have features in both the platform and the Chatbot itself (mentioned above) will help you make an easier decision, better selection, and help ease your headache moving forward after selection and deployment.
Make sure, to ask for your free trial of any platform selected before going forward, take the time to test it, get access to some of your employees and customers who will be using it, ask them to engage the Chatbot and the AI, test its Natural language processing (NLP) engine, Intent identification, and other capabilities before even proceeding with investing lots of resources with some vendors who will not deliver on what they promise.
Rajai Nuseibeh is the Head of Marketing and Customer Satisfaction at botique.ai, The Leading AI Chatbot Platform.
