Building a Virtual Assistant that Your Customers Want to Talk to (Part 1)
How to build customer trust and drive engagement on your website
What’s the easiest way to get help from a company?
A. Wait for hours on the phone before reaching an agent
B. Email back and forth for days before getting the issue resolved
C. Try out a company’s basic chatbot, realize it doesn’t understand the issue, and then try option A or B
If you’re sitting there thinking “none of the above” — you’re correct! So what IS the most convenient way for customers to get help? By reaching out through their preferred channel — phone, email, chat, Facebook, etc — and easily getting connected with a virtual assistant who solves their problems quickly and on the first try.
The biggest hurdle to this experience isn’t connecting to different channels, or even building intelligent dialog, but gaining the trust of your customers: 86% of consumers prefer humans to chatbots (Forbes). Ultimately, you can have the best virtual assistant in the world but it won’t help your company until customers actually start engaging with it. With IBM Watson Assistant, clients using our newest features have seen 50% higher first-time engagement.
Gaining Customer Trust
Deliver the best customer care experience with the Watson Assistant web chat: an enterprise-ready, pre-built user interface designed to handle advanced conversational scenarios such as rich responses, clarifications, multi-tasking, and agent escalation.
Gain trust in your customer service experience by aligning the assistant with your brand identity and showing customers how they can quickly resolve their most pertinent issues.
Let’s explore how the latest features of the Watson Assistant web chat will rapidly drive customer engagement on your website.
Home Screen
Customers often don’t know how to interact with your assistant at first. They aren’t sure how to format a question or what types of things they can ask. Don’t make them guess. Show them, with the new home screen for the Watson Assistant web chat:
Many other chatbots will give customers a landing screen that overloads them with choices and information. On websites that are already overflowing with different options and ads to look at, these types of chatbots quickly become another pop-up that customers become used to ignoring.
We designed the web chat home screen to provide a reprieve from websites with overly complicated user interfaces. Use this feature to concisely tell your customers what they can do with the assistant and drive them towards resolving the most common requests. In the last few weeks since the release, web chats with home screen enjoyed a 50% higher first-time engagement rate compared to web chats not using home screen.
Theming
It’s necessary to align the virtual assistant with your branding so that customers recognize your web chat as a company-approved experience. With no code required, easily customize the colors of the 3 main types of components: the chat header (primary elements), the user message bubble (secondary elements), and additional interactive objects (accent elements).
Custom Theming
Developers have full control over the colors and fonts of the Watson Assistant web chat. We use Carbon themes so you can assign colors for different types of elements. If you build further customizations, these Carbon themes will ensure that your web chat designs remain consistent and cohesive.
Web chat comes with a default launcher icon that customers click to open the assistant. To integrate with other methods of customer contact, or to better match your brand, you might want to replace the default web chat launcher icon with your own mechanism for opening the web chat window. We make it easy to hide the built-in default launcher and build your own.
You can also customize the location and size of the web chat — for instance, if you want your chat widget to dynamically change size when you display images.
We will continue to focus on delivering the best customer care experience. Keep an eye on the IBM Watson Assistant blogs for regular additions to this series on building engaging assistants.
Try out the Watson Assistant web chat today to build a virtual assistant that your customers will love talking to!
