Chat your way to Happiness: The value of chatbots for better customer satisfaction

Customer services are an industry that many of us love to hate. From telephone calls spent listening to distorted versions of last year’s charts to emails that go unanswered for days, getting assistance from a business can often be a frustrating and unrewarding process. Plenty of businesses fail to appreciate just how significant an impact customer support can have on the happiness and satisfaction of their customers, and how large a factor this is on the likelihood of repeat business, positive reviews and overall business growth. For as long as there have been customers, there have been issues that need resolving, and finding the perfect way to solve them is an art not all companies have gotten the knack of yet. The first step to doing so, however, is to establish what customers really want…

The needs of the customer

97% of consumers say that customer service is an important factor in their loyalty to a brand. That should be a no-brainer, really, but it needs reiterating. Going beyond that, there are several key things customers expect from a business:

Speed sells. No one likes waiting, and this is especially true when something goes wrong and the waiting in question is for a solution. There’s no time like the present to help your customers. 33% of customers surveyed by NM Incite said they’d recommend a business that could offer them a ‘quick but ineffective’ response, while only 17% said they’d want a ‘slow but effective’ response. Of course, it is most favourable to offer a response that’s fast and effective, but these statistics serve to highlight just how crucial speed can be if customers would be willing to waive quality to gain it. Finding swift solutions to your customer’s problems is no doubt a reliable and consistent way to keep them happy, but companies with more customers will struggle to maintain a good pace when the queues start building.

When it comes to seeking help, customers want easy access to answers, and the opportunity to bypass manned support channels. An increasing number of people are starting to make more use of FAQ and knowledge base sections of websites that offer customers a chance to solve their problems without consulting with a member of staff. In 2012, 67% of surveyed US adults used an FAQ or knowledge base on a company’s website. In 2015, that number rose to 81%. Bearing in mind the value of speed in customer problem resolvement, giving customers the chance to solve their own problems without relying on another person can reduce waiting times and ease the pressure on your customer support teams, potentially cutting down on live support costs. However, online knowledge bases aren’t a perfect solution, unfortunately; as they grow larger they can become harder for users to search through, and can eventually add to their frustrations if answers they think should be easy to find are not immediately obvious.

Customers want a precise and full answer upon making initial contact — they don’t want the fuss of talking through their problem multiple times before reaching someone that can resolve it, and this reluctance is growing where traditional approaches to contacting businesses are used. Web-based customer service channels are seeing a significant and consistent rise in usage, whilst phone engagement is on the decline and is falling out of favour. Phone lines are instead becoming a channel for escalation in cases where other customer service routes do not lead to resolution, or as a solution for more complex problems that might involve direct actions.

So, what’s quick but effective, offers easy-to-access information that’s painless to search, and doesn’t depend on a phone call to get things sorted? The answer is chatbots. Chatbots, specialised computer programs that simulate human conversation, are a powerful force in the customer service world, and an option that more and more businesses are turning to in the quest to offer their customers the best support. If speed is what customers are looking for, there is nothing faster than chatbots. Thanks to the AI that powers them, chatbots will reply instantly without fail. Even businesses with large customer bases will have no problem keeping up with queries and preventing the buildup of queues. It’s that speed and consistency that’s helping to boost their popularity at such a fast rate. Chatbots work like an interactive FAQ service; instead of the user having to search through pages of an online knowledge base, they can input their query and have the answer delivered directly to them. The downside of big knowledge bases — being difficult for customers to search — is completely negated through the use of a chatbot that does the searching for them, easing frustrations and yielding speedy results.

Any businesses that need more persuasion of the value of chatbots should be pleased to hear they’re a superb way to make your marketing and customer service streams more efficient by supporting your human teams. When used as an initial point of contact, only handing over to humans when it identifies a problem it cannot solve itself, a chatbot is an invaluable addition to any customer support team. It will augment, not replace, manned support, freeing up human teams to focus on the most complex and time demanding issues.

For the 97% of consumers that say customer service is an important factor in their loyalty to a brand, the immediate, automated and engaging values of a chatbot cannot be overstated. Isn’t it time you got started?

Originally published at Natter.ai.