Why Bots Should Be Part of Your Customer Success Arsenal

Image by Ger Acosta.

In today’s subscription economy, customers have more choices than ever before. With new competing services rising daily, it is crucial to watch your churn rate. Managing your customer relationships becomes even more important. Ensuring your customers are benefiting the most value from your product is a must.

Conversational Marketing should be in your arsenal

Conversational Marketing is one method companies use to build relationships and learn more about their customers. With big data and influx of information from pixels, cookies, conversion rates, social data, there is an argument that Conversation Marketing may not be as powerful and useful. However, customer information gained through conversation marketing may lead to deeper behavioral insights and sales triggers than accumulating statistics from other channels.

Ian Lurie defines Conversation Marketing as a strategy for meeting age-old marketing challenges on the internet. It’s a methodology that makes use of the changes brought about by new, faster, more interactive media, without discarding the basic, sound principles of good communications.

How does Conversation Marketing tie in with Customer Success and Bots? Bots are tools used by Customer Success as part of a company’s conversation marketing strategies. The goal of Conversation Marketing and Customer Success is to maximize the value of your offerings. Making your clients more productive, efficient and satisfied with your solution. You maximize the value of your customers. The rewards are return buy, referrals, brand awareness or product feedback. For example, if a client is paying you $20 a month for your product, that’s great. You want them to pay $20 a month for as long as possible. But wouldn’t it be even better if they paid you $20, then $25, then $30, then $35 a month? This is what customer success can do, increasing your profits along the way. It is a meaningful channel of growth if done well. This is where bots come in. Bots can help your customer success team to perform more efficiently and build a better relationships with your clients.

What is a bot?

A bot is an automated software agent working for you to perform a simple task. Whether it is a chatbot (software agent that interacts with you through messages), UI bot (ie. allowing you to perform tasks with buttons), Voice bot (ie. using voice command for a task) or any visual bot (ie. getting chart of the market performance for the day). They all perform a certain specific task and any new task that are automated through an AI will become a bot.

On WeChat, you can use Tencent’s other services or third party services all from within the app. Whether its a loan or wealth management, booking a public bike or ordering a taxi, you do it all within the app. A bot comes into play to either help you order or perform a task or follow up with you after a service has been ordered. WeChat sends automated messages to let you know that your movie start time, when you receive money from your peers or when you need to top up your wallet. It is all automated by these agents we call “bots”.

WeChat offers their own and third party services. You can even get promotions and discount via bots and subscribe to brands you enjoy. These bots will alert you for the newest deal, product or news.

How to add Bots to Your Customer Success Team

1. Direct Customer Bots — Bot agents that interact directly with your customers empowering your team to monitor and create an efficient customer journey. These bots can handle brand subscriptions, aid in product purchasing, product feedback and connect with your company such as looking up another product you may be selling. Big brands in China have built bots within WeChat to connect with their consumers giving an extension within a mobile platform.
2. Automation Bots — automating regular tasks that require little real agent help. Changing account password, request a copy of a monthly statement or checking account details, adding another user etc.
3. A Bot Assistant to a Real Agent —speed up minor tasks so your agent can focus entirely with your customer. Your customers feel more secure talking to an actual person. This hybrid approach allows your agents to manage the relationship while bots help speed up the conversation flow.
4. Escalation Bots and Processes Bots — These bots serve as the first line of action in your customer success team. They allow the filtering and routing of customers who have issues or need assistance in a particular subject such as software setup, product optimization, product upgrade etc. The bots re-route depending on the customer’s need, to the proper real life agent who can better help solve the request.

Bots serve as the first response mechanism to your conversation marketing tactic. I’ve spent the last two weeks in China and have noticed most shops and brands have built their own bot. You can subscribe for company news, product updates, sales and deals and even exchange products with other consumers. It gives brands a manageable way to first interact with their customers. They can see how people interact with their bots giving them personalized insights on their needs.

Building Bots is now easier than ever

Bots serve to further enhance your team’s ability and add to the experience of your customers. This is why we’ve built Recime, to make it easier and faster to build bots. Build multi-channel bots for Facebook, Telegram and others all in once place. It is now easy to integrate bots into your customer success and marketing strategy.

About Us

Recime.io is a developer platform to build cross-platform bots saving time and frustration. Don’t have the skillset or manpower to build a bot? Contact us and let’s see if we can help you out.