Maximising Chatbot Experience for Your Contact Center
A great Chatbot experience helps streamline B2C interaction and enhance efficiency in resolving customer requests, improving customer experience, and minimizing operational costs.
According to a report by MIT Technology, 90% of businesses report faster complaint resolution with bots.
Creating a desirable Chabot experience for your contact center helps increase the efficiency of dealing with customer requests, reduces call traffic to your agents, and improves customer satisfaction through self-service.
You can analyze the data obtained from chatbots to understand consumer needs better and improve service.
The history of Chatbots
Chatbots have been around for a long time. The first one, ELIZA, was developed in 1966 by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum.
By using pattern matching and substitution methodology to simulate conversations, ELIZA mimicked human conversation. It passed words that users entered into a computer, pairing them to a list of possible scripted responses.
Eliza was the first recognized Chatbot (image source: cambridge.org)
For example, if you text ELIZA “The car moves very fast”, it would pick up the word “Car” and respond by asking an open-ended question like “What sort of car do you like?”.
ELIZA had limits to her responses; however, they portrayed the potentials of computers’ understanding and interaction in natural human language.
Over the decades, there were several other Chatbots: Parry in 1972, Jabberwacky (1988), Dr. Sbaitso (1992), Alice (1995), Smarterchild (2001), IBM Watson (2006), Siri (2010), Google Now (2012), Alexa and Cortana (2015).
However, implementing chatbots for customer services came in 2016 when Facebook launched Bots for Messenger.
Facebook announced that its bots could provide anything from automated subscription content like weather and traffic updates to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages, all by interacting directly with the people who want to get them.
The move by Facebook unlocked opportunities for the deployment of Chatbots for customer service.
The chatbot experience
Chatbots are increasingly at the heart of customer service for many industries. Social networking, App and Websites develop chatbots to serve as customer interfacing agents that can collect registration data, provide information, answer frequently asked questions, etc.
Customer engagement and service delivery are faster, simpler, with better experiences for users. According to Salesforce, 69% of consumers prefer to use chatbots because they deliver quick answers to simple questions.
The Chatbot experience helps to simplify shopping and payment processes by providing quick information, search results, payment options, and suggestions that support customers’ purchasing decision processes.
Besides e-commerce functionalities, chatbots send automated information or news to a company’s customers and potential buyers.
Making Chatbots the darling of many companies and customers are its 24/7 availability.
While customer representatives may not always be available around the clock to deal with consumer requests, Chatbots satisfy this demand. 64% of consumers claim that 24/7 service is the most useful chatbot functionality.
Chatbot experience in industries
It isn’t far-fetched that customer engagement, improved service delivery, and customer satisfaction are pivotal to several industries’ chatbot implementation.
90% of businesses report faster complaint resolution with bots.
Health care, Travel, e-commerce, Human resources, Real estate, Food, and the Banking industries have implemented chatbots to deliver improved customer experiences. Below are a few case studies to explore.
E-commerce
With an increasing number of internet penetration across different countries and the adoption of online shopping, it will be a massive task for companies to have agents available to process every order or request from consumers.
For example, India’s internet users are projected to be 829 million by 2021, increasing from 481 million in 2017. The E-commerce revenue to move from US$ 39 billion in 2017 to US$ 120 billion in 2020 — an annual rate of 51 percent.
Popularly known as shopping assistants, Chatbots manage processes such as order placement, suggestions of sizes, colors, price ranges, possible choices, or close alternatives customers may fancy.
Your contact center agents get to focus on more personalized issues, thereby saving time, shortening the sales cycle, boosting conversion while delivering customer satisfaction.
Here’s a customer success story on how chatbot experience was used to manage an increase in order volume during BlackFriday sales.
Banking
With 24/7 availability and a 99% uptime, Chatbots can be trained to be personal bankers, wealth managers, or loan service agents to customers.
With GPS service integration, it can serve as an ATM locator. Chatbots make banking easy with instant response to queries from routine requests to complicated tasks across the bank’s customer service touchpoints — mobile app, website, or Facebook page.
A Samsung report states that more than 50% of financial services companies have chatbot development as one of their projects.
Health care
Research has shown that administrative work consumes one-sixth of the average physicians’ working hours, taking away valuable time needed for crucial responsibilities.
A Chatbot experience can take charge of scheduling appointments. Patients seeking to see a medical practitioner can provide information to the bot. Nurses or doctors can then collect this data from the backend.
The process of admitting, discharging, transferring, or referring patients can all be handled by a chatbot, thereby saving administrative time required to process forms and documents.
Chatbots can also serve as a consultant for minor illnesses by providing information sources from an extensive database. Individuals can ask health questions to the bot and receive answers retrieved from a Q&A database.
In a situation where an individual isn’t satisfied with the bot’s responses, she can be connected to a professional who can then provide an expert answer.
Food
Restaurant/Fast Food activities such as asking for the menu, taking orders, making reservations, or accepting payments are all avenues to provide seamless chatbot experiences.
The above picture exemplifies the chatbot experience by Dominos pizza using Facebook Messenger.
Chatbots are a particularly great success in the food industry because of the straightforwardness and predictability of the process involved in obtaining a service without human intervention.
This saves the company time to handle other pertinent issues and cuts down on the number of staff required to process orders. Here’s a case study of how a voice bot was implemented for a multinational chain of fast-food restaurants to handle an increase in order volume.
Building your Chatbot experience with the necessary features
So, your team has decided to develop a chatbot for your business, and you are not too sure of how to go about it.
You need to first determine the interaction process of customers with your service or product. Every company or brand has unique interaction flow patterns from customers.
It would help if you made your Chatbot less complicated, nonetheless, rich with information to reduce the call traffic that goes through to your call center agents.
It would help if you considered the following things;
Simplicity
Please don’t make our chatbot loaded with too many options that leave your users lost in the process of using it.
Start simple and improve on your chatbot experience with feedback from users.
Focus on adding to the customer experience rather than creating an “out of the box” solution that leaves the user frustrated and immediately preferring to speak to a contact center agent.
Bruce Lee once said that “Simplicity is the key to brilliance.” Keep your chatbot experience simple.
Link-up to the right source
A Chatbot is just an interface that intelligently calls out information from a defined database/source.
Ensure that you link up your chatbot to the right resources to provide users with the necessary replies.
With Google Dialogflow, a business’s contact center need to create user intent samples based on service offerings or frequently asked questions. Dialogflow uses machine learning to create a pool of related phrases pulled from a database with the supplied information.
When a user makes a request, the AI can match intent to a best-fit response phrase. Responses can be through Chatbots, Webchats, or whatever platform that is integrated with your contact center.
It is a sure way of improving your contact center’s First Time Resolution (FTR).
Chatbot Analytics
Building a chatbot without analyzing user statistics and the resolution rate of queries is a bad idea.
Your chatbot should have built-in reporting capabilities that will enable performance over time. With analytics data, your business can determine areas that need to be improved or taken out.
With Dialogflow Console, you get an analytics page that shows various agent requests and response data statistics. This data helps you assess how your Chatbot is being used and may be used to improve your service.
You can select from multiple data views and filter by time range. The statistics shown on all charts are computed hourly.
Escalation Path
Taking your customers through a journey of discovering a solution to their problem without finding any due to your chatbot’s limitations will only lead to bad customer experiences and loss of existing and potential customers.
It is necessary to have an escalation path. You allow individuals to click a button to have their query answered by a contact center agent via Chat or phone call if the chatbot cannot provide the desired answers.
Data protection
One of the significant challenges of chatbots is security, which can be divided into threats and vulnerabilities.
Threats include spoofing/impersonating someone else, tampering with data, and data theft. While vulnerabilities mean a bot can be open to attacks if it is not well maintained, has poor programming, or lacks encryption.
To mitigate these threats, end-to-end encryption, secure protocols, robust user identity authentication, and authorization need to be implemented.
You could integrate biometric, voice recognition, or taking a selfie for authentication of customers.
CRM Integration
For chatbots that collect and store customer information, keeping data from customer interaction and passing them into a customer log will be ideal.
This helps any of your contact center agents continue with conversations in the case of an escalation, preventing the customer from having to repeat the information provided earlier.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
NLP is an AI-powered system that learns to recognize the human language, analyzes conversation tone while allowing the chatbot to engage in a human-like manner.
Google Dialogflow is a Natural Language Processing platform used to create virtual agents for websites, mobile applications, popular messaging platforms, connected cars, smart home devices, wearables, services, robots, and more.
You can use it to build interfaces (such as chatbots and conversational IVR) that enable natural and productive interactions between customers and your business.
As an inherent feature of Call Center Studio, Dialogflow aids call center agents to be more efficient in responding to customer requests.
When a customer calls your business, a text-to-speech feature performs speech recognition and understands what customers are saying regardless of how they phrase statements.
Dialogflow takes over by identifying customer intent from transcribed text and matches it to the best-fit reply for your agent to say or take action.
What’s next?
Chatbots will be bigger and better; businesses must adopt innovative ways to deliver continuous customer engagement by building exceptional chatbot experiences.
According to Gartner, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be a mainstream customer experience investment in the next couple of years. 47% of organizations will use chatbots for customer care, and 40% will deploy virtual assistants.
With the above-listed features, your process of building a chatbot should be easy-peasy with no sweat. However, if you still have questions and need clarification, you may speak to one of our experts — Book A Call
