How Chatbots Can Boost Your Customer Experience 

According to a Deloitte report, “A strong customer experience can not only lead to stronger financial performance but also form the basis for competitive differentiation.

Successfully differentiating the brand both in terms of products and the experience can have a positive impact on a company’s bottom line with higher conversion rates and increased customer loyalty.”

Not surprisingly, Gartner has predicted that over 50% of organizations will redirect their investments to CX (customer experience) innovations in 2019.  

But where should you start — is that the question echoing in your mind as you read these words on your screen?

Well, if you ask us, investing in customer support technology can give you great results in terms of improving your CX. A report indicates that “62% of organizations view customer experience provided through contact centers as a competitive differentiator.” 

We are inclined to agree. 

So would you, if you have dropped an email to customer support, without receiving a reply for days. Or, if you ever waited for hours on the phone with customer support, repeating your query to agent after agent until you reached the right department poised to solve your question.

Stats confirm that the experience mentioned above is not uncommon. 

On average, customer service takes over 12 hours to respond to an email. 62% of companies do not even care to respond to customer service emails. Of those that do, only 3% care to send a follow-up email to check whether their customers are satisfied with the response or not

Of course, humans have limitations, and it isn’t possible for your support agents to instantly reply to every single query. Yet, your customers want instant gratification and would not think twice before turning to your competitors after a single bad experience. Thankfully, there’s technology to the rescue in the form of AI-enabled chatbots that can transform your customer support completely.

The Rise of Chatbots in Customer Support

The millennials are not wary of using new technology if it ensures a faster and convenient buying experience for them. Even across generations, people have a favourable view of chatbots. 

Business Insider mentions that 38% of consumers view chatbots positively, while 51% are neutral about them. In another survey, 49% of consumers preferred to conduct their customer service interactions via text, if only the company could get it right! 

Here’s what customers generally use a chatbot for:

• Get quick answers to their questions in an emergency (37%)
• Find detailed answers or explanations (35%)
• A tool for getting connected with a human (34%)

Four Ways in Which Chatbots Can Boost Your CX

Do you wish to increase your online sales by giving your customers an unmatched buying experience? 

Enabling 24/7 support on your site through chatbots can improve your customer service standards manifold. However, this is not only the reason why chatbots are becoming integral to every successful customer experience strategy. 

Few ways in which chatbots can turn around your business by creating seamless and consistent experiences for customers:

1. Instantaneous Customer Service

Data shows that 82% of buyers expect companies to respond to their questions instantly, allowing them a response time of under 10 minutes. Besides, 33% of customers feel frustrated as they have to wait for long or repeat themselves multiple times to customer service representatives. 

Using a chatbot for customer service can speed up your response time by answering 80% of routine questions instantly. Chatbots also enable 24/7 support on various touchpoints, living up to the expectations of the ‘always connected’ modern customers. 

2. Reduced Costs

Are you aware that 29% of customer service positions can be automated through chatbots, saving $23 billion annually for U.S. businesses? 

Every cent counts, and chatbots can save your business an enormous amount of money in hiring and training several human agents. Chatbots achieve this by streamlining your customer support system. 

Powered by NLP-based Machine Learning algorithms, a chatbot can go through customer queries contextually, leading them to the next logical step that could be the link to a relevant page, FAQs, or connect them to a human agent. Such filtering ensures that simple queries are answered speedily, and your human agents are optimally utilized for solving complex queries. Besides, you can always pass on the savings to your customers in the form of discounts to boost sales.

3. Personalized Shopping Experience

Amazon spearheaded the era of curated shopping experiences by suggesting items to users based on their past shopping behaviour. Chatbots can personalize this experience further by allowing you to start conversations with your customers pro-actively.

Yes, many businesses are employing chatbots to make online shopping more comfortable and rewarding for their customers.

For example, your chatbot can begin a conversation and inform customers about ongoing sales and promotions. Or, it can proactively ask customers what they are looking for and suggest suitable options to save them time and hassle. You can also connect your chatbot with your inbox, messenger, and other third-party apps to keep all your customer conversations at one place. This will help you keep track of customer information, leading to a higher degree of personalization.

4. Collect Feedback from Customers

Investing time and money in developing CX strategies for your business is excellent. But how do you do that without knowing what your customers think about your services and what they expect from you? 

Chatbots come in handy for collecting customer feedback quickly, without any survey fatigue that may bring down your overall customer experience. All you need to do is prepare a micro-survey, and your chatbot will share it in a non-intrusive manner via messenger, at the end of a conversation or before a user leaves your site, leading to higher completion rates as compared to traditional modes like email.

Conclusion

Chatbots offer an efficient and cost-effective way of meeting your customers’ expectations. However, it is essential to train your chatbots correctly to avoid customer frustration. As you may already know, chatbots are programmed to identify specific keywords and respond to them with pre-decided answers. Thus, there is a danger of providing instant but mechanical responses that may frustrate your clients. However, by using chatbots as the first point of contact for solving simple queries and passing on the complex ones to human agents, you can ensure meaningful interactions while also streamlining your workflow.

Are you already using a chatbot as part of your CX strategy? Tell us about your achievements and what you think about the future of chatbots in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you.