When a customer is not happy and doesn’t feel supported or informed, they are more likely to vote with their feet.
How long is too long for a customer to wait for feedback? Turns out that if you ask them, they will say any amount of time spent waiting is far too much. And if your customer is waiting for Godot, it will cost you. In fact, not-so-great customer service has even been quantified by Forrester Research as amounting to a loss of $62 billion worth of business. When a customer is not happy, and doesn’t feel supported or informed – which is what prompts them to call customer service in the first place – they are more likely to vote with their feet.
In reality, customers need to be engaged constantly, consistently, and always. The most significant part of customer contact is the conversation. It is why we believe it should be as easy as possible to create it be it automated or human. Business users (i.e., content managers, conversation designers, content analysts, etc.) should be able to design conversations and manage the content behind those conversations – without any knowledge of NLP, AI, or technical know-how.
The process can take numerous forms, but it will always require an enterprise to think deeply about its current position and where it wants to be after it has transformed itself. That includes gathering intelligence on what competitors are doing and how they’ve managed to differentiate themselves. Only then will it be possible to come up with an effective transformation strategy.
Customer acquisition and retention are incredibly competitive. What sets apart a business is the customer experience which is a fluid combination of automation and human interaction. The former takes care of repetitive tasks while the latter leaves you with room to innovate and strategise. Both allow conversations.
This kind of tech has saved companies an estimated $165 million over time.
In our latest consumer insights report, we found that only 22% of the entire sample was happy to wait for longer than 24 hours for a response, so it’s clear that companies must move quickly to develop a self-service strategy that delivers. 36 per cent of the sample wanted an immediate response, and a further 24% said that an acceptable time for a response is within an hour.
Given this need for real-time servicing, there is an opportunity for the use of chatbots. However, it’s important that the chatbot’s answers are natural and appear human.
When asked whether they had ever had a sense that they were dealing with a chatbot and not a real person, 82 per cent of this sample answered yes. Clearly, too many businesses are getting this wrong through poorly implemented chatbots.
Companies dotting the globe have found value in AI chatbots. An example would be Northern Ireland Water, an entreprise fecund with information and a chatbot interacting with over 2,600 customers per month. It has reduced the pressure on their contact centre, otherwise awash with repetitive queries. Eneco, a Dutch energy supplier company, was able to handle high-volume, low-urgency queries that made up a large percentage of their 1.5 million calls per year. An omnichannel approach with 24/7 support allowed them to build a “Bot first, agent follows up” strategy. Like a good chatbot, Conversational AI can hand over to a live person, allowing the agent to focus on more urgent matters and far more complex queries. Take Missguided, a fashion brand using a real-time internal chatbot that reduced its operating costs by 14 per cent. They were not looking for a massive overhaul. They needed a prompt solution integrated into their existing architecture.
Many businesses are lacking technical staff and this solution allows them to leverage the resources they have available within their company, rather than resorting to third parties or having to recruit more capacity.
To enable business users, we created an easy-to-use CMS. No development is needed. In this CMS, anyone can build dialogs and conversations for any virtual assistant (including chatbots, voice bots, dynamic FAQs, and knowledge base management) to carry out via any platform/channel.
Conversational AI also has one supreme advantage that cannot be overlooked. They record. This can be used to enhance the customer experience as it provides insights, especially with the knowledge of the customer’s history. By understanding customers, you understand customer conversations, a task that is necessary for generating accurate answers. Artificial Intelligence helps to understand customers and supports in providing answers that match certain questions. The beauty of Conversational AI is not limited to external customers. It can also enhance the employee experience.
If you were to take a random poll, you will find that any customer-centric business is making AI its driving force. Oracle goes as far as reporting that eight out of 10 companies have already implemented or plan to implement AI as a customer service solution. According to ZDNet, 81 per cent of the companies using AI “use it to gather preliminary information when a customer makes first contact” adding that “75 per cent of companies use AI to automate the handling of routine customer issues – like password resets. In addition, 74 per cent use AI to classify customer problems and route them to the right customer service representative.”
We have also realised different customers need to be treated differently when it comes to customer experience. Millennials and Generation Z will do literally everything on mobile be it paying for their bills or ordering KFC. The customer journey needs to consider this self-service aspect across demographics and factor it into their customer interactions. In contrast, Boomers usually prefer to speak to customer service representatives on phone.
Of course, this is not Google AI, and neither will it be LaMDA.
But, if you want personalisation, something that comes up because a customer knows they are, in fact, not talking to a human, then you might want to offer your customers their preferred contact options be it Telegram, WhatsApp, or your website, via chat, or on phone. It works efficiently because it pairs up with existing infrastructure. Oxxio, a Dutch energy supplier, did this when they introduced Chatbot O. who goes beyond accepting payments. O. also advises customers on how to save energy, messaging them when they exceed their limit. It has paid off and users have been so impressed they have taken to sharing screenshots online. It has set Oxxio apart as a “fun and innovative customer-centric digital brand.” Clearly, Conversational AI cuts across the board, gifting companies with a competitive advantage.
