Every business should be thinking about creating great customer service experiences in businesses. Happy customers make for repeat customers, and that leads to more revenue and company growth for the long term.
The rise of business technology made better customer service possible. Conversational AI for customer service is a game-changer for the most part, allowing customers to interact with a business representative, even if that representative is an app programmed to answer queries and concerns. The use of chatbots is undoubtedly on the rise. Up to 40% of millennials now engage with artificial intelligence-based chat support regularly.
If you have a business, whether large or small, there are now dozens of tools available to help build out conversational artificial intelligence for your store, brand, or company. Here are some best practices to remember when creating chatbots.
Before taking a look at your customer service software options, you must first take a look at the people who will interact with your chatbot. Not all customers are alike. In fact, each persona or segment will have a unique set of preferences, behaviors, and priorities. Hence, people in charge of customer service technology must first understand who their audience is and how to serve them best.
Some questions that a company must answer if they want to get to know their AI-based customer service clients better include:
A rule-based chatbot example that has become common practice is answering queries from customers, which can be sales and after-sales centered in nature. There’s no question that chatbots can improve customer service, but that’s only if queries built into the technology are as extensive as possible. Before figuring out the tech side of things, determine the common questions that your customer service department gets and populate them into one central document.
It might take a while to be as extensive as possible. Consider categorizing your concerns for better organization. You can put concerns under shipment, product defect, repeat order, payment concerns, and a variety of other categories that you might think of for your business. No two businesses are alike so it’s unlikely that this will be a cut and paste job. Take your time and be as extensive as necessary.
Conversational AI statistics indicate that bots see 35-40% response rates. In some cases, bots can even get response rates of up to 80-90%.
One common denominator in high engaging chatbots is they don’t sound like bots at all. Decades ago, people in computer sciences came up with the Turing test to see if people could distinguish technology from humans. The time has come to apply this to customer service. Yes, we’re at that point in time.
When building out conversational AI, supercharge your customers’ experiences by adding emotion-based keywords. When a customer airs out a complaint, add scripts like “I understand that you’re frustrated.” When they give good feedback, add key phrases like “I’m so glad I was able to help!”
Chatbot creators allow you to customize and build out responses to requests with the highest levels of personalization possible. Why not throw in a few emojis here and there as well? That might add a more personal touch to the experience too.
Companies and teams building chatbots for customer service can often make the elementary mistake of making their conversation flows too complicated—albeit they add too many options, put too many scenarios, add unnecessary steps, and so on. The key to any successful chatbot flow is a simple system that helps customers get in and get out of the conversation in the fastest time possible and leave with a solution.
AI-based conversational chatbots can be a thing of beauty, but remember to keep chat flows simple and clean. Try keeping responses short and sweet. Add a little bit of flare to it, but try to solve the problem within a few sentences or even words.
Creating a conversational AI chatbot is rarely ever a one-time occurrence. Now, while it helps to be as extensive as possible when creating your first chatbot sequence, chances are it will still feel incomplete on the first run. And that’s okay. Because just as customer experiences change through time, chatbots will as well.
Never put one final stamp of approval on your chatbot flows. Allow for more room to improve or amend them as necessary. Some chatbot builders have the added bonus of being able to tag certain responses so that you can easily search them and update them as needed.
75% of customers believe it takes too long to reach a live agent, so businesses are now deciding that chatbots are necessary to any customer service department. But that doesn’t mean that the day of human customer service representatives is ending. It only means that this will help companies serve their customers better by joining the best of two worlds into one experience.
