As businesses are growing, serving customer queries is no longer restricted to direct and personal employee interactions but has instead moved to digital channels through interactive displays and service chat bots.
With increased customer interaction, a product or business gains the reputation of responsive marketing when no query is left hanging. But as call centers are overwhelmed with increasing call volumes, they are unable to cope with the demands for service without over-exertion. It becomes nearly impossible to satisfy every customer request, especially with the onset of on-call deliveries and customized products and services.
The key differentiator for conversational AI was that it could field the front-line of customer queries by handling the low-stakes market for the masses. As most queries were simple enough to be handled by bots rather than take up time from a human handler who can handle more complex queries, conversational AI and chatbots started to take command.
Juniper Research1 stated that consumers and businesses will save over 2.5 billion customer service hours by 2023. Additionally, chatbots are expected to deliver $11 BN in annual cost savings for the retail, banking, and healthcare sectors by 2023.
Today, chatbots can handle more than just customer service. By throwing AI into the mix, the conversational AI bots could take up customer orders, book services, take interviews, support healthcare, and handle almost every routine office task. They have also assumed home assistant roles–like with Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa adorning home spaces acting as constant companions.
However, as chatbots and Virtual Agents (VAs) were not providing the warmth of human interaction, they failed to impress customers.
Forbes reports that up to 87% of customers2 prefer humans over chatbots in their interactions. They deemed humans as more ‘understanding’ to their queries and were capable of understanding complex situations. Admittedly, most chatbot solutions today are conducive to such criticisms.
It’s becoming more apparent as we progress in the digital age that service requests need to be met with empathetic and more realistic encounters. Rather than an experience where the customer tries to figure out the logic behind a client-facing tech, the experience should guarantee that the tech can understand the customer. But with the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) that can head chatbot creativity, it is possible to make conversations match human interactiveness.
Reaping the benefits of conversational AI
AI-powered enterprise chatbot solutions perform intelligent tasks through common machine learning techniques and complex NLP. It can influence businesses and their customer outcomes in ways never seen before. Listed below are some of the ways in which conversational AI can influence and benefit present and future businesses.
Cost-efficient digital experience
Digital experiences usually come at huge prices. Yet businesses value the long-term impacts of digital transformation through improved customer experiences.
Instead of employing additional staff to handle rising call volumes and spending on the extra infrastructural needs that support their needs, chatbots are an initial investment that can reduce future spending.
Deploying conversational AI solutions can also help in collecting information faster, with more accuracy and efficiency. This leads companies to forego old and inefficient practices of extracting customer feedback manually.
Brand messaging
When business services get a facelift with conversational solutions, it gives the whole organization an improved outlook. It sends a strong message among the audience that the company is willing to adapt to newer effective technologies and align itself strategically with the market. This enhances the brand messaging as a whole by building up trust among partners and customers in various segments. Incidentally, the business also stands out among the competitors.
Sales enablement
Chatbots collect information and queries from prospects and existing customers to help companies understand how to position themselves for all incoming service demands. Instead of multiple manual interactions to gather relevant information from an interested party, the chatbots could easily follow through with an interaction until they are ready for direct interaction with an employee.
Sometimes, leads could be disqualified early on in the interaction, making it unnecessary for either side to interact further. The bots can methodically and clearly give out information about the products and services, answering simple queries without wasting time.
Customer satisfaction
Customers are looking to be served faster and more efficiently than ever before. You don’t want to wait to get your order status for hours on end but can simply chat with the bot. The bot can sift through information from the database within milliseconds and reply to the query.
This is exactly what customers desire in today’s fast-paced culture. This is beneficial for new customers that want more information about the service to see whether you suit their needs. When it comes to clarifying the doubts of an existing customer, chatbots can quickly serve without any delays. This redirects much of the chat volume and makes it worthwhile when a customer needs more complex assistance from a human representative.
Higher NPS
NPS or the Net Promoter Score is a widely accepted metric for determining how likely a customer will be to recommend a service to others. The customers who recommend the services are known as promoters of the service. Employing chatbots for customer service results in higher NPS as they can speed up responses. NPS surveys ask customers about their experience with the digital platform, and the results contribute to the NPS score.
In a survey on millennial interaction with customer services, 30% of responders3 said that they would prefer interacting through chat and that they would contact the company more if chat was an option.
Productivity
AI-powered, enterprise chatbot solutions enrich both the employee experience as well as boost company productivity.
Since AI is capable of faster information processing, the overall productivity increases by allowing staff to concentrate on more important tasks. Collecting and relaying information becomes easy as the chatbots are programmed to do so accurately. This results in lowered emotional stress among employees when handing customers day in and day out.
Integrating AI chatbots with your business
Conversations are increasingly resembling those with employees-in-person with new conversational AI, raising customer satisfaction and attracting more promoters for the services. In order to stand out in the peer service market, businesses need to integrate intelligent customer engagement technology into their service platforms.
Engaging customers in intuitive and easy communication will promote more engagements leading to better cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. As customers are less hesitant to interact with a digital entity, they are encouraged to gather more information, in turn offering further insight into general customer needs.
Innominds has partnered with a leading conversational AI provider, Haptik to help businesses scale up conversational AI adoption to enhance customer experiences and build the foundation for a future with contactless systems and seamless self-service transactions and processes.
In a recent announcement, the new collaboration seeks to introduce businesses to simple and secure chatbot solutions that will increase customer engagements in the pandemic situation and beyond.
Learn more about Innominds’ chatbot solutions and reach out to us for more information.
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