Customer Service Chatbot for Rivhit, an automated accounting software for business owners

Ofri Bar-Meir – Marketing Manager, http://www.rivhit.co.il/

Introduce your business and tell us about yourself: What does your business do? What is your role?

Hi, I’m Ofri, and I’m the Marketing Manager for Rivhit. Rivhit.co.il is an accounting software designed for business owners. We look to help businesses transition from manual book-keeping to a convenient and automated system that takes care of invoicing, inventory management, cash management, customer support for payments, and a lot more.
As Marketing Manager, I oversee the company's sales and marketing strategies, explore and implement new ways to convert interested business owners into customers.

What problems/challenges did you have and why did you decide to create a Chatbot?

The fact that we deal with the complex subject of accounting, it becomes imperative for us to provide high-quality online customer support. A lot of our customers (owners of small businesses and startups) don’t understand much about accounting. When faced with a bunch of technical terms and tasks that they haven’t dealt with before, it’s natural for them to be apprehensive about going forward with something they don’t understand. Which is when they need help and guidance.

I’ve followed the chatbot development space for a while now, and I saw potential in adding a chatbot along with a live chat feature to our website. The chatbot would be able to handle large volumes of basic queries, most of which we had already fleshed out into a series of FAQs. And if a customer asked a question that the chatbot couldn’t find the answer to, or raised a particularly complex or custom issue, someone from our customer support team would step in and take over through the live chat facility. Together, this promised to be the effective and efficient customer support system that our website needed.

What was the result of adding your Chatbot to your business/website? And what did you learn from it?

To put it simply, it worked! Ever since we added a chatbot to our site, we’ve noticed a 40% drop in the number of incoming support calls and emails we receive from our customers. This proved right away that the chatbot was being able to address the bulk of the queries it received.

Another excellent result of creating a chatbot has been the constant stream of relevant feedback we’ve been collecting without even asking our customers for it. For instance, because the chatbot is powered by artificial intelligence, it keeps recommending additional questions that we should consider adding to the script. Using these recommendations, we’ve been able to expand our list of FAQs, and have been able to update the chatbot with more issues that it can solve for our customers without roping in a human support rep.

What are your top recommendations for businesses just starting with their own Chatbot?

Build your chatbot along the same principles that guide your business. Rivhit, for instance, was built on creating an experience. It stands out not only because of our product offering, but also because of the overall customer journey we offer. We aim to deliver value through our accounting software itself and through our customer service. And we look to do the same thing through the answers that we write for our chatbot. To this end, we designed the chatbot not just to give out information, but also to help our users figure out how to solve their issues and be better equipped to take action on their own in the future.