TOPICS: Chatbot for Support   Chatbot for Service    Chatbot Trends   

Customer Support Chatbot – Improving Customer Satisfaction

The customer support chatbot has come a long way from its days as delightful but simplistic FAQ tool. Today, they’re part and parcel of most of our interactions with online services, and diligently meet our demands for on-demand assistance, irrespective of our location or time zone. A host of studies conducted in recent years have shown that building customer support chatbots has an immediate and positive effect on a company’s customer satisfaction scores. In this article, we’ll walk you through the process of leveraging customer support chatbots to acquire and retain more customers.

1. Lighten your customer support staff’s workload.

If yours is a business that deals with a large number of users every day, the only way to retain your customers is to provide them with the assistance they need, as and when they need it. This leads to a hard-pressed customer support department, in which your employees are burdened with repeatedly answering the same set of basic questions. The solution? Reduce their workload by bringing automation into the picture.

A growing number of businesses have started automating a chunk of their customer service interactions by opting to create a chatbot. The best customer support chatbots combine customer-oriented scripts and artificial intelligence to identify and address a variety of simple questions and complaints. These basic issues tend to come up multiple times in a single session, and without a customer support chatbot available to address them, can unnecessarily burn your support agents out.

Picture Hannah, a visitor on an online gifts store. Hanna is one of many visitors who just want to confirm the size of a greeting card. She sees a chatbot option on the site and proceeds to ask her question.

Hannah: “What is the size of the dragon pop-up card?”

Chatbot: “I will be happy to help! Please select the design you’re interested in.”

Hannah: [Selects one of three products]

Chatbot: “Our Flying Dragon 3D card measures 7” x 7”.”

Hannah: “Is that when it’s folded flat or is it the height of the pop-up?”

Chatbot: “All dimensions listed on our site are measured with the card folded flat. The height of the 3D pop-up may vary from design to design.”

The above interaction takes a few seconds and gets Hannah the information she needs without taking up a customer support agent’s time. These twin benefits are prompting organizations around the world to define repetitive entries in their customer service conversations, and automate their resolution by building customer support chatbots. This frees up their customer support agents to focus on higher priority issues.

2. Trim your customer support costs.

Customer support is a department you can’t afford to do away with, but it can quickly evolve into a setup that you can’t afford to maintain. It costs a big chunk of change to hire a team of efficient and dedicated agents who will be available to your customers for the greater part of a day. To add to the problem, customers have started expecting assistance at all hours, regardless of time zones, locations, or even public holidays. Catering to their needs on such a massive scale has costs that even a moderately sized organization can’t always afford to foot. Building customer support chatbots, on the other hand, can get you the results you need even if you have a tight ship to run.

In Hannah’s example, we looked at how a customer support chatbot can fill in for customer service agents if the query at hand isn’t too complex. Having your human and virtual staff on the job together will not just be easy on your pocket, but will also allow you to maintain the same standards of service as you scale up and acquire more customers.

3. Get yourself an advanced system of analytics.

When talking about the advantages of building customer support chatbots for websites of modern businesses, we usually discuss their 24-hour availability, high-speed responses, and low costs of development. But there is another ‘behind-the-scenes’ benefit of customer support chatbot development. The best chatbots for customer service can be easily integrated with existing helpdesks, email service providers, and customer relationship management systems. What this means is that once you’ve opted to create a chatbot for your business, you have a sophisticated analytics suite in place which organizes and streamlines your customer service operations, makes it possible for you to update your existing setup at a moment’s notice, and gives you plenty of useful information about how your customers are engaging with your product or service.

4. Collect feedback from your customers.

You can’t really talk about increasing your customer satisfaction score without actually providing your customers with what they need. Often, the challenge here is to actually find out what it is that your customers like about your product or service, and what they’d rather change. A customer support chatbot makes sure that you stay in the loop.

When you create a chatbot for customer support, you’re constantly in touch with your customers, and have a written record of every conversation between your chatbot and your customers. This means that you can always know how your customers are responding to your new products, website updates, or customer service quality. From Hannah’s recent example, you can tell that the descriptions on your site could have a little more information in the card measurement section. Similarly, customer queries and statements like the following can serve as useful pointers for implementing changes to your product or service:

“I can’t find a way to return my order.”

“How do I change my current address?”

“Isn’t there a way to reschedule the delivery from the website itself?”

“What other colors is this product available in?”

Of course, because your customer support chatbot is already conversing with your customers, you can also introduce a quick survey into the script and get feedback on specific areas where you’re looking to improve. For instance, in Hannah’s example, the chatbot could end the conversation with a quick message like:

“Thank you for visiting [Gift Store]! I hope I was able to answer your questions. Would you please rate me on a scale of 1 to 5 below so I know where to improve?”

Collecting user feedback is an excellent way for companies to assess where they stand in terms of product or service quality, and to design their user experience around the actual needs of their customers.

Find out how customer support chatbot development is influencing industries around the world by reading our latest blog posts. If you’re looking to build the best chatbot for your own business, feel free to reach out with your requirements and we’ll revert as soon as possible.