“Building a good customer experience doesn’t happen by accident. It happens by design”, said CMXperience’s founder Clare Muscutt. And we couldn’t agree more. Achieving peak customer satisfaction requires a solid strategy. And today, automating your customer experience using chatbots can help. Here’s how.
A decade ago, customers primarily contacted your business by phone or email. But a lot has happened since then, and the options have vastly expanded. The internet has changed the way we interact, and as a result, so have customer expectations. In these times of instant messaging and chat, speed and convenience are becoming ever-important. And for customer-facing teams, managing these expectations is quite the challenge.
Customers today don’t want to wait for days – or even hours – to get a reply. They expect fast, personalised service in their native language. Moreover, they want to contact your business on their terms: across all channels and platforms, at any time they see fit. And if they have a bad experience, they vote with their feet. 47% of consumers will leave a brand after poor service, costing businesses nearly $100 billion each year.
The limits of human teams
To sum it up, the importance of excellent customer service has become apparent for business leaders at all levels. But at the same time, the time and energy required to meet the changing customer demands are more than their current teams can handle. All too often, the knee-jerk reaction to optimise customer experience is to hire more people. And while great employees do make a world of difference for your clients, constantly increasing your staff base isn’t a durable solution.
As the volume of inbound calls and messages keeps accelerating, companies are grappling to keep their hiring rhythm up. The talent gap is a daily struggle for most, with nearly 80% of global organisations that believe there’s a gaping void between their business’s needs and available talent. And, of course, hiring and training new people is also a costly affair – especially in high-income countries with low unemployment rates.
Customer experience and automation
If technology has influenced customer expectations so drastically over the last decade, it can also help you meet these ever-growing demands. And a little automation might just do the trick.
So, what is automation really? In customer support, automation refers to a set of technologies to complete tasks instead of human agents. You can choose to automate entire processes, like sending payment reminders, or just parts of processes. In every case, the result is less human involvement.
Of course, the prime objective of CX automation is customer satisfaction. And indeed, technologies often do better at performing simple, highly repetitive tasks than humans do. And they do it in a fraction of the time. By turning to automation technology, businesses can optimise their CX while unburdening their staff. With success: enterprises that use automation to support human operations increase annual revenues by 22%.
Customer experience automation and chatbots
The main concern of businesses looking to optimise their customer experience, is managing inbound communication. Because, let’s face it, dealing with a deluge of emails, phone calls, and messages every day often leaves customer service teams stressed – and customers dissatisfied. There are a few automation options to tackle this ever-growing inbound traffic, and one of them is chatbots.
Technically speaking, a chatbot is a piece of software used to conduct an online chat conversation with a customer. Depending on the chatbot you choose, they can interact with customers in varying degrees of complexity. Some bots just follow pre-programmed scripts with fixed responses, while others use AI to mimic a live human agent.
Chatbot advantages for customer service
But isn’t a chatbot just a nice gimmick? No. In customer service, chatbots can do anything from leading customers to the right FAQ articles, or helping them with a purchase or return, to making personalised product recommendations.
By using a chatbot, you can cut a significant amount of your agent’s workload. Some of the best bots out there can resolve up to 60% of customer queries without human intervention, giving your agents the time to focus on more complex tasks. These are some of the most significant benefits associated with customer service automation using chatbots:
- Reduced waiting times
- Expanded service hours and channels
- Fewer human errors
- Higher agent engagement
- More loyal customers
- Higher cost-effectiveness
- …
To sum it up, chatbots prove essential tools for guaranteeing the best support experience while unburdening agents and keeping customers content.
Want to dive in deeper?
In this eBook, we explore 5 reasons why artificial intelligence in chatbots is crucial to ensuring a high-quality customer experience and enabling growth across borders.
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