By Swatil Binte Mahmud, Blogger, Lava Protocols
What is a chatbot? That is an important question we should ask ourselves because Gartner predicts that by 2020, the average person will have more conversations with chatbots than with their spouse. Senior executives of businesses have assistants to handle routine tasks, freeing them up for more strategic problem-solving that keeps the business running smoothly. You can think of chatbots in the same way.
Chatbot (derived from “chat robot”) is a computer program that simulates human conversation, either via voice or text communication. It is driven by the promise of intelligent round-the-clock digital support, more companies are using them to engage with customers alongside the now classic channels of phone, email, and social media. Chatbots can communicate via smart speakers, function on smart home devices, and via popular chat and messaging platforms like SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and LINE.
Over the years, developers have incorporated more sophisticated techniques to enable chatbots to better understand people’s needs and provide more useful responses. Now, chatbots with Artificial Intelligence (AI) can learn more complex ways of simulating human conversation, such as maintaining context, managing a dialogue, and adjusting responses based on what comes up in the conversation.
AI chatbots can be custom-built to meet a range of specific business needs in both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) environments. If you are thinking of introducing an AI chatbot to your business, keep reading to understand better why you should.
Providing Distance Support
The COVID-19 pandemic has led thousands of businesses to practice remote working. Employees are juggling loads of office work at home, household chores, and the stress of a pandemic. Providing support to all their customers along with those things can become a challenge for some. Hence, customers can interact with an AI chatbot via a call centre application. This way customers can perform tasks such as changing a password, requesting an account balance, or scheduling an appointment- all without speaking to an agent.
Providing Enterprise Support
Chatbots can be integrated with your company’s back-end systems such as inventory management or customer relationship management. An AI chatbot can help sales reps quickly access phone numbers or help the human resources team perform faster employee onboarding.
Reducing Customer Waiting Time
Chatbots can reduce the time customers spend waiting for answers. Customers can get immediate answers to common questions (about order status, store hours, or locations, for instance) in a chat window instead of waiting for an email, a phone call, or a response from another channel.
Handling Efficient Redirects for Customer Inquiries
AI chatbots can instantly welcome customers with a branded greeting in a chat window, for example, and quickly direct them to the resources they need. This way customers will not feel lost when they visit your website.
Providing Agents with Leads
By handling initial support interactions with a customer or prospective customer, AI chatbots can help open conversations that human agents can follow up on at a later time. A bot might ask a series of relevant questions, for example, and gather an email address, thus delivering a more qualified lead to a sales rep — who can then use this information to personalize future customer interactions.
Creating Interactive FAQs
Instead of prompting your customers to go to an FAQ page on your website, chatbots will bring the answers to your customers. All you will have to do is to load your top-level FAQ questions — including any follow-up questions and their corresponding answers — into your AI interface. With natural language processing (NLP), chatbots recognize language as it’s used in everyday interactions, making it easy for your customers to get answers.
AI and chatbot technology will continue to evolve, ushering in a new era of text- and voice-enabled user experiences that reshape the customer experience. Research shows, high-performing service teams are often further ahead in developing AI chatbots to augment their human agents and deliver customer service support. In an age where the speed of service matters more than ever, chatbots are helping companies stay a step ahead.
You can leverage Einstein Bots of Salesforce to ease the load on your service agents. Einstein Bot will handle routine requests and free your agents to handle more complex issues that have emerged due to COVID-19 pandemic.
Lava Protocols is an authorized Salesforce Partner in Malaysia. Need a field service management software? Drop us an email to schedule your demo: hello@lavaprotocols.com.