How Artificial Intelligence driven chatbots enhance customer support?

If you have placed orders online for food or any other item (who hasn’t these days) and if you had a query regarding your order or if you faced a glitch and opted to seek resolution for your problem through a conversation via chat, chances are you chatted with a (very human-sounding) chatbot and chances are that the chatbot was able to resolve your problem too.

Chatbots are Artificial Intelligence powered software that simulates a human-like conversation (or a chat) with a human user, in a natural language through messaging applications, websites and mobile apps or through the telephone. Chatbots simplify conversations between customers and brands through instant auto replies, thus reducing human dependency for simple, everyday queries. Today, chatbots are helping mid-to-large sized enterprises to achieve goals in customer relationship management.

Satisfy existing customer for better business returns

Customer satisfaction is a top priority for businesses as focusing on customers ensures a better return for businesses when compared with the cost of converting new customers. Technological advancements are giving companies additional tools and resources to transform customer service interactions, ensuring better response times and enhanced quality of interaction. With businesses increasingly adopting AI for customer support, AI is proving itself useful in many ways.

Personalized consumer experience: Consumers find it faster and easier to connect to businesses through communication methods like Chat or Business Messenger which have significantly lower wait times, have updated customer history for the context and have higher resolutions rates compared to traditional support options like phone and email.

Controlled support centre costs: If the wait time on helpdesk queries are cut down while the customer is in the resolution process, it’s a win-win situation for everyone. With a 30% reduction in support service costs, enterprise helpdesks using AI are achieving up to 80% resolution on the bulk of queries.

These stats are pretty encouraging for enterprises struggling to control support costs. Before chatbots were here, good CX and support costs were mutually exclusive. The current self-service support era is enabling personalized consumer experience at optimized costs for growing enterprises.

For mid-large sized enterprises with a massive and ever-growing consumer base, self-service support systems like chatbots and live chat systems prove to be a major cost-saver.

Real-time self-service

Chatbots have truly transformed customer service into a more convenient self-service where the customer does not have to endure inordinate amount of wait times at the end of a phone line or for an email response for simple, recurring issues. When a customer receives smart auto-responses to their frequent queries, the sense of trust grows between individual customers and brands.

Efficiently orchestrated support interplay: A modern chatbot is a beautifully orchestrated interplay between the automated system and live human agents. It ensures that neither the customer experiences an overly robotic service nor the support agents’ response times are wasted on simple, everyday queries. There is a delicate, yet powerful balance between the automated system and human agents. This works very well for enterprise support wherein:

          0 A live human agent can instantly take over the conversation when auto-response intelligence has reached its limit.
          0 Consumer experience is not hampered at any point during query resolution.

With efficiently orchestrated support interplay, it matters very little whether the customer is talking to a chatbot or a human.

Where is my order?

For a query as simple as where is my order, in the absence of AI support automation, a human agent will need to pull information from 3-4 different systems including databases, servers, etc. Chatbots, on the other hand, are ‘know-it-alls” that integrate with enterprise systems in a way that they can auto-derive customer information from multiple systems instantly.

Backed by a powerful CRM: For an efficient interplay between the automated system and live agents to work, the chatbot product must be backed by a powerful CRM.

          0 A powerful CRM is one with strong API integrations. With the ability to connect and adapt to multiple business systems, human effort can be significantly brought down by a large percentage.
          0 Machine learning capabilities of the CRM backing the chatbot must be top-notch. With strong NLP (Natural Language Processing) capabilities, the automated system should be able to interact with customers in a humane way, thus exceeding consumer expectations by every standard.

Intelligence for every industry: The success of any business in 2019 depends entirely on the kind of service experienced during every purchase. With customer engagement expectations going beyond the call centre, businesses have a rather tough responsibility of offering personalized service to stay ahead of the curve.

AI-driven automation is not only helping brands to be available for a quick chat, but it’s also transforming customer service into self-serve which is advantageous to businesses in two ways:

          0 Customers are happy with a self-serve portal that they can access at any time to get their issues sorted, without tedious wait times.
          0 With a large consumer base, providing a personalized customer experience becomes an achievable goal.

With AI for service technology, it’s easy to configure the chatbot to respond in accordance to the nature of the business and the industry.

By Sheshgiri Kamath, Co-founder & CEO, Kapture CRM