If your business has an online presence and you engage with your customers via your website, you know how important it is to let them talk to you in real time. You may have great products and professional services, but do you have the time and resources to handle all the website inquiries? A Chatbot can help with this.

The more we browse, the less our attention span becomes, and as a result, we have less patience when ‘on hold’ and are left to twiddle our thumbs. So, it’s more important than ever to take care of your online customers as quickly as possible.

But how can online customer service be made better?

Chatbots can help with this. Chatbots are computer programs that mimic humans by using artificial intelligence (AI) to communicate with customers in real-time by typing messages back and forth, engaging with the customer until the Chatbot has dealt with their requests or passed them on to an actual customer service agent. Even when you or other team members aren’t around, Chatbots are constantly working to help manage online visitors.

Fact: Businesses that put customer service first make more money than those that don’t.

Here are four tips to help you use chatbots as part of your customer service and support strategy.

When it talks to new users, a Chatbot won’t know what those customers want or why they’re reaching out. They have to figure out how to help users and solve their problems based on what they say in the conversation.

To ensure a Chatbot gives the same kind of communication experience as a human, it has access to the customers’ data, preferences, and personal information. This makes it easier to talk to them about what they need so that the Chatbot can solve the problem immediately. By asking a few key questions, the Chatbot can establish the customers’ requirements and guide them through the process to determine the best possible outcome.

Who are you?

With so many Chatbots to choose from, you need to consider your options. Even if they know they’re talking to a computer, no one wants to have a conversation with a robot. Adding human-like features to your Chatbot and, in essence, giving your brand a human touch makes all the difference. It is possible to create interactions that align with your company, its products, and its services.

People want to talk to people and feel like they’re talking to someone who gets them and cares about them. Utilising customer data and user information ensures your chatbots can quickly assess your customers’ requirements and offer solutions while acting like humans.
Chatbots help your business understand what customers want and how to deal with it. The more natural and human-like the chatbots’ responses are, the easier it will be to resolve customer enquiries.

Give excellent (and quick) support.

Customers expect to get help and have their queries solved quickly. Customers are more likely to stop doing business with a company if they think they are not being dealt with efficiently.

Chatbots are a great way to give users support in real-time and all day, every day. Customers want answers quickly, and chatbots can provide them with the information they need at any time.

You can program your AI to take care of consumers at all hours of the day and night, even when neither you nor your employees are accessible. Instead of waiting for you to respond, clients may get answers immediately from your Chatbot and continue navigating your website.

Give individualised suggestions.

If you don’t know what people want from your site, you will likely lose them immediately. Every customer comes to you with different problems, queries, and pain points. To move your business and its audience forward, giving each one the same amount of care and attention is essential.

Train your Chatbot to give consumers helpful product suggestions, advice, and solutions when they need them. If people aren’t sure what to look at on your site, showing them products similar to what they’ve already looked at will point them in the right direction.
Chatbots can ask users questions to validate and confirm their queries, which makes it easy to give them suggestions that are right for them.

Your turn.

You should consider implementing a chatbot to provide the best customer support online or improve your online customer service. When used right, they improve your customers’ experience, achieve better results and save your business money.

How will chatbots fit into your plan for customer service?

Saascoms Contact Centre Solution

The Saascoms Omnireach Chatbot centralises all non-voice communication to a single agent platform, including webchat, email, SMS and social media (e.g., Messenger/WhatsApp).
The digital assistant undertakes the frontend ‘heavy-lifting’, responding to FAQs without agent interaction. Additionally, the AI can verify the customer to offer more in-depth responses or hand over to an agent pre-validated. The purpose is to streamline communications, expedite resolutions, and give customers a 24/7 self-serve support function, improving the customer journey and experience.

The customer can communicate 24/7 via their preferred channel, switching between them during their interaction without needing to re-validate their ID.
Our clients report an increase in their collections of over 10% and a lower cost base than traditional telephony engagement by allowing customers to communicate via their preferred route.

Omnireach has an API integration function compatible with leading dialler technology, meaning agents can blend between voice and digital conversations, allowing contact centre management flexible resource planning.

The AI can understand customer requests by analysing conversations using sentiment, key phrases, and natural language processing (NLP). The Chatbot detects nuances in a customer’s message, and by machine learning, it becomes progressively smarter with each conversation to resolve up to 42% of all requests without human involvement.

Omnireach provides agents with a single view of all digital Omni channels, giving them a clear and straightforward window to all outstanding enquiries, making it easy for them to self-assign conversations and assist customers promptly. To further assist the agents, they can access customer profiles, spelling and grammar support, previous conversational history, foreign language translation, customer interaction history, and library responses.

Omnireach offers a specific DCA-centric AI Chatbot, trained over hundreds of thousands of client interactions within the DCA industry. Saascoms collections AI engine has monitored and analysed over 100 million conversations and agent responses over the last four years to ensure accurate conversational intent matching. It is fully scalable from 1 agent to 1000+ agents.
Sentiment and request analysis allows the AI to tag conversations processed by the tag action programming or workflow pattern. This conversation analysis means that when the bot functionality is exhausted, the AI routes the message to a dedicated queue such as the ‘Vulnerability Queue’. This identification ensures that if a customer conversation is vulnerable, it is routed to a dedicated queue and a team of agents. Other queue routing can be actioned based on sentiment, request, account number, or location, for example.

This advanced, analytics-driven intelligence defines a collections strategy and customer journey. This offers a single point of resolution via self-service and creates a more personal response.
Results

Q1 2022 stats show that 72.4% of conversations utilising Saascoms Collection and Arrears Chatbot are resolved on the first contact.

Two-way messaging has resulted in a ‘right party contact’ increase across energy and telecoms clients of 64% (compared to traditional voice and non-conversational messaging).
From April 2021 to April 2022, 38 million+ conversations were activated across Omnireach regarding collections and arrears.

Saascoms Omnireach chatbot is a multi-award-winning technology.

Omnireach has an AI function that not only detects vulnerability but can also match the category of vulnerability, i.e., suicide, self-harm, emotional, terminal illness, substance addiction, bereaved customers, third parties or financial distress (can’t pay you vs cannot pay rent/mortgage).

By detecting the vulnerability type, the Chatbot makes decisions on how to best handle the customer. For example, someone identified as suicidal or self-harm is immediately transferred to a live agent with specific training for handling this type of customer.