Brands are changing their ways of interacting with their customers through chatbots. Since chatbots are extremely advanced AI software, pretty sure the changes are for the positive. Many famous and well-known companies use chatbots in the most exciting ways, and the company numbers are growing every day to adopt this chatbot technology in their business models. But not many knows why and how chatbots are helping out businesses worldwide. The answer to this lies in asking a “what” first.
What is an AI-powered Chatbot?
Chatbots are AI-powered software that converses with consumers and customers on behalf of the brand via a live chat interface. These conversations can happen on the brand’s website, app, or even through platforms such as Alexa, Skype, WhatsApp, Slack, etc.
Since chatbots facilitate sales and find information, simple chatbots follow a process by scanning keywords from a customer’s inquiry to deliver predetermined answers. There are advanced level chatbots as well, which are powered by machine learning that uses natural language processing to engage in complex conversations with your customers.
Here’s the difference between a simple chatbot and an AI-powered chatbot:
User: Hi, what time does your store open this coming Sunday in New York?
Simple chatbot: Hi! We open at 10 am on Sunday.
AI Chatbot: Hello, Mary! We open our stores at 10 am on weekends. It is summer in New York so dress light!
AI-powered chatbots give a better performance when they are integrated with a customer engagement software or CRM software. Since such platforms support in studying the brand’s online presence, they should be united with customer inquiries as well to provide customized experiences.
How Chatbots Enhances Customer Engagement
While it might be beneficial for the companies that use the chatbot to reduce staff bills, the real winner for incorporating chatbots with your customer engagement software will be your customers.
There are eight ways an AI-powered chatbot can improve your customer engagement:
1. Seamless live chat
Engage your customers with a chatbot just the way they would with a live customer supporting staff. This way, you can significantly reduce the learning curve for the customers about your brand, product, and services. Chatbots analyze a customer’s question through their natural language processing methods and deliver a response within a fraction of seconds to meet the customer’s needs.
You can integrate AI-powered chatbots to your company’s website and mobile app to help your customers save time and trouble in searching the company’s contact information online.
2. 24/7 customer service
If you have a contact support staff, naturally, they will work only for specifically designated work hours and go home later. On the contrary, chatbots don’t need to rest or anything which your customer can still get to satisfy their queries, orders, or any needs even outside the business hours. Thus, customers won’t have to wait for you or get their questions directed to a voicemail or email if a chatbot is integrated into your CRM software.
3. Endless queries solved with zero sass
Although most of the AI-powered chatbots are designed to resemble human intelligence, it shouldn’t necessarily have to be a perfect simulation of social interaction. The main goal to want to integrate chatbots in your customer engagement software is to satisfy the common queries of your customers. A chatbot enables you to eliminate any wrong tones delivered by human support staff and still complete the questions of the customers. Despite, however, a thorough training, your support staff might give away a particular negative emotion (annoyance, frustration, indifference, etc.) when a customer asks for the same product details the third time in a week, but a chatbot won’t!
4. A smoother journey
Chatbots help customers in their buying process by giving relevant additional product information to the customer like video content, discount code, matching products, etc. Chatbots, if integrated with CRM software, can easily help your customers by suggesting what to purchase from the customer’s history, preferred payment options, and even how they would want to ship. This process can significantly help reduce the number of abandoned carts in the long run.
5. Less stress
Most of the customers dread contacting customer support as it takes too long a time to get them connected to a calling agent. Plus, the current methods of handling customer support calls that have automated telephone menus and long waiting lines haven’t eased the customers’ frustration in reaching out to the brand.
Chatbots can help accomplish specific needs that are triggering customers to get frustrated. It can include reducing the time needed to resolve common issues on purchases, shipping, and tech support, reduce time to reach out to a customer representative, streamline the customer service process, etc.
6. Sayonara, IVR
One of the frequent complaints that customers nowadays have is going through maze-like interactive voice response (IVR) systems during call support. Since these systems route a customer’s call to a specific department based on the voice responses of the customer, it ends up connecting the customer with the wrong departments due to unclear voice responses. This ends up making the customers wait around and start over again until they reach the right calling agent with their queries. It sounds even frustrating to let a customer go through such an ordeal.
On the contrary, though chatbot is used similarly, it at least eliminates the IVR-induced frustration. Through a chatbot, a customer can either be led to an answer or a human representative without any categorized department in between to lengthen the process.
7. Personify your brand
Through AI-powered chatbots, your brand and employees can engage with customers on many different levels to sell, educate, or simply entertain the audience. Chatbots can be programmed in various conversational styles depending on the media channel and instantly impress the customers to keep coming back for the personalized experience.
8. Reinvent your forms
Instructing your customers to fill up a form to retain their information through a calling agent, email, or even on social media platforms makes them unwilling to follow it sincerely.
Instead, through chatbots, you can spruce up a situation and get customer’s information while chatting with the customers without causing any friction or heavy cognitive load while solving their queries.
Conclusion
AI-powered chatbots are the new wave of the future to enhance customer engagement. They bring in more opportunities for companies to reach out to their customers in exciting ways and also fulfill their goals efficiently.
Through chatbots integrated with your customer engagement software, not only can you get to be best at your customer support but also make the customer walk away with a better experience with your brand.
