Shoppers are turning to email, live chat, and even social media to get their questions answered
Over the last few years, customer service has increasingly moved online. Rather than travelling to a store to ask questions, or picking up the phone and waiting on hold for an eternity, shoppers are turning to email, live chat, and even social media to get their questions answered.
As a business owner, your ideal scenario would be to have the manpower to answer every customer’s questions instantly. This isn’t always possible.
Customers have a habit of asking questions in the middle of the night, or during public holidays. If their questions don’t get answered promptly, there’s a high chance that they will lose interest in your product or service, or move on to a different service provider that responded more quickly.
Give Your Customers What they Want
The average small business owner simply cannot afford to have customer service staff available 24/7.
While there are outsourcing companies that can provide small businesses with affordable live chat advisors, the agents that they supply are usually working for multiple companies so you cannot be certain that they will have enough product knowledge or even motivation to give your customers the experience that you would personally provide.
Chatbots can help to improve the customer experience by ensuring that your customers get prompt, accurate answers, given in your company’s voice.
It’s predicted that 80% of customer support queries will be answered and dealt with by using chatbots by the end of 2020.
You can program a chatbot to understand the questions that your customers most commonly ask and provide answers that are worded exactly the way you want them to be.
If you want to get a chatbot working you will need to sign up for a reliable web hosting package that can handle a chatbot script running. Fortunately, you don’t need a lot of programming expertise to make bots work these days.
If you’ve been providing customer support yourself by typing out answers on social media, you already have a database of common questions from which to start building your bot.
How a Chatbot Can Automate Your Customer Service
Chatbot services allow you to automate the initial contact that your customers have with your business.
If you have ever used live chat or asked questions over social media, you have probably interacted with a chatbot yourself, and seen how useful they can be.
Chatbots follow a simple process. They will send a pre-defined message to a customer when they open a conversation, then process the answer that the customer gives, looking out for keywords so that they can understand the question, and then answer that question.
Some more complex bots can go a step further, allowing a customer to book an appointment, view information about their account, or request a callback without the need to deal with a human to do that.
Some examples of questions that a bot can answer include:
- What are your opening hours?
- Can I book a trial class?
- What events do you have coming up?
- Do you have any vacancies?
- Is this product in stock?
- How much does X package cost?
- How much time do I have left on my account?
- How do I install X product?
- Can I return this product?
Take a look through your emails and your social media logs. How many times have you answered those questions, or something similar to them?
A lot of businesses try to provide answers to those questions, and their own unique ‘frequently asked questions’ on their websites, but still find that they are inundated with requests from customers via social media. Consumers often feel that websites are too hard to navigate and that email responses are too slow.
If you provide your users with a chatbot, you can reduce the friction that comes from navigating websites, and make your customers feel like you care about them and are willing to provide instant customer service.
Chatbots can answer a huge percentage of the most common questions that a customer has during their initial contact with a brand.
The customer feels good because they got their question answered almost instantly, and you as a company win too because you still have an open dialog with the customer so you can step in if there is a need to after the conversation concludes.
Not every question will get answered by the bot, however, you can see what people are saying to your chatbot.
If you notice that the same question keeps cropping up, you have the option of coding an answer to it at a later date. Your bot script is always evolving and learning.
Some customers will have questions that are simply too complex for the bot to answer, and you will need to have a human step in and talk to those customers.
Only a small percentage of questions should fall into that category, though. By using chatbots you reduce the number of conversations that your customer service specialists have to deal with, allowing them to spend more time on the conversations that matter.
Wrapping Up
If you’re a small business owner that does his or her own customer service, then having a bot will free up your time so that you can focus on more important things than supplying dozens or hundreds of people with your opening hours. If you pay a customer service team, then you will save money by reducing the number of tickets that they deal with.
Bots can’t do everything, and they do lack the personal touch of speaking to a human, but they are a good way of creating that initial connection, and in the world of business, those first few seconds count.
Author Bio
Mary is a passionate blogger and the chief editor at her own content marketing company PRable.org. Since college, she’s been interested in break-through technology and technical writing about innovative products and services that change our everyday lives for the better. She’s also interested in web design and photography.
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