Using Chatbots to Transform Your Bottom Line, The Right Way

No matter what your business is or which industry it belongs to, your customers are likely to be one of your most important stakeholders. This means you must take concrete steps toward enhancing your customer experience to keep business booming.

As digitization takes the world by storm, more and more customers are living online. Most online visitors to your business website will only ever interact with you and your business digitally. And today’s modern customers want blazingly fast responses, because this is the new normal. To deliver that level of customer experience in an always-on digital landscape, your business will have to redesign its customer engagement models to include chatbots.

Why chatbots? you may think. Well, let’s take a look at the stats.

The fact of the matter is...

Across various business verticals, companies are unlocking the potential of conversational bots to boost customer engagement like never before. Today, the AI-powered bots are getting beefed up—and they’ll continue to become capable and sophisticated as time goes on.

Long story short? Chatbots are integral to enriching the customer service experience. Today, more and more customers prefer interacting with businesses via bots. Don’t take our word for it. Here are some statistics that prove the importance of virtual customer assistants or VCAs:

• Gartner predicts that, by this year, chatbots will play a major role in almost 25 percent of customer engagement channels.
• There are more than 300,000 active bots on Messenger, where almost 8 billion messages are exchanged daily.
• As per a report, a whopping 69 percent of chatbot chats get resolved.
• More than 100,000 companies are harnessing the power of bots to deliver responses to customers at a lightning-fast pace.
• A study from Accenture reveals that CRM, sales and marketing, after-sales, and customer service were popular landing spots for bots—and this trend will only gain momentum in the future.
• Another report suggests that over 60 percent of millennials have already used chatbots.

These figures point out that the use of chatbots is pushing the customer service segment toward its tipping point. And expect virtual assistants to get more polished with the radical improvements happening in intent-matching capabilities, natural language processing, and machine learning.

The potential benefits of incorporating chatbots into your customer engagement channels range from reliability to speed and availability. But simply shoe-horning chatbots into your engagement strategies isn’t the way forward. Instead, you must make sure that bots organically fit inside your CRM. Up next, we’ll explore the road map for improving chatbot capabilities by integrating them with your CRM.

CRM integration expands chatbot capabilities

Customer support is changing fast. Over the last ten years, customer support has been revolutionized because of the growing popularity of digital communication channels. It’s true that the lion’s share of incoming customer requests comes from phones.

But another chunk of customer requests also comes from digital channels such as social media, email, and SMS. And the percentage of non-phone requests is on the rise, too. And that’s unsurprising, given the fact that people are using messenger apps and spending a lot of time online.

Basically, your business is dealing with a generation of customers who prefer communicating with your business through messenger apps because of its sheer convenience. For this reason, it’s essential for your enterprise to make it a priority to extend support services through messenger apps instead of only relying on support reps over the phone. This is where integration of intelligent chatbots across the most popular messenger apps comes into play.

The thing is, a chatbot initiative drives massive ROI if it uses well-designed conversation logic and harnesses multiple data points for matching user intent. That’s why it makes sense to use CRM-integrated chatbots. But before including AI-enabled chatbots in your CRM, you must keep in mind that the escalation process for bot-to-human handoffs must be as seamless as possible.

A pro tip: Chatbots should be integrated into multiple information outlets that include not only CRM systems but also scheduling systems, ticketing systems, ordering systems, and any other framework that helps customers execute tasks. Another suggestion is that chatbots must be integrated into a messenger app of your choice where your customers and prospects are spending a lot of time these days.

Now, let’s figure out the top advantages of putting chatbots into CRM ecosystems.

Saving time for your support team

If chatbots are implemented well, they’ll save time for your business’s customer support team. For example, a chatbot can give quick responses to simple questions while your customer service executive can handle complex customer questions.

Scaling your business effortlessly

Chatbots can even enable your business to scale effortlessly and more quickly. And deploying these VCAs makes all the more sense when your business’s customer base increases. With the help of well-strategized chatbots, your support team will have more time on their hands to focus on bigger customer service tasks.

Delivering customer support anytime, anywhere

Since chatbots are not humans, they can work 24/7 anytime, anywhere. That means if your business has clients operating in a different time zone than yours, then their basic questions will be fielded on time even when your staff isn’t available.

Delivering immediate responses every time

Customers now prefer using chatbots and self-help options over age-old outlets like talking to a customer support executive. To enhance the client experience, you can program bots to offer immediate responses that lead to instant gratification. Remember, if your target audience comprises millennials, then they expect their questions to be answered immediately. And there’s nothing better than chatbots to mesh well with these expectations.

Bringing down the total enterprise cost

As per a report, enterprises can bring down customer service costs by nearly 30 percent if they implement conversational channels such as chatbots. The chatbots help to free up the human agents working at contact centers who address complex inquiries. In this way, chatbots help customer service reps better use their time for improving services.

Now that we’ve listed some of the top advantages of incorporating chatbots into your CRM system, let’s talk about designing their conversation flow.

Designing a chatbot conversation flow

Chatbots must have incredible control over the entire conversation flow. You can choose from a wide array of available actions and responses to provide your bot with a kind of personality and knowledge so that it can successfully navigate through any given scenario. Up next, we’re going to give you a few pointers that’ll definitely help you decide on your bot’s conversation flow.

Before designing a conversational flow, you must clearly define your bot’s interaction goals. Every bot-driven conversation should lead to a specific action or outcome. Speaking of bot-goals, we’d like to mention the importance of a goal that relates to authenticating customers. This goal will become non-negotiable if the bot is deployed in an ecosystem involving sensitive information.

Coming up with the flow is both technical and an art

First of all, building a conversational flow for your bot is both artistic and technical. The bot’s conversational flow is an art because its language style should reflect your company’s personality and culture. On the other hand, picking the right flow for your bot is technical because it’ll require programming that seamlessly responds to cards, images, texts, and the like.

Avoid tricking users into thinking that they’re talking to a real human

It’s a given that you have to spend a lot of time developing your chatbot’s conversation flow. The thing is, you have to make sure your bot sounds as human as possible. Which is why it’s important to deploy a bot that helps customers and prospects the way a real human assistant would. One tip: Design your bot to handle smalltalk from your audience, because sometimes conversations don’t have to just be about business. However, chatbots should never trick users into thinking they’re real humans. Eventually, make sure that trust and transparency are the cornerstones while deploying AI-driven chatbots.

Chatbot should gracefully handle exceptions

Your user has a lot of expectations regarding your chatbot, so you should design a bot that meets each one of them quite naturally. But as is the case with any program, a bot may encounter some exceptions. In those cases, you must keep in mind that your bot’s script is primed for handling all sorts of exceptions quite naturally. In web environments, exceptions are usually handled with an error message or a popup box. But the same cannot be done with a bot. Worst of all, if your bot just remains silent in the face of an exception, then your customer will either think that the conversation has abruptly ended due to a technical snag, or that your bot is just too slow in responding. Either way, that customer won’t be coming back to your website to interact with such an under-optimized bot. That’s why you have to program your bot to seamlessly handle exceptions. While designing the conversation flow for exceptions, you should factor in a seamless and fast bot-to-human handoff process as well.

So, now you know a thing or two about designing the conversation flow for your chatbot. But coming up with a good conversation flow for your bot is just half the story. You should also make sure to follow chatbot implementation best practices to make sure that your chatbot is doing well.

Chatbot implementation best practices

One of the golden rules for successfully implementing a chatbot is that it should be able to initiate conversation, not just respond to a bunch of questions. Your bot has to be approachable and friendly, just like a human salesperson. Similar to these elements, several other facets make chatbots good enough to engage with customers or prospects.

In this section, we’ll list some best practices that’ll streamline your chatbot implementation like never before.

Knowing customer expectations

To begin with, you have to know what your customers might want from a chatbot. First of all, customers want to experience 24-hour service, so chatbots must be implemented to field customer questions with zero downtime anytime, day or night. Additionally, since customers need instant responses, the chatbot should be programmed to minimize response time to an all-time low. The chatbot must be able to answer simple questions and communicate easily with an audience. Chatbots must be engineered to field some complex queries as well. Because letting your chatbot answer just simple questions isn’t the hallmark of good customer support. The bot must be capable of answering challenging questions to enhance the overall experience of interacting with it.

Providing information in real time

Chatbots should provide valid information by tapping into the company’s knowledge base in real time. That way, they will accelerate a customer’s decision-making process. For this purpose, it’s important to give your chatbots access to your enterprise’s knowledge base so that they can provide relevant answers to customer questions with zero delay.

Supporting multiple communication channels

Besides having the ability to scan the company’s knowledge base, a chatbot must be engineered to support multiple channels of contact. These channels comprise telephone calls, messaging applications, kiosks, websites, texting, social media, and the like. Now, chatbots are even expected to engage with customers through voice channels.

Finding the right AI-enabled chatbot

Now you know why it’s important to harness the capabilities of a well-designed AI-enabled chatbot. And when it comes to deploying a chatbot that leverages AI, Zebyl’s intelligent chatbots make a great choice. These chatbots are engineered to be easily and quickly integrated with countless enterprise-class software applications.

A true asset to your customer support team, this chatbot has multi-channel capabilities; that means the chatbot can be integrated into websites, Facebook Messenger, and SMS campaigns. These bots will be true salespeople because they come with different re-engagement options for customers who leave your website or e-commerce shopping outlet without completing an intended action. Even better, these bots from Zebyl are designed to involve live reps as and when needed.

In short, a chatbot that comes with AI and natural language processing capabilities will simplify and streamline customer interactions. It’s time for you to take that step toward either embracing AI-powered chatbots or refining your experience with them. Schedule your free consultation with Zebyl now.

Author:Pejman RajabianChief Technology AdviserZebyl Inc.

Zebyl is a conversational communications platform for businesses of all sizes. Zebyl makes it quicker, easier, and cheaper for businesses to interact with prospects and customers on the channels they prefer – like text messaging over landlines.