Using chatbots to transform customer experience. by Matthew Johnson, Content Strategist

Customer experience has become an integral part of most businesses over the past 5 years. With large-scale developments in technology affecting consumer behaviour, businesses now face a far more demanding and informed customer than ever before. Chatbots are an innovation that can revolutionise a customer’s experience of your brand or service, massively improving the customer journey. 

Businesses need to innovate to avoid getting left behind as attracting and retaining customers becomes more challenging. With instant access to your competitors, more information to shape decisions, and a shortening attention span, consumers of today hold much of the power. Organisations are now focused on improving the customer experience from the initial touchpoint, right through to conversion and after-care.

What role do chatbots play in Customer Experience?

Traditionally, chatbots have received fairly negative feedback for inaccurately routing and responding to customers. However, with machine learning and improved data analytics, chatbots can now direct customers to answers that will actually help them.

There are plenty of testimonials that tell you all about the effectiveness of chatbots, but to summarise, success stories usually look like this:

• Increased engagement
• Faster speed to generate a leads
• A higher number of conversions
• Efficiency and scalability improvements
• Lower operating costs

If the adoption of chatbots ultimately leads to the positive outcomes listed above then consumers have an increased propensity to consume; purchasing becomes easier, quicker, and more engaging through things like personalisation. Chatbots can remove some of the roadblocks to purchasing and make it easier to convert your audience. Even offering a chatbot nowadays will signal a positive message to the market about the way you offer support to your customers. 

What do consumers want?

We are all overstimulated and overconnected, constantly bombarded by content and prompts to buy or subscribe. As we grow into this digital era, we have become increasingly concerned with two things; speed and personalisation. Bots make it easier to seek information in a way that resonates with the consumer.

Using chatbots, the consumer benefits from:

• Improved personalisation
• Quicker access to the information required to make a purchasing decision
• More choice

The trick here is to ensure your bot is working for your brand. If it’s not, speak to people like us. A few suggestions from us may provide the solution you are looking for when it comes to engaging with your customers online.

There are, of course, several limitations to successfully adopting chatbots. Not only is there going to be a bit of a language barrier for at least a few more years, but there are also limited responses with most of the bots deployed across the internet. With machine learning, however, there’s no telling how clearly and deeply we will be able to communicate with them moving forward. There are a few advanced customer chatbots around, but they’re mainly used by larger companies who can afford the cost of implementing and managing the AI software.

What does the future hold?

The good news is as time goes on, chatbot learning will reduce the number of issues we encounter in conversation. Responses become more plentiful, insightful, and helpful, so they will soon play a very important role on your website. It makes sense that as businesses begin to invest more in improving their customer experience, we will see an improvement in the number and capability of chatbots deployed across the internet.

In 2018 Gartner predicted that chatbots will power 85% of all customer service interactions by the year 2020. However, this doesn’t mean robots are ‘taking over’ as other studies suggest the majority of us would still prefer interacting with a human rather than artificial intelligence.

Now might be the time to consider implementing one. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to discuss some options.

The opportunities with AI-driven messaging platforms are plentiful and extend beyond serving the customer. Business intelligence and analysis is a great example of something else which would drive new efficiencies within your business. Instead of searching for data, why not have a chatbot present you with the information within seconds?

How would you use a chatbot in your business?

We have all of the in-house experience and capability to deploy simple or complex chatbots to integrate with your current digital infrastructure. Get in touch today by giving us a call on (0)20 8293 7740 or dropping me a line: [email protected]