How to enhance Customer Support with a Call Center Bot
Have you ever wondered how you can improve your customer service without increasing your team size? A call center bot might be the answer! These AI-powered bots can handle common customer questions, manage high call volumes, and provide 24/7 support, ensuring your customers get help when they need it. Imagine having a virtual assistant that never sleeps, improves response times, and boosts customer satisfaction. Ready to transform your customer service with a smart solution? Let’s dive into how a call center bot can make it happen!
Get Free Quotes
Customized Options Await
What is a call center bot?
A call center chatbot understands and responds to real-time customer queries, providing relevant resolutions under minimal agent intervention. Chatbots could be programmed according to your business use cases, whether collecting data or agent feedback. However, there are many more applications of AI chatbots in call centers. Let’s discuss them.
How do call center bot work?
Call center bot operate in one of two ways: through simple rules or more advanced AI, managing interactions through structured dialogues designed to accomplish specific communication tasks.
Rules-based chatbots function by identifying keywords or phrases from user queries and matching these to predefined responses. For example, if you ask a rules-based chatbot, "What are your store hours?", it detects the keyword "hours" and retrieves information about operating times. These chatbots engage in a basic form of dialogue, following a linear script where the conversation flows strictly according to predefined rules. This method can be limited, as it struggles with variations in how questions are phrased.
AI-powered chatbots use NLP and ML to go beyond simple keyword recognition and can understand the underlying intent behind a user's message. This allows them to engage in more complex dialogues that are personalized and adapted based on the context of the interaction and previous exchanges. These chatbots learn and evolve from each interaction, enhancing their ability to conduct seamless, end-to-end conversations that closely mimic human interaction. This makes them sophisticated virtual assistants, capable of managing detailed and nuanced dialogues with users.
Common use cases for call center bot
Organizations can leverage call center bot to engage with customers by deploying them to answer Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and speeding up response times. You craft better customer experiences as well as save costs on operations. Here are three primary use cases of chatbots in a call center.
1. Automate website support
Your website is one of the first points of contact between you and your customers. They will have a lot of questions about your products and services like:
- How can your product help me?
- What is the cost of your product?
- Will I get any warranty?
- What should I do in case I need any technical help?
- Would there be any shipping charges?
Call center bot is efficient in resolving commonly asked queries. Deploying them on your website helps in delivering instant responses, without overwhelming your agents. Even when agents are busy or unavailable, chatbots can continue resolving queries 24/7, shooting up your response rates and reducing customer churn.
Bots can function like a bridge between your customers and agents, making it easy to optimize your service process at every stage of the buyer’s journey. When agents are unavailable, bots can continue collecting customer data and hand it to agents on a platter, enabling faster resolutions.
2. Become a support system inside the app
Companies are implementing chatbots in their mobile apps and leveraging them as a customer support system. Using conversational AI, chatbots have become a primary force of in-app support as you can easily provide these three things to your customers.
- Timely notifications and updates
- Real-time query resolutions
- Personalized product recommendations
It helps increase user engagement, making the customer feel more satisfied with getting assistance within the app, without jumping through multiple channels.
3. Gather instant feedback and increase your net promoter score
Chatbots can be leveraged heavily to get customer feedback across different stages of the buyer journey. Post a sale, you can use a chatbot to send a pop-up survey to your customer and gather feedback on their purchase experience.
Similarly, chatbots can share NPS surveys with customers during their interactions to gather authentic testimonials for promotion on different customer-facing platforms. In short, using chatbots is a win-win. They help you increase customer satisfaction and detect loyal customers and advocates through NPS scoring, enabling you to build a better brand.
How can call center bot beneficial?
As said, chatbots don’t just help you lower your operational costs, but they also help you craft better customer experiences. They allow you to manage customers who overload your helpline by deflecting them to cost-effective channels like web chat, SMS, email, and WhatsApp. Let’s elaborate on the main benefits of using chatbots in contact centers.
1. Low service costs
Self-service tools like chatbots provide organizations with an excellent opportunity to reduce overall support costs as they cost way less than live channels. For B2B and B2C companies, live channel interactions cost $7 and $13, respectively, as opposed to $3.64 in chatbots.
If organizations could deploy enough chatbots, customer support agents would spend more time solving complex queries, leaving the basic issues to self-serve tools and reducing the cost per contact.
2. Faster response time
Today, customers suffer from the paradox of choice. If you give delayed responses to their queries, the probability of them choosing your competitor over you becomes high. For an average customer, how fast you get back to them matters; faster responses can increase your conversion rate by 21x.
With chatbots, you can engage with your customers 24/7, which helps brands improve their sales by 67%.
3. Higher agent productivity
Chatbots can easily handle basic queries, leaving agents with more time to focus on complex issues. They also help in pre-qualifying customer issues by asking questions and gathering relevant information before transferring it to an agent.
While the agent deals with a complex issue, chatbots can provide real-time assistance, sharing relevant customer information and help articles to guide them through the troubleshooting process. This way, agents can resolve more cases in less time and boost their productivity at individual and team levels.
4. Better CSAT and NPS
If your NPS and CSAT scores are below industry benchmarks, step up your customer service game by deploying chatbots. They can drive net promoter scores (NPS) as businesses can use them to implement AI-driven customer surveys.
Getting a good NPS score is not the only objective here, it’s also about understanding why customers gave a particular score.
These surveys go beyond asking monotonous questions and focus on understanding the customer expectations from a brand. Thereafter, the decision-makers can implement customer insights to improve the overall customer experience, product, and pricing strategy, leading to happier customers.
How do chatbots enhance call center operations?
If you deploy chatbots, it’s like putting call center operations on steroids. If a customer service chatbot is not deployed, this is how a customer journey looks like if they try to get details of a particular product on an e-commerce website.
Without a chatbot to assist, this is how the customer journey would look:
- The customer visits the website
- They enter the category and name of the product
- Scroll through the search suggestions
- Skim through the details till they find the right product
With a chatbot deployed, it becomes a two-step process:
- The customer visits the website
- The customer interacts with a chatbot, “Hey, please find me this product.”
Essential features of chatbots for call centers
There's no end to the features you can have in a call center chatbot, but some are non-negotiable. To begin with, you should look out for these five main features when developing your chatbot.
Unsupervised AI Learning (NLP/NLU)
The best call center chatbots are developed through unsupervised AI learning. It involves discovering hidden patterns and insights from the given data. Compare it with how a human brain learns new things, that’s how unsupervised learning works. It will help your bot personalize conversations based on user profiles and, as per their understanding, offer them solutions and recommendations to make informed decisions.
Knowledge base
Knowledge is power, and your chatbot is robust if it can integrate seamlessly with a knowledge base. It helps them deliver the right answers and updates. And as long as the knowledge base keeps getting updated, the bot only gets better and better with the delivery of resolutions.
Omnichannel messaging
If your company wants to give an omnichannel customer experience, you need omnichannel bots.
With omnichannel bots, you can be omnipresent and offer a seamless, consistent experience to your customers everywhere. Plus, these bots adapt accordingly when customers switch between channels and never lose conversation context.
Customization
Deploying chatbots is a great idea, but you can confuse your users if your chatbots don’t reflect your brand identity. Your chatbots should be similar in physical attributes across all touchpoints to give users a unified experience.
And for this very reason, customization is a much-needed feature in chatbots. Infuse your brand’s personality into your bot and make it stand out. You can train your bot to speak in any human voice of your choice and lend a human touch to your bot conversations.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis enhances chatbots' ability to interpret a query's intent through context, tone of voice, and words used by the user. It comes in handy when a chatbot is dealing with an angry and frustrated customer. Moreover, you get to know what a customer feels about your products and services. Analyze their sentiments over a period and figure out which products, services, and teams are doing well, and which have scope for improvement.
It also helps the bot classify words as positive, neutral, or negative, helping it to understand the mood of a conversation and suggest the next steps to the agent in the queue.
Chatbots learn fast, and with every interaction, they become more insightful in their support, leveraging sentiment analysis.
Get Free Quotes
Customized Options Await
Conclusion
A call center bot is exactly the tool your business might lack to deliver smooth and non-problematic customer support. Not only does a bot handle inquiries efficiently and instantly that will increase customer satisfaction but it also saves your team from replying to basic questions and is available 24/7. The question is whether or not you are willing to pull the trigger and let AI revolutionize your customer service? Perhaps it’s time you reassess and get one of those awesome call center bots to help you improve the experience!
References:
