Enhance your call centre with chatbots

In this 4 part series, we explore some of the challenges faced within call / contact centres and how chatbot technology can help alleviate some of these challenges and provide you with additional customer insight and increased customer satisfaction.

• Part 1: What's wrong with calling us?
• Part 2: How to begin
• Part 3: Channels
• Part 4: Integration and self service (coming soon)

Introduction

One common misconception with chatbots is that they exist on websites and provide automated responses only.

We see a chatbot as channel agnostic (i.e. You can converse with a chatbot on a website, via SMS, or even WhatsApp)

The content within this channel can be automated (i.e. Chatbot content), live chat, or even a voice based conversation with an agent.

The customer value is the offering of an omnichannel experience where you can engage across web, SMS, or WhatsApp seamlessly - gracefully elevate chatbot conversations to live chat conversations (all contextualised chat history is maintained), and even send customer communications / push notifications via SMS and respond to follow up queries with your chatbot.

This can be an evolutionary journey where a standard / single channel chatbot is elevated from web only to omnichannel and or live chat.

Live chat

Live chat is becoming more and more popular with our clients and their customers. It offers the same human based outcomes as a traditional phone call to a contact centre - with the perceived reduction in wait time for the customer.

This in itself is a positive step for customer services, however it can actually re-introduce the same core challenges faced by your contact centres - how to scale in an affordable way whilst maintaining a high level of customer service.

One approach we have been developing with our clients, is chatbot fronted live chat where we introduce the chatbot to focus on not just call deflection, but also live chat deflection to reduce as many queries as possible.

For those resulting queries where the customer either requests a live person, or if we detect poor sentiment in the conversation (i.e. The chatbot can work out if the conversation is not going well), if can suggest that a live agent then gets involved.

This is a much more seamless model that a chatbot only approach as where escalation is required - the customer does not have to start again in a call centre queue and re-explain their query, in fact the live agent will pick up the conversation within the same window and have access to the previous interactions with the chatbot.

As mentioned above, this is not unique to webchat conversations from your website and can also triage inbound customer queries via SMS or WhatsApp and still offer messaging channel based live chat as well.

Translate

Another advantage of live chat over voice channels is the ability to extend the capabilities of your agents to interact with customer queries across multiple languages.

We have recently developed an agent dashboard component which enables agents to have a live chat in real time with customers in any languages.

Machine translation is utilised to seamlessly broker the communications between your agents and customers - to facilitate a productive conversation and greatly reduce the need to have language specific agents in place and instead offer a more efficient agent queue that can leverage a centralised resource pool.

SMS / WhatsApp

SMS / WhatsApp and other platforms like Facebook Messenger and Apple Business Chat introduce customer communication channels that can share your investments in chatbots and live chat without having to rework all technical components.

What is unique about message based channels is their ability to persist a conversation with your customers.

When interacting via your website, it can be difficult to recognise your customers between visits or offer any level of proactive engagement (when requested by your customer).

SMS continues to offer relevant value to customers through proactive notifications such as appointment reminders, or for urgent updates on a product or service.

Take the example of a delivery delay for one of your products.

The combination of a multi-channel experience with automation would enable an exchange as follows:

Bot sends customer SMS advising them that there is a delay in their order shipping by one week and offers some options such as change product, cancel order
Customer responds to the message asking what other options are available
Bot responds advising that the shipping fee will be waived

Or alternatively, the bot could facilitate a specific query with an agent and instigate a live chat session right within the conversation context for the customer.

Bringing it all together

Chatbots are simply automated responses to a prescribed vocabulary of expected inbound queries from your customers.

They usage is not confined to websites, rather they can enrich all aspects of your customer engagement via an omnichannel approach.

Additionally, consider chatbot use cases to perform outbound communications to your customers and allow your chatbots to automate follow up queries to remove the need for your agents to always take a phone call to resolve a query.