Why Chatbots are Powerful Tool For Consumer Engagement
Chatbots can be personal trainers, nutritionists, financial advisers, career coaches, fashion gurus, relationship guides, and more. Here’s how.
Brands are turning to conversational engagement technology solutions to boost productivity and meet customer demand. Chief Operating Officer, of Gupshup, Ravi Sundararajan, discusses why chatbots will become your new best friend.
In year three of a global pandemic, how we engage with brands is rapidly changing. We now expect brands to be accessible anytime, anywhere. In response, brands are turning to conversational engagement technology solutions, such as chatbots, to make frontline staff more productive. Artificial intelligence, in its current state, still isn’t smart enough to answer every question and solve every problem. But with advancements in Internet-connected devices and intelligent algorithms, chatbots are getting more human-like. They can understand natural language, respond with answers that make sense and even learn from our conversations to understand us better. But how do these programs know so much about us?
It’s not magic—it’s data. Data is the key to building AI that can talk to us like friends, which is why chatbots are here to stay. Using chatbots, brands can drive more personalized and contextual engagement with consumers. To their credit, chatbots are making our lives more efficient and convenient in many ways. Most of us use chatbots to connect with our favorite brands, schedule a doctor’s appointment, check our account balance, raise a service request, and more. And, just like our friends show up when we need them, intelligent chatbots are just a call/click away – making them perhaps our new best (digital) friends.
Chatbots Are Going To Be the Next Big Thing in Customer Service
With advancements in conversational AI, chatbots are getting more intelligent and human-like. Brands typically use chatbots across marketing, support, and commerce. Businesses are crafting holistic customer engagement journeys using these digital tools. The reason is simple. Consumers – and the repeat business value they bring – form the crux of every strategic business decision an organization makes. Several brands are using AI-enabled chatbots to gain a deeper understanding of consumer buying behavior and preferences.
But what’s even better is that chatbots can be customized to fit a brand and business model. With a little creativity and imagination, you can build a chatbot that reflects the tone of your brand and makes customers feel like they’re talking to real people. They can be programmed with a brand’s unique personality and taught to conduct specific tasks based on their business needs. They can even learn from previous interactions with customers to increase their efficiency over time.
What’s more, chatbots are available 24/7—so there’s no need to miss out on potential sales opportunities because you cannot answer questions at certain times of the day. You can rest assured knowing that your customers will always receive prompt responses from a chatbot that knows everything about your products and services—and can answer any questions they might have.
Take the insurance industry. According to a survey, 83% of customers felt satisfied with support delivered via an AI chatbot. They are quickly becoming a standard tool for customer service. The reason is simple: they’re fast, efficient, and provide the most accurate information possible. These virtual assistants help free people – human customer support agents – to handle more complex queries and increase customer satisfaction. These numbers are huge and show how much potential businesses have for improving customer service through chatbots.
Conversational Commerce Is the Next Big Thing in Retail – And It’s Already Here
Industry experts believe chatbot usage will see exponential growth. They anticipate yearly cost savings of $11 billion across retail, healthcare, and banking. However, there’s a catch. Brands need to get their omnichannel conversational engagement journeys right with their consumers. Businesses should boost the conversational capabilities of their omnichannel chatbots on a continual basis.
The key to converting visitors into paying customers lies in conversational capabilities and the chatbot’s ability to handle multi-turn conversations with all the nuance and empathy a human agent offers. A good mix of data management and continual natural language processing (NLP) training is needed, allowing the AI chatbots to share an accurate and timely response. They must also identify customer needs in every conversation and extract better insights. Chatbots can be tuned to detect hidden demand signals and analyze and recommend appropriate actions, helping brands drive better engagement and proactive communication.
We already see this in action. Many brands are developing intelligent customer experience journeys using voice, video, text – or a combination of these. With AI-enabled intelligent chat/voice bots as the frontline customer engagement agents and the ability to seamlessly transition complex queries to a live/human agent, businesses are getting better at delivering natural, human-like customer service experiences.
Chatbots Have Revolutionized Many Industries
For example, many e-commerce brands use AI-enabled chatbots to handle everything from intelligent product searches, product recommendations, in-stock notifications, post-purchase queries, and much more. Per an MIT survey, 90% of businesses experienced quantitative improvements in their resolution speed, and more than 80% saw enhanced call volume processing after deploying AI chatbots.
Similarly, in Fintech, AI chatbots can enable secure omnichannel banking, online payments, 24/7 banking support, alerts, account balance checks, and much more. Juniper Research predicts that AI chatbots can help Fintech organizations save nearly $7.3 billion by 2023.
Soon, AI-powered intelligent chatbots could enable intent recognition, humanize conversational flows, and help with accurate purchase patterns. It’s just a matter of time before brands offer a chatbot as a digital concierge for every consumer.
In summary, it is no secret that chatbots are on the rise. Chatbots are doubling as an effective customer engagement tool for brands and their frontline/customer-facing staff. They are also a great way to ensure that your company keeps up with the latest trends and technologies, so you don’t get left behind in this new era of customer service. They have the potential to improve customer service by providing fast access to information and support. Most importantly, chatbots are fast emerging as reliable tools for consumers and businesses to get more things done quickly and efficiently, leaving us with more time to do what really matters to us.
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