Alex RaineyAlex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
Table of Contents
- What are Chatbots?
- Using Chatbots for Customer Support
- Best Ways to Use Chatbots for Customer Support
- 1. Around the Clock, Real-time Support Service
- 2. Personalized Recommendations
- 3. Customer Feedback Collection
- 4. Troubleshooting Assistance
- 5. Lead Generation
- 6. Multilingual Customer Support
- 7. Efficient and Interactive Customer Onboarding
- 8. Customer Data Analysis
- 9. Knowledge Base Resource
- 10. Sentiment Analysis
- Effective Tips on Using Chatbots for Customer Support
- Choose the Right Chatbot Platforms For Customer Support
- Training Chatbots for Effective Customer Support
- Monitor the Chatbot Performance
- Start Maximizing Customer Support With Chatbots
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Feb 16, 2024 07:18 AM
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Feb 18, 2024
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Customer satisfaction is the royal road to business success. That’s why your customer service must always be in good shape to deliver the first-rate service they need. Otherwise, you’ll risk losing customers to your competitors.
To sustain the increasing demand for efficient customer service, it’s time to embrace this tech innovation—chatbots. Powered by AI, chatbots provide 24/7 real-time responses, personalized recommendations, lead generation, and customer data analysis. It can do multiple tasks simultaneously, surpassing the limits of human agents.
So, if you’re eyeing to leverage the power of chatbots, read on and discover how to use chatbots for customer service.
What are Chatbots?
Chatbots are computer programs designed to engage in human-like conversations and instantly provide responses to human questions.
Before, chatbots were made by coding predefined responses to answer people’s inquiries. However, this chatbot cannot understand conversation context, limiting its ability to generate coherent and personalized responses.
At present, most chatbots are trained using artificial intelligence to understand human language, mimic human speech, and generate contextualized personalized responses. Through machine learning (ML), these chatbots can learn and improve from previous interactions, enabling them to reply to more complicated inputs.
Using Chatbots for Customer Support
Using AI chatbot assistants can improve a business’s customer service. They can provide real-time assistance to customer requests or quick responses to basic, commonly asked questions. Chatbots can be implemented in mobile applications, websites, or messaging platforms so they’re accessible to as many customers as possible.
Of course, chatbots are still incapable of making complex decisions and critical thinking. So, most complicated concerns are still handled by human agents. Nevertheless, chatbots can significantly improve your support service’s efficiency by streamlining its operations.
Best Ways to Use Chatbots for Customer Support
1. Around the Clock, Real-time Support Service
Relying purely on human staff to address high customer traffic won’t cut it. Live agents have limitations; they cannot work round-the-clock and struggle to simultaneously handle multiple concerns
Unlike humans, chatbots can address customer concerns at any time. It has no breaks and holidays, providing 24/7 assistance without the help of live agents. Moreover, they’re trained using vast amounts of data to answer common queries at a blitz, so that customers can get prompt responses for their problems.
For cases beyond the chatbot’s ability, it can also analyze the nature and urgency of the query so it can automatically queue the customer to a staff representative.
2. Personalized Recommendations
People prefer businesses that cater to their needs. Meeting their demands and interests is one way to show that you value them, allowing you to earn their loyalty eventually.
Chatbots can analyze tons of information about customer interactions, usage patterns, purchase history, and site visits. Based on these data, they can deliver personalized recommendations that match customers’ needs and preferences. Since these suggestions are drawn from their behaviors and choices, they’ll likely avail of your recommended products, resulting in improved customer retention.
For instance, B2B e-commerce companies use chatbots to study their customers’ purchase history and browsing patterns so they can provide relevant product or service suggestions they might acquire.
3. Customer Feedback Collection
There are various customer feedback collection methods. One is to employ chatbots to ask your customers for reviews and ratings or answer a short survey to determine and assess customer satisfaction.
Typically, feedback-collecting chatbots ask customers after they avail of a product or connect with the company’s helpdesk. These bots must engage in human-like conversations to entice people to give honest feedback about the product or service.
4. Troubleshooting Assistance
It’s common for customers to encounter problems without knowing the specific nature of the issue.
For instance, a customer with a subscription to a SaaS product may find their account suddenly restricted. He’s unsure if this is due to a security breach, expired subscription, or violation of terms of service. So, he gets in touch with the customer support to troubleshoot the problem.
Chatbots can troubleshoot the customer’s concern so he can retrieve his account. The bot may ask for his account details and then check his recent usage history, payment details, and other pertinent details to determine potential root causes. Once the problem is identified, the chatbot will give a step-by-step guide to resolve the issue.
If the customer raised that the problem persists, the chatbot can make him a ticket so a live agent can continue troubleshooting the problem.
5. Lead Generation
Aside from servicing long-time customers, businesses must also focus on their website’s first-time visitors and provide them with top-notch service to maximize customer conversion.
Chatbot integration to your website allows you to provide personalized greetings, recommendations, and assistance to site visitors. The bot can also ask them targeted questions like their specific interests, email address, company name, and nature of business so you can determine leads where your marketing officers can focus.
6. Multilingual Customer Support
Chatbots can be trained using multilingual natural language processing (NLP) to understand and communicate in multiple languages. Instead of developing numerous separate chatbots for various languages, you can develop a multilingual NLP model that can detect if a customer shifts to a non-English language and adapt accordingly to give useful responses.
Employing these chatbots can significantly improve your customer service, especially catering to different nationalities.
7. Efficient and Interactive Customer Onboarding
Many businesses still use manual handbooks or text guides to teach customers how to use their products or recent features. Unfortunately, this approach is painfully boring and inefficient. And if your text guides are not well-written, customers might do an incorrect setup, leading to a complete aversion to your products.
Chatbots can facilitate speedy and efficient customer onboarding. They can offer an interactive process where they can guide customers in real time and provide detailed instructions, from setting up the product to mastering its advanced functionalities.
Customers can also ask the bot if they encounter unclear instructions, and the bot provides prompt responses.
8. Customer Data Analysis
Chatbots aren’t just trained to answer basic queries, but also to collect data for every interaction with customers.
The bot can process this data and provide valuable insights about customers’ behavior, trends, purchase patterns, and more. Your business can utilize this info to craft a data-driven strategy to improve your products and services.
9. Knowledge Base Resource
Some people connect with customer service because they have concerns. But some simply want to learn more about the business’s products or the latest features and innovations.
Chatbots can direct the customer to educational resources like the FAQs section, company-written blogs, or video tutorials so they don’t have to waste time scouring the business’s website.
10. Sentiment Analysis
Lots of chatbots are also trained to assess customer’s emotions during support service interactions. This technology detects keywords and the tone during the conversation to infer if the customer is satisfied, upset, disappointed, or furious.
As the bot analyzes customer sentiment, you’ll get insights into how to respond to various concerns to elicit positive emotions from them.
Effective Tips on Using Chatbots for Customer Support
Improving customer service through chatbot implementation is not straightforward. You must mindfully integrate this technology into your CS team to ensure your employees can work with it harmoniously.
Here are some tips for using chatbots in customer support:
Choose the Right Chatbot Platforms For Customer Support
Picking a chatbot is like hiring new staff. Scrutinize its abilities and alignment with your business goals. Ensure its features fill the gaps in your customer service team. For instance, if you have a slow-moving team with too much on their plate, get a chatbot that can support workflow automation.
You can take a look at some of the leading AI customer support software to get the right chatbot that fits your budget, security needs, and desired improvement.
Training Chatbots for Effective Customer Support
The effectiveness of your chatbot depends on how frequently you train it. While it automatically learns from regular interaction with customers, feeding it with training datasets can hasten its improvement process.
However, there are reasons why you shouldn’t build or train your own AI chatbots. It’s not something you can learn by simply reading Chatbots 101. You might need to hire experts like NLP specialists, software engineers, or data scientists to properly train them.
Monitor the Chatbot Performance
Track your chatbots’ impact on customer service. Do they reduce your team’s average handling time? Do they lead to higher resolution rates? Do they improve your customer satisfaction scores? Monitor your KPIs closely and see if your chatbots boost them.
You can also survey chatbot users to determine their satisfaction with this technology, or perform benchmarking to see how your chatbot fares against your competitor’s.
Start Maximizing Customer Support With Chatbots
Adopting the latest tech innovations like AI chatbots is now imperative to thrive in the market. They can respond to your customers’ needs straight away, around the clock, with absolute accuracy and helpfulness.
Looking to use AI for customer service? MyAskAI’s AI-powered tools can help you swiftly tailor chatbots to your needs and objectives. No technical skills required to get started.
Written by
Alex Rainey
Alex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
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