COVID-19 forced companies to reorganize and manage the crisis. Now it is time to adapt to the new normal. Reaching and giving service to customers online is more important than ever. AI chatbot and voice assistants help your company give exceptional customer experience, using natural language processing. How can you tap on the advantages of AI to grow your business? In this post, we give you insights and tips to use AI as a business strategy
COVID-19 is bringing many changes to our lives and work, driving us to interact, work and shop online. Countries are lifting restrictions. Yet, the home continues to be the center for most activities. According to a survey by PWC, half of consumers are still working and staying at home as much as possible.
There is a rise in online activities. Besides shopping, consumers turn online for banking, health services, or requesting services from utility companies. The increasing demand for digital services also brought the need for voice and chatbot assistants.
Chatbots can be a game-changer for e-commerce companies. In Australia, for instance, customers can chat with Olive, Woolworths’ chatbot. The grocery giant supports its mobile services offer with a friendly chatbot. Olive can help you with questions related to their mobile service.
What consumers want from companies in the post pandemic market?
Put it shortly: A great online customer experience. Which means getting the answer to their queries :
- Quickly
- Effectively
- Any time the customer interacts with the
The boom of online activities is putting customer experience in the central stage. Customers use your product or service, according to the experience they are having. Users don’t put on with long delays and a lack of response from companies. They demand quick and effective interaction with companies.
Why Customer Experience is More Important Now than Ever?
Customer experience is becoming a top priority for businesses in 2020. Why?
The rules of brand loyalty are changing. Now, price or product are not that important. Instead, customers are loyal to companies that give them a great customer experience. If a customer has a so-so experience with your company, they quickly leave you.
Giving priority to customer experience can be very rewarding for companies. When you increase the customer satisfaction, you can lift revenue by 15%, according to McKinsey insight. You also lower the cost of serving the customers by 20%.
What customers want from good online customer experiences? Customers want to engage the business and achieve their goals whenever they need it. Unlike a human agent, a chatbot or voice assistant can provide customer service 24/7, without days off or vacations. Your customers can reach your product or services when they want it.
The Global Demand for AI Chatbot Technology Is Growing
The demand for AI chatbot technology is growing as companies look for ways to give a great customer experience. Customers of today demand 24 hours service. They want to access products and services, from banking to health and from anywhere.
Valuates Reports expect the global chatbot market size to grow to $9.4 billion by 2024. The market is growing mostly in North America and Europe. However, Asia Pacific is growing at 9% annually. Chatbots operate in banking, payments, marketing, and health. Among the sectors, customer service is the fastest growing one.
What Is Driving the Global Chatbot’s Market Growth?
- Increasing consumer demand for self-service. Consumers demand from companies to be available 24/7. To satisfy this demand, companies are looking to provide round-the-clock customer care at lower operating costs.
- A speed rocket increase in the demand for digital customer service. The new normal implies consuming and interacting online with companies. Enterprises need fast and effective ways of interacting online 24/7 with customers. The high demand for customer service solutions boosted the Voice and chatbot assistants at the market.
- Chatbots technological innovation. The increasing consumer demand accelerated the global chatbot developer market. Therefore, developing companies like SCSS Consulting, create chatbot solutions that deliver 24/7 services, understand your consumer while supporting multiple languages, at a low cost. AI-powered chatbots can also automate routine tasks, improving process performance, and giving better customer experience.
- Advances in machine learning allow chatbots to act as study bots, predicting consumer behavior. In Wall Street, traders are using machine learning to assess trades and predict the reaction of consumers to advertisements. Therefore, chatbots with machine learning capabilities create revenue by generating leads and increasing brand recognition.
Australian Chatbot Market Overview
In Australia, COVID-19 caused users to turn to digital communication. Australian government implemented three chatbots to deal with increasing queries. During COVID-19, Services Australia had a 600 percent increase in queries. Users turned to Charles, Sam or Oliver, the government chatbots, to get information about government services and social security claims.
The situation in the private sector was similar. The surge in customer inquiries made companies turn to chatbot and online messaging solutions to deal with the increasing demand. Australian businesses are jumping on the wagon of chatbot and voice assistant technology, and for a good reason. When you implement chatbot technology correctly, it improves customer experience, which increases revenue.
Business usage of messaging channels such as WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, increased in the last years. Australian top companies are leveraging on the power of chatbots to grow their businesses. Let’s explore which companies are doing it right:
ABC News Australia
The ABC’s NewsBot launched back in 2016. The bot updates subscribers with relevant news via Facebook Messenger. At the moment, the bot was used for the elections.
Why it is successful: they created an engaging conversational experience. They changed how people consume their news.
AGL (AGL Energy)
The Australian energy company launched its first chatbot, Alfie, in 2017. Alfie helps customers with questions about their accounts. The development team uses the data collected to improve the bot’s capability, adding new intents. The goal is to get Alfie to handle any customer queries.
Why it is successful: The team focused on making the chatbot easy to use for customers. In addition, AGL started working with just one use case, cancellations, adding more capabilities later in the line.
CBA (Commonwealth Bank)
The Commonwealth’s Bank virtual assistant, Ceba, is available 24/7 and can handle over 200 banking tasks. The goal was to provide seamless customer experience and secure online banking.
Why it is successful: the key here is the intuitive and easy-to-use interface. The bot also connects with human operators for sensitive tasks such as reporting fraud.
Business Strategies for a Post-Pandemic World
Technology came to the aid during COVID-19 crisis, allowing businesses to stay open, and people continue working somehow. Now is the time to adapt to the new reality. Read below for strategies to prepare your business for the post-pandemic market.
- Meet your customers where they are: online.
Focus on providing your customers with a smooth customer online experience. Offer different options for self-service and contact. Add a chatbot or voice assistant to guide your customer through the journey. .
- Automate as much as possible
The pandemic increased the user’s demand for online services from many industries. As a result, customers want immediate responses and solve their queries as quickly as possible. This requires seamless operations and effective interactions. To achieve customer satisfaction, automate as many processes as possible.
One way to ensure your customers always get service is by automating responses with bots. Add an email bot to send automatic responses to repetitive customer emails. This can eliminate confusion and human errors in dealing with common questions.
A chatbot helps your customers with self service and address simple queries. It automates customer support dealing with basic problems. It also collaborates with your customer support reps by elevating complex issues.
- Leverage data for decision making
Customer interactions, like electronic payments, can give your business useful data and analytics. Use these data to base business decisions. The insights can help you understand the marketplace and your customer’s needs.
There are millions of new online users, and with every interaction, they generate data. Your ability to leverage automation and use this data to extract information can affect your business. For instance, the customer’s interactions with your chatbot. The conversations can show an unresolved need that will turn into your new product.
- Update your digital tools
Even if you have an online presence, look for alternative ways you can meet your customers. Social distancing and lockdowns make digital interactions a priority. For instance, brick and mortar stores can offer store pickup and contactless payments. Services providers, such as banking, healthcare, energy, or communications companies can offer voice or chatbot assistants to help users with services.
AI as a Business Strategy
Artificial Intelligence technologies help global brands accelerate e-commerce. They deliver engaging language at the right time on the right channel. Let’s check three ways AI technologies can help companies recover post-COVID-19.
- Helps reduce audience churn
AI technology may help identify customers who are about to opt-out of the brand. At SCSS Consulting, we design AI-powered chatbots that can analyze customer sentiment and respond accordingly.
To be effective, an AI chatbot needs to learn constantly. The experts of SCSS Consulting give you peace of mind by setting robust continuous improvement for your chatbot. That way, your bot is constantly growing and learning, improving customer service.
- Allows the user direct communication with the company
These days, more than ever, customers want prompt responses when contacting companies. Automate responses with AI and you’ll never leave a client waiting. AI capabilities can be applied to emails and also to chatbots. The bot provides instant automated responses to customer queries, giving immediate service to the customer.
- Helps understand the customer
AI analytics can give you extensive information about your customer. You can use these data to pinpoint popular locations and focus your marketing in that zone. You can learn your customers’ habits, when do they buy more? On weekdays or weekends? The possibilities are endless.
How Chatbots Use Artificial Intelligence to Help Customers?
Communicating with a bot is not what it was. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, talking to a bot doesn’t seem very different from talking to a human. AI-powered Natural Language Processing gives chatbots the ability to mimic human conversation. They can “understand” the intent behind what the user is typing and deliver a relevant response.
Machine learning capabilities go beyond, allowing chatbots to learn from past conversations. They can refine and correct mistakes, giving better responses and solutions. SCSS Consulting engineers are experts in AI and Machine learning, creating bots that give the human touch to the conversation. Hey, they even make small talk!
Here are 3 ways chatbots use artificial intelligence for customer service:
- They use context- AI Chatbots learn by understanding the context of the conversation. Bots tailor the conversation to the user activity. They can infer the intent from the number of visits of a user to a page.
- They prepare information for your agents- from the moment the conversation starts, the bot can ask for details that may be relevant for a support agent, i.e. order number, or account number. Then, when the case gets to the support agent, they already have the relevant information. The agent doesn’t need to ask again for customer details, annoying the user.
- They can delegate inquiries to the right people- bots can route complex tickets to the appropriate support agent. An AI-powered bot can detect when the conversation stalls and offer to redirect to a human agent.
Tips for a Successful Chatbot
How can you create an outstanding chatbot that connects to your customers and grows your business?
Check out the SCSS Consulting Essential Checklist before launching your bot. Download the cheat sheet here.
- Focus on the user: base your chatbot experience on the needs of your target audience. Do your research well from the outset. Define who is your target audience and what is the pain point your chat solves.
- Define your metrics: set which metrics you are going to measure to check success. It can be the ROI of customer satisfaction.
- Launch at the right time: the right time to go live is critical. Align the launch with your brand strategy, delivering value to your customers.
- Launch on the right platform: find out which social media your customers use and launch your bot on it. It is no use if your customers are on Facebook and you set a WhatsApp bot.
- Don’t forget about security: take care of securing and encrypting sensitive data your customers may share with your bot.
Why Is Chatbot Technology the Present and Future of Customer Support?
Companies trying to get an edge in customer service, turn to solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Consumers’ attitude towards bots is positively changing. According to a report, 45% of surveyed users prefer to interact with a bot instead of a human.
Customers service managers see the benefits of AI chatbot technology for customer support:
- 24/7 support
- Can solve simple issues
- Personalized customer service
- Allows clients to solve routine issues quickly
- Gives instant gratification to the client by addressing the problem at the moment.
Customer support still needs humans, though. According to a Forbes article, customer service chatbots are most successful when combining human and AI support.
The opportunity for business with AI powered technology is soaring. Gartner estimates that AI-powered bots and tools will generate almost $3 trillion in business value by 2021. With this predicted value, it is no surprise many big enterprises are leveraging in AI to grow their businesses.
At SCSS Consulting, we help Australian companies tap into the opportunity of AI custom chatbots and give an exceptional customer experience to their users.
Start changing your customer service strategy today.
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