Customer support is reigning supreme again, thanks to advances in technology and user expectations. It has become a critical driver of an organization’s credibility, customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction. While companies have been applauded for delivering stellar support, many are relentlessly chastised for delivering outmoded reactive support.
As 2021 unfolds, many companies have realized that it is imperative to transition from reactive support to proactive support. Why proactive support, you may ask? Let’s take a look at an example.
Imagine a customer browsing your website, tracking down a piece of particular information. After a moment, your chatbot sends a push notification – “Hello, Jane! How may I help you?”
If the timing is perfect, the customer will respond. The bot can address and resolve the query in a matter of seconds. While responding, the bot will create a personalized experience based on customer profile, search patterns, product(s) version owned, etc.
You see, what your bot buddy did there?
This is an example of proactive (and impressive) assistance. However, according to a Gartner report, only 13% of customers have received proactive customer service.
Well, there is a ray of hope. According to the Intercom Survey, 78% of support leaders want to move from a reactive to a proactive support approach. Without further ado, let us help you bridge the gap between what customers want and what support teams can deliver with the help of chatbots.
5 Ways to Enter the Powerful Realm of Proactive Customer Support Using Chatbots
1. Generate Accurate User Journey Insights
One thing that today’s customers are not lacking is ‘choice’. If one company fails to meet expectations, another one is always there to swoop in to deliver an effortless experience. To ensure that you’re not the former, you need to outdistance your competitors with next-gen, adaptable cognitive chatbots.
These bots leverage AI, NLU, ML, & auto-intent learning to deliver relevant responses. The richness of the customer data gathered through AI-powered tech is invaluable. It can help you truly understand your customer, identify their lifestyles, and predict the best action in real-time based on the user history and engagement patterns. Additionally, these insights help you identify customer interests which further helps create ample upsell & cross-sell opportunities.
2. Create More Seamless, Personalized Self-Service Experiences
In the world of instant gratification, modern customers expect responses from brands in the blink of an eye, and that too with minimum efforts. An intelligent chatbot enables that and much more. It leverages the cognitive framework to fetch relevant information through stacks of data in a matter of seconds, all the while personalizing self-service experience.
Imagine Cassandra, a salon owner, looking for information to get one of her hairdryers fixed. She browses the manufacturer’s website to seek help. A chatbot pops up and she enters her query. The bot asks for relevant product details and Cassandra responds. In that micro-moment, the bot suggests her with a collection of FAQs, how-to videos, technical guides, and an option to book an appointment with a certified technician. She chose her option, and she is happy to receive a quick and personalized experience.
3. Leverage Unsupervised Learning to Enrich Knowledge Bank
Cognitive chatbots can undertake a horde of tasks – be it human-like conversations, a robust reporting engine, seamless hand-offs, and many more. Another interesting thing about cognitive bots is that they are built on unsupervised learning models that leverage customer data to create meaningful interactions.
Intelligent chatbots that are powered by a unified cognitive platform can gather search queries and club them under separate categories on their own. Basically, they can classify raw customer search data, thus eliminating major manual efforts that would have otherwise gone into data labeling. After that, they create intent suggestions that the admins can accept or reject. This can be further used to enrich the bot’s knowledge bank so that no customer query goes unanswered.
4. Manage Queries Round-the-Clock
When it comes to keeping your customers happy, no wait time or 24×7 availability is a sure-shot way. But correspondence can get tricky when your clients live in different time zones. The challenge is how to deliver prompt support to the customers who are located halfway around the world? Or to those whose business hours fall outside your own? Or what if agents are inactive due to technical issues?
One way is to go about it is by employing another team for the night shift. Goes without saying that this strategy will cost a bomb. The alternative is to deploy intelligent bots that can get the job done effectively and efficiently round the clock. Intelligent bots facilitate seamless live communication, 24×7 customer service, quicker case resolution, increased ticket deflection rate, and much more. And, in case of critical queries and escalations, they can seamlessly loop in your human agents.
5. Tap in Advanced Chatbot Analytics & Sentiment Analysis
New-age chatbots have an intuitive interface that drives customer engagement. SearchUnify’s intelligent bots have a modern UI that enhances the experience by enabling customers to create a case or a discussion from within the chat window itself.
Chatbot analytics provide real-time insights into active interactions and total user interactions over a given time. It also generates nifty reports like frequently used intents, utterance hit count, chat transcripts, etc., which help evaluate and optimize chatbot performance. This also helps gauge customer sentiments which further accelerates proactive, real-time support.
Think Outside the Outmoded Chatbot Box
The future of chatbots is limitless. With a dash of proactiveness and well-structured knowledge bases, new-age chatbots can act as your brand’s intelligent virtual assistant. So, are you ready to transform your CX with AI-powered chatbots? Then request a free live demo today!
Need more information? Gain insights from our e-book consisting of actionable ideas for a fruitful chatbot implementation and adoption to help you chalk out a robust chatbot strategy.