Help! Customer service is overflowing with questions and customer satisfaction is going down due to increasing wait times. The focus on the customer starts to blur and agents start to get bored with all the routine questions they have to answer on a daily basis. Do you sometimes see yourself in these scenarios? Then one thing’s clear — time for a chatbot!
1. My customers are frustrated with the long wait times
Due to digitisation, more and more customers are able to find organisations through digital channels. Organisations are expected to be available 24/7, 365 days a year through multiple channels to give customers the help they need. Questions flood in via email, live chat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger… It’s no wonder service agents can’t always keep their heads above water. As customer contact professionals, we feel your pain, but of course, customers don’t always understand. They get frustrated with the long wait times and can quickly lose interest in your service or product.
So, how do you keep the customer connected, and ensure that they’re satisfied with your service? You guessed it, with a chatbot! This virtual assistant doesn’t take a break, is never sick, doesn’t have a 9 to 5 mentality, doesn’t go on vacation and is a master at multitasking. The chatbot helps several customers at the same time, is tireless and incredibly fast. Long wait times become a thing of the past!
“We’ve added a chatbot to our WhatsApp channel to handle messages more efficiently. We hope to be able to help customers with the WhatsApp Business API, not only in the best way possible, but quickly as well.” André Tuinenburg, Head of Customer Care
2. Oops! My customers aren’t always given the right answers to their questions
A mistake can be quickly made. Unfortunately, a small mistake without any malicious intent can have major consequences for an organisation. If a customer isn’t satisfied, he or she can leave a scathing review on a review platform or via social media. And you don’t want that.
But a chatbot, if well-trained, doesn’t make mistakes. This virtual assistant obviously can’t come up with an answer to a question on its own, but if you train it properly, it can provide the correct answer the next time it needs to. In the meantime, you can always route the customer to a live agent who can answer the question.
3. My employees lose their motivation because of all the routine questions they constantly have to answer
The high turnover of service employees doesn’t just come out of the blue. Agents often find the work too repetitive and they lose their motivation due to the lack of challenge.
By using chatbots, you ensure that the boring, repetitive questions aren’t constantly on the service agents’ plates, so they can put their focus on the more complex questions and can deal with the (sometimes high) emotions of customers. These types of more challenging tasks not only ensure that the employees get more satisfaction from their work because they’re actually doing something productive, but that they come to work each morning feeling motivated.
By using a chatbot to answer the simple questions, the customer service employee can focus more on giving sound advice. That ultimately makes the work for the customer service agent much more attractive.” – Jasper Meijerink, Strategic Project Manager at Aon.
4. Due to high turnover in the customer service department, we lose a lot of knowledge and expertise
Many organisations can confirm; turnover in customer service departments is often very high. This is unfortunate, because service agents build up a lot of knowledge over the years, knowledge that is lost once they leave the organisation.
With a chatbot, you don’t have to worry about that. These virtual assistants continuously learn with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning and can only learn to answer even more questions over time. This knowledge and expertise remains within the organisation as long as the chatbot is online. In fact, you can also extract knowledge from the chatbot, so you can learn a lot more about your target group with the help of a large dataset.
“As in any customer contact centre, we have to deal with attrition, so information comes and goes. We strive for quality customer contact and guaranteeing substantive knowledge has a positive effect on this. The chatbot helps to maintain that quality.” – Eric van Tilburg, Team Leader Study Guidance NCOI
5. The number of customer inquiries is increasing, but I can’t just keep expanding the customer service department
Service agents are highly sought after, and job boards are filled with postings for temporary and permanent jobs. But hiring employees on a continuous rotation… isn’t that a bit like trying to mop up the floor with the roof leaking?
Don’t get us wrong though, chatbots can’t just run a customer service department on their own. Far from it. It’s precisely the use of a combination between people and technology that provides the best results. Chatbots can easily intercept routine questions. This saves a lot of time, and therefore a lot of money.
“Ultimately, it’s about the ideal mix between machine and employee. That’s where the future lies,” – Zinho Parisius, Customer Service Manager at HTM.
6. I have more than enough visitors on the website, but they’re not converting enough
Recognise the problem? You put your entire marketing machine in motion to get people to the website. Once they’re there, they hang around for a while, but you quickly lose them again. So you end up with no visitor contact information, and you don’t even know what caused them to change their minds and decide to not purchase a product or service after all.
In addition to chatbots that help with customer service, there are also variants that can help you with marketing and sales-related matters. Do you notice a high bounce rate on certain web pages? Then try to find out where the problem lies with the help of a chatbot. A chatbot that provides assistance on a page or makes some recommendations can be just that extra trigger that one needs to purchase a product.
Tackle challenges with a chatbot!
Is your customer service department facing certain challenges due to the sharp increase in customer inquiries? No worries! A chatbot can be a lifesaver. Want to have a chat with one of our experts about the benefits of chatbots for your organisation? No problem! Contact us here.