Conversations about chatbot hype of recent times have quickly transformed into chatbot productivity and making chatbots do even more. Enghouse Interactive provide chatbots across their contact centre portfolio and has taken the unique approach of being realistic with your chatbots. Once businesses have accepted that sometimes chatbots need training – i.e. they need some data to drive their artificial intelligence– you can start to explore the possibilities of just how much a chatbot can transform your organisation.
Chatbot use
Before you implement a chatbot, you must give it a purpose. Like when employing a new member of staff, it’s there for a reason. Is this chatbot in place to upsell across your customer base or is it to provide one-word answers when your real-time agents cannot serve people on your website?
Further to the individual bot purpose, you must ensure that it fits with your overall communications strategy. When deploying a chatbot, ask the following questions:
- What you are trying to achieve?
- What business are you in?
- Who are your customers?
- How should you interact with your customers?
- What processes help you achieve these goals?
- What resources do you need to achieve your end objectives?
Garbage in, garbage out
The importance of keeping your knowledge management system up to date is second to none. Just as you would let an employee know about a discontinued product or a change in data protection, your chatbot needs a constant stream of updated knowledge to draw from. If an employee makes a mistake on a call, they can easily apologise and remedy the situation. Whilst a chatbot can learn from user experience and sentiment of the conversation that something is clearly wrong, it still only has a set amount of data to recalibrate its response from. Looking after your databases is paramount when making chatbots work for your business.
Thoroughly vet your customers
When reviewing all elements of customer experience, you have to put your customer first. It may sound innovative and modern to front your customer service team with a chatbot. It is. But, if your customer demographic won’t respond well to or even use a chatbot, you must question your decision to implement it in the first place. The State of Social Support report for 2016 shows that chat is used primarily within the age ranges of 26 – 50. If this is your target audience or existing customer base, you may think you are in the clear. But, also consider what your product or service is and whether or not a chatbot can do it justice. For example, if your business strapline is around providing a personal approach, removing a person from a customer service function may not be the best idea.
In the same vein, if your customer base is above the threshold reported in The State of Social Support report, you may want to hold off on implementing a chatbot or interview your customer base to see how they feel about increasing response rates and overall productivity when resolving their queries online.
Chatbots should be part of your overall contact centre strategy, offering an end to end experience. So, whatever stage your chatbot implementation is at, make sure you walk through these key points to ensure you are realistic with your chatbots.
To learn more about chatbots in the contact centre, you can view Enghouse Interactive’s on-demand webinar here.
