While chatbots certainly aren’t new to customer support, increasingly, customers will expect a chatbot to be in place on a company’s chat feature, as this should be able to provide them with almost instant answers. As such, chatbots have become an essential tool for contact centres of all sizes. Chatbots offer a relatively low-cost customer support service with significant returns. But, aside from the saved costs, there are a number of other ways in which a chatbot can benefit your business. In this guide, we will explore six of the key ways in which a chatbot can help to increase your customers’ satisfaction.
1. Improved Contact Centre Productivity
One of the biggest benefits of a chatbot comes from its ability to deal with multiple requests at once – something a human agent is incapable of doing. Chatbots can handle an endless amount of questions at once, providing your customers with a quick and consistent service. This can have a huge positive impact on productivity, with chatbots dealing with a large number of queries, leaving human agents free to focus on more complex tasks.
With agents able to focus more attention on higher value work, both simple customer queries and more complex cases will be able to be dealt with in a timely manner, thus improving customer satisfaction. With agents only needing to step in with chatbot interactions if the bot becomes stuck with a request, a lot more time will be saved for more productive tasks, where the skills of a human agent are required.
Furthermore, with less time spent on FAQ-style questions, agents are likely to see a boost in motivation. With the focus for human agents now on more complicated or interesting tasks that don’t require as much repetition of common questions and answers, they are likely to feel more motivated with work.
2. Reduced Costs
For many contact centres, the biggest expenditure will come from the money spent on employing people to deliver service to your customers. While some contact centre staff may be wary of chatbots, thinking that the bot will be used to replace human agents, this is actually a misconception. Chatbots are a valuable tool that can help to support your pre-existing contact centre team – not replace them. There are often times of day when a call centre will be faced with an increased call or contact volume that the human agents will not be able to cope with. This can cause frustration for both customers and agents, as calls and messages begin to queue up. Instead of needing to hire additional staff to deal with these random spikes in demand – who may be left with little work to do at quieter moments – a chatbot can step in as and when required to help answer as many online queries as possible.
Beyond the cost of setting up a chatbot, the price of each interaction the chatbot has with a customer is negligible in comparison to the cost of an agent taking a 15-minute phone call. In a contact centre that only relies on human agents, you also run the risk of losing money from lost business if your customers have to sit in call queues.
3. 24/7 Contact
When a customer has a question or complaint, they will want an immediate response. With the rise of smartphones and social media, instant answers increasingly are expected. If a customer doesn’t receive a response to their query in a timely manner, then your contact centre could get a complaint. However, it isn’t always possible to staff a contact centre 24/7, and doing so would be very costly for your business.
A chatbot offers a very cost-effective way to offer your customers round-the-clock service. Your chatbot is accessible at all times of the day and night, so your customer’s questions can be answered when it best suits them to get in touch. In those occasions where the chatbot cannot help, they can be added to an outbound queue for calling when an agent is next in the contact centre.
4. Added Flexibility For Unpredictable Call Volumes
As previously mentioned, unpredictable spikes in calls can be challenging for human agents alone to deal with. There will be moments when you can predict a spike in calls, such as following a new promotion or advertisement, but a lot of the time, a spike in calls can be down to coincidence, and your agents may not be prepared.
In a contact centre that only uses human agents, unpredictable call volumes would be dealt with by adding or removing agents at short notice. However, this is not a cost-effective solution. At best, you find yourself paying for agents that are underutilised. At worst, you’ll be unable to keep up with demand and could potentially damage your reputation and customer relationships irreversibly.
A chatbot is an excellent solution to this issue, and will greatly help to ease the burden on your agents at busy times. Plus, with no wage going towards your bot, at times when your chatbot is inactive, no costs will be incurred! Chatbots are typically the first port of call for all customers getting in touch with a contact centre via a chat, as they are used to ‘triage’ a customer before deciding whether or not an agent needs to be involved.
5. Increased Availability and No Queueing
Customers now almost expect to be put in a long wait queue when trying to get in touch with a contact centre. However, you can surprise and delight your customers by removing the frustrating queueing process. As a first point of contact, your chatbot can eliminate call queues, helping to get the interaction off to a positive start. Your chatbot and agents will be able to deliver great service without needing to make up for a long wait time.
Chatbots can also help to increase the availability of agents and reduce the time of queueing for customers by handling some of the more repetitive elements of a customer interaction. For example, a chatbot will be able to gain customer consent to meet compliance statements, such as asking for permission to record the call. It will also be able to perform security and identification checks. The chatbot can then access the customer’s accounts and details and can update them if required. Then, the chatbot will be able to gather information on the customer’s query or issue and may even be able to provide a solution, such as answering a simple question or updating customer information.
If the call needs to be passed on to an agent, then all of this information can be transferred over with the call, eliminating the need for the agent to go through all of this process. Due to this, the time an agent spends with each customer on administrative tasks is massively reduced, allowing human agents to handle more calls per hour. This will, in turn, help to reduce the amount of time customers are waiting in call queues.
6. 100% Accurate and Precise Answers
When your provider helps to design and code your chatbot, they will work with you to develop carefully worded answers to questions. Beyond the answers you have provided, there’s no room for improvisation from your chatbot.
This means that, if it’s a question that your chatbot can help with, the answer is 100% accurate every single time. The risk of human error is removed entirely, as, unlike agents, a chatbot can’t misunderstand your policies, forget its training, or be distracted by something on the other side of the contact centre.
While your agent’s ability to improvise in conversations will be invaluable for many customer interactions, your chatbot will be especially useful for dealing with repetitive and monotonous answers. Chatbots will not tire or get bored of repeating the same information in the same way over and over again!
If you would like a chatbot to help you introduce these six ways to increase customer satisfaction in your contact centre, then get in touch today. Hostcomm can help you to improve your contact centre with a Call Centre Chatbot perfectly tailored to suit your requirements. Contact us on 0808 168 4400 or email [email protected] to find out more information.
