Forrester data reveals 60% of U.S online adults use online messaging, voice or video chat services. With increased familiarity with digital solutions, today consumers often prefer to manage simple and low-emotional effort queries through self-service, including chatbots. The COVID-19 pandemic fast-tracked adoption of self-service. Al consumers found necessity pushed them online and many came to recognize the benefits of fast, hassle-free, 24/7 service.

However, many organizations had to move quickly to deploy chatbots and other self-service solutions limiting the ability to carefully plan, deploy and train chatbots for specific use cases. As a result, brands are finding their chatbots don’t always meetexpectations for the business or their customers. A recent Gartner study revealed more than 51% of Customer Service and Support leaders found only low to moderate value in chatbot implementation.In webinar Chatbots for Customer Service Automation, Abhinandan Jain, Chief Digital Officer, Startek, and Venkatesh Krishnaswany, CCaaS Product Strategist, Dialpad discuss obstacles to effective chatbot deployment and how to overcome them.

Webinar takeaways

Know your customers

Understand user intent, demographics and history. Segment the users and design the chatbots for new and frequent users to ensure that UX and UI are made to serve each customer with a personalized approach.

Keep iterating

Use your data to discover your customers’ most common needs and build from there. Keep iterating as you gather more insights and develop new use cases.

“You're robbing yourself of the opportunity to learn if you're not connecting the experience and bringing [customers] to a single point…Think omnichannel as a core value, bring all your channels into a single place where you can…provide… a unified, uniform customer journey and collect data in a most comprehensive manner.”

Venkatesh Krishnaswany, CCaas Product Strategist, Dialpad

Orchestrate

Plan user journeys and workflows to ensure a smooth customer experience. Be sure to keep the journey simple. . And be realistic, don’t aim for your chatbot to manage everything.

Be transparent

Ensure that customers know they are interacting with a chatbot and be upfront about the support your chatbot can and cannot offer. Help your customers understand what they should expect so they can make informed decisions about when to interact with your chatbot and when they need to interact with a live agent.

Make escalation easy

Customers should always have the option to turn to a life agent. Don’t trap your customers in frustrating chatbot loops. When the chatbot can’t answer the question, or if the customer just wants to engage with a human, ensure a smooth handoff to a live agent. For the best CX, chatbot interactions should handoff to a live chat agent while voice bot interactions should escalate to live voice channels.

“That is the most frustrating experience I think anyone goes through, [when] you just can't get to an agent.”

Abhinandan Jain, Chief Digital Officer, Startek 

Chatbots for Customer Service Automation is a part of our monthly webinar series exploring the elements that make up world-class CX and how brands can employ them.

Up next, we explore the role of empathy in the contact center. Register or watch on demand.