The Promise of Chatbots is Now a Reality

Managing employee turnover and customer satisfaction has always been a daunting task for contact centers. However, with the advent of new technology and advancements in artificial intelligence, contact centers can now use chatbots to revolutionize the customer service industry. Chatbots are being widely used by businesses to improve response times, increase sales, and improve customer satisfaction. This article will explore how chatbots are changing the way contact centers engage with employees and delight their customers.

One of the biggest challenges faced by contact centers today is employee retention. As the job market becomes more competitive, employees are demanding flexibility, great benefits, and the ability to work from home. To retain top talent, contact center managers must rework their old tried and true methods of bringing in lunch, casual days, and spin the wheel games to engage with employees online. This requires creativity and out of the box thinking. Chatbots can be used to assist with heavy workloads and allow agents more flexibility while providing faster service to our customers. Moreover, customers expect to get resolution through multiple channels such as phone, chat, and even text messaging.

The use of chatbots in customer service has transformed the way businesses interact with their customers. Chatbots can provide 24/7 support, answer frequently asked questions, and even provide personalized recommendations. Utilizing chatbots can significantly reduce response times, improve customer satisfaction, and increase sales. Chatbots can handle a high volume of queries simultaneously, allowing customer service teams to focus on more complex issues. With the rise of e-commerce, chatbots have become an essential tool for businesses looking to provide fast and efficient customer service.

The benefits of chatbots are not limited to improving customer satisfaction. Chatbots can also be used to engage with employees and provide development opportunities. By allowing work from home options and providing training through chatbots, employees can learn at their own pace, without the need for expensive training programs. Chatbots can also manage workloads and lessen the need to hire additional staff, reducing the burden on the contact center's budget.

At our contact center, we have found that utilizing technology such as chatbots has proven to be very effective in engaging with our employees and delighting our customers. We first began utilizing a chat team managed by agents. We found that they could engage with up to 5 customers at a time and had a higher success rate. Utilizing chat lowered our call volume and resulted in a much higher customer satisfaction rate and increased account saves.

The decision was then made to implement a chatbot that could engage with our members at a basic level 24 hours a day. The chatbots could assist numerous customers at a time and often referred them to our help articles to increase self service. Proudly, we were able to forgo hiring a total of 4 phone agents that were previously planned thanks to the use of our chatbots. In addition, our team has been able to enjoy taking off certain paid holidays knowing that our chatbots will be available to guide our members. This helps to improve the much-needed work-life balance that our employees deserve.

Once you make the decision to roll out a chatbot process you have to keep in mind several factors that can impact your business. For example, be mindful and aware of the cost associated with the additional chatbot sessions you are creating. In addition, ensure you have solid help articles built out that the bot can refer customers to. You also want to be sure the chatbot comes across as human-like and as relatable as possible. Keep in mind that rolling out a new process such as this requires an agent to constantly oversee the conversations that are taking place. As an example, we had to tweak responses and help make the chatbot “smarter” as to how they were responding to ensure they had a successful end result.

Our next phase will require an API connection so that the bot can look up and relay account information and take certain actions. We are excited to take our bots to the next level and increase their effectiveness while lowering the need for a live agent to engage to take account actions. Today our bots gather information and create tickets that our agents have to work. As a result of this we are faced with more tickets to work which will be alleviated in the future as the API connection progresses.

Overall, chatbots are here to stay, and we are excited to see how we can further this initiative to fully engage with our customers and act on accounts to lessen the workload for our agents. We must embrace the future of technology and utilize it to improve our team's work experience and delight our customers. As contact centers continue to evolve, chatbots will undoubtedly play a significant role in shaping the future of customer service.