According to the 2022 Digital-First Customer Experience Report, 52% of surveyed consumers said they prefer online chat assistance, but only 31% of businesses offer chat support.

Chatbot support is gaining wide traction in all business forms since having an online presence is essential in an increasingly digitised marketplace. Customers demand easy access to making transactions and addressing grievances.

What is a customer request?

Some customer requests can be pretty straightforward, such as

• How to purchase an item?
• How to return a defective item?
• How to track the shipment status of an item?

Other customer requests may be more complicated, and may require more intensive assistance depending on the individual or business. In either case, providing an accessible and responsive chat assistance option can make the difference between earning a loyal customer, or alienating them.

Live chat vs chatbot support

One way to provide such assistance is via live chat with customer support representatives. This involves hiring agents trained to address queries, acting as mediators between the customers and the service providers, and providing personable yet efficient support.

Around 73% of customers prefer live chat as their primary means of communication with a business. However, live chat support is limited by labour since one representative can only attend to one customer at a time. This necessitates hiring more agents to keep up with the demands of a growing customer base.

An alternative to this is automated chatbot support. A chatbot is an AI programme meant to mimic human interaction and can provide cost-effective options for addressing customer requests. Unlike live chat support, a chatbot is capable of 24×7 functionality and attending to multiple customer requests simultaneously.

What are the benefits of chatbots for businesses?

Chatbot programs can range from simple AI, providing a standardized list of queries for a customer to select, or Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVA), which are capable of closely replicating human speech. The latter allows a company to automate the benefits of live chat support, with the tradeoff being the vast development and implementation costs.

In a survey conducted by Userlike, 68% of respondents reacted positively to the quick response times provided by chatbots, and 54% of respondents claimed they would trust a chatbot for handling basic customer requests.

Furthermore, implementing chatbot support alongside live chat support enables the representatives to spend more time on complicated requests and grievances.

How to calculate ROI of ChatBot?

While customer satisfaction with chatbot support is quite apparent, its profitability can be gauged by comparing the ROIs of live chat support versus chatbot support. Return on Investment (ROI) is an equation that indicates the profitability of a given investment. It can be expressed as a function of two variables, the current value of the investment and the cost of investment.

ROI can be calculated as follows:

The cost of investment for live chat services will involve salaries for representatives and managers, as well as additional bonuses and benefits.

How much does it cost to provide a live chat service?

Suppose the following:

• a customer service agency receives 10,000 customer requests per day
• each live chat interaction has an average duration of 7 minutes
• each representative works an average of 8 hours, or 480 minutes, per day

The number of representatives required for this workload can be calculated as follows:

Therefore, approximately 146 representatives will be required. Accounting for other positions such as team leaders, supervisors, and managers, the cost of investment can be calculated as follows:

The compensation figures, which include salary plus bonuses and benefits, have been taken from Salary.com. These represent the average US nationwide salaries of technical customer support employees. While calculating such cost of investment, other expenditures such as office space, equipment, and other material costs must also be accommodated.

How much does it cost to build a chatbot?

The cost of investment for a chatbot involves building a chatbot and subsequent monthly costs, which include licensing and maintenance.

A chatbot can be set up by either an in-house development team or an agency. With the former, the team will require at least one developer, with an average salary of $6,880 per month, and a graphic designer, with an average salary ranging between $2750-$6,300 per month. This will also include additional costs for integrating the chatbot into different platforms.

With an agency, the initial setup would cost anything between $500-$3,000, and further monthly maintenance would range between $100-$2,000. As a rule of thumb, the higher the setup cost, the lower the monthly maintenance cost.

It should be noted that setup costs are one-time investments only, and will not be included while calculating the cost of investment for subsequent months. Furthermore, additional costs such as employee training, web servers, and maintenance must also be considered.

Suppose that, of the 10,000 daily customer requests received, a chatbot is able to successfully interact with 5,000 of them, with the more complex requests being passed on to live chat support. With the need of human labour being effectively cut down by about 50%, the new cost of investment for live chat can be calculated as follows:

The cumulative cost during the first month of chatbot’s operation will be $538,126.

Comparing the ROIs for live chat vs chatbot support

Assuming a constant total value of $3,000,000, the ROI on customer support, with and without chatbot assistance, can be calculated as follows:

If you compare the live chat ROI with chatbot ROI, it is clear to see how much more profitable chatbot support can be. Even accounting for additional costs and salaries for an in-house development team, the bulk of investment for a chatbot is linked to the one-time initial setup.

Potential limitations of chatbot

One common hesitation in adopting ai chatbots may be the over-reliance on automation. After all, about 69% of US customers have a preference for live chat support.

Of course, there are drawbacks to chatbot support. The first is the immense installation costs that might be prohibitive for smaller businesses. Then there is also the distrust in a chatbot’s capability to provide adequate service. Some major complaints that consumers have against chatbot support include “lack of understanding” and “incapability to solve complex issues”. 46% of consumers believe that chatbot support is a tactic employed to deny them easy access to a live agent, while 60% of consumers would rather have a human address their requirements than a chatbot.

Conclusion

The data is stacked in favour of chatbots. They can help save about 30% in customer service investments. They have been projected to save businesses about $8 billion on such investments and about 2.5 billion hours by 2023.

This time saved can be utilized in developing further business strategies, attracting more customers.

The retail marketplace is only getting more competitive. The ongoing aftereffects of the pandemic, massive political disruption, and the spiraling cost of living crisis are combining to only make it more challenging to meet customers’ needs. Andy Wilkins, Co-Founder and CEO of Futr, explains.

Laying the groundwork for new innovation

Many retailers have already taken significant steps to retain market share and set themselves up to grow. With the pandemic having accelerated digital transformation plans, many have spent the last two years laying the groundwork to deliver exceptional experiences to their customers, irrespective of channel.

That foundation is critical for what comes next. While the considerable boom in ecommerce has naturally receded slightly as shops reopened, the behaviours it instilled have persisted. This has helped rapidly increase the digital literacy of many demographics that might previously have been resistant to more virtual and contactless engagement methods.

Capitalising on changing perceptions

This has led retail brands to investigate new forms of communicating with and serving customers, notably chatbots. First introduced on a large scale in 2016, advances in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), combined with the growing popularity of messaging apps, are helping to change both brands’ and the public’s opinion of chatbots.

Specifically, retailers are using chatbots to:

1. Revolutionise customer service: running 24/7 contact centres is expensive and challenging, but when something goes wrong, customers want answers immediately, not waiting for office hours. Chatbots offer a way of providing dynamic contact which can help source information without requiring large teams working through the night on the off chance a customer needs support.

2. Provide a platform for two-way communication: once, brands communicated to customers, with little opportunity for traffic to come back the other way. Consumers aren’t willing to accept that anymore; they want the means to get in touch as they see fit and via the channels that suit their needs. Text, Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, phone, web, emails, Instagram comments; the list goes on and on. And with more channels comes the risk of more silos, hampering efforts to deliver connected experiences and increasing the chance that customers will keep having to repeat themselves, affecting engagement levels. Chatbots can provide a presence across all channels, managed through a central point, so that brands can deliver a consistent experience.

3. Avoiding cart abandonment through conversational marketing: more than three quarters (76%) of online transactions in retail are abandoned, rising to 85% on mobile, with a total global value of more than £13 million. Conversational marketing, in the form of social commerce, automated display ads, and chatbots, can help tackle shopping cart abandonment, providing reminders at critical moments to customers. Chatbots able to bounce from platform to platform help maintain a consistent conversation and increase the chances of transaction completion.

4. Reducing operational costs: introducing chatbots can save money by reducing the need for large workforces. It can also help reduce turnover (and therefore hiring costs) by taking on administrative and repetitive tasks from human workers and freeing them up to focus on more value-adding activities. So, alongside the benefits that chatbots deliver to customers through a better experience, staff also benefit through improved working conditions.

5. Improving brand engagement: with chatbots now capable of not just holding conversations with customers but doing so in multiple languages across multiple channels, brand communications are easier to maintain than ever. Chatbots can be designed and adapted to have a tone of voice that matches branding, creating an even more conversational communications flow. That only adds to brand understanding, trust, and loyalty.

6. Personalise the customer experience: a customer service chatbot offers a level of personalisation that’s proving extremely effective for retailers. Customers are more demanding than ever and seek a tailored experience that makes them feel valued. Chatbots can address the needs of multiple customers simultaneously while giving the retailers a 360° view of the entirety of a customer’s data. This offers personalised experiences because retailers can be more proactive in their approach to customer service, as opposed to reactive.

Delivering better brand communications

For many, deploying chatbots might seem like a significant undertaking yet the reality is that they require little set-up time, as most are ‘plug and play’ and require very little technical expertise.

Retailers have already done much of the foundational work, so now is the time to invest and augment existing efforts with chatbots that can help businesses to scale their brand communications. With the retail landscape more competitive than ever, being able to deliver consistent experiences across multiple channels is one way brands will protect their market share and grow it.

About the Author

Andy Wilkins is the Co-Founder and CEO of Futr. Futr is a VC backed tech start-up with the mission of delivering superpowers to support teams everywhere.  From out of hours self-serve chatbots to making live chat agents instantly multilingual on any social or chat channel, Futr’s superpowers are transforming the way organisations serve their audiences.

Voice is the fastest form of human communication and has long been the backbone of the customer service industry. Now, with the development of voicebots the power of voice is reaching new heights.

In this article, we will discuss the basics of voicebot technology and how it is changing the customer service industry.

What is a voicebot?

A voicebot is a computer program that can recognize and respond to voice commands. They are commonly used in voice-activated assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home. Voicebots are still relatively new technology, but they are growing in popularity due to their convenience and ease of use.

What is the difference between a voicebot and a chatbot?

At first glance, voicebots and chatbots may seem to be very similar. After all, they are both computer programs that are designed to communicate with humans. However, there is a key difference between these two types of bots. Voicebots are designed to respond to spoken requests, while chatbots typically communicate via written text.

How does a voicebot work?

A voicebot needs input from a user in order to function. This input can come in a variety of forms, but most often from voice commands. The voicebot will then process this information using natural language processing (NLP) algorithms that understand human speech patterns and vocabulary usage.

Voicebots also use machine learning techniques to improve their ability to recognize different phrases over time through repeated interactions with people who speak those phrases regularly; this is known as “training the voicebot.”

Once a voicebot has been trained, it can be used to provide information or assistance to users. The voicebot will respond to user queries using text-to-speech (TTS) software, which will convert the text into an audio message that can be played back to the user.

How are voicebots changing the customer experience?

The customer service industry is one of the first to adopt voicebot technology. This is because voicebots can help improve customer service in a number of ways:

• They can provide quick and easy access to information

• They can help customers with simple tasks, such as ordering food or checking account balances

• They can respond to customer inquiries in real time, which can help improve customer satisfaction

• They can collect data about customer interactions, which can be used to improve customer service strategies

How are Voicebots being used in the Contact Center?

Voicebots are already automating routine voice tasks in large contact centers.

They are being used to:

• Route calls to the correct agent

• Collect customer information

• Handle customer complaints

• Provide very basic customer service

• Train new agents

The use of voicebots in the contact center is still in its early stages, but it is clear that they have the potential to improve customer service and save businesses money. In the future, voicebots will likely play an even more important role in the contact center and other customer service industries.

What voicebot technology is already in use by contact centers?

There are a number of voicebots that are currently being used to automate voice tasks in contact centers, including:

• Watson Assistant from IBM

Watson Assistant is a virtual assistant created by IBM. It uses artificial intelligence to understand and respond to questions in natural language. In addition to call centers, Watson Assistant can also be used on websites. It is also available as an app for Android and iOS devices. Watson Assistant is powered by the Watson AI platform, which includes capabilities such as machine learning, natural language processing, and text-to-speech. Watson Assistant is available in over 20 languages, including English, Spanish, French, and Japanese.

• Amazon Lex from Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Lex is a voicebot from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that helps you build conversational bots or text chatbots. It uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the user’s intent and fulfill the user’s requests. You can use Amazon Lex to build chatbots for customer service, lead capture, data collection, and many other applications. Amazon Lex is based on the same technology that powers Amazon Alexa, so it is highly accurate and scalable. You can use Amazon Lex to create bots that run on any platform, including web, mobile, and messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger and Slack.

• Google Dialogflow from Google

Google Dialogflow is a voicebot platform that enables you to interact with your customers using natural, conversational language. With Dialogflow, you can create chatbots and virtual assistants that can understand and respond to your customers’ needs. Dialogflow is powered by Google’s machine learning technology, which allows it to constantly improve its understanding of customer queries. Additionally, Dialogflow integrates seamlessly with other Google products such as Calendar, Maps, and YouTube. This makes it easy to provide a comprehensive customer experience that goes beyond simple interactions.

• Microsoft Bot Framework from Microsoft

The Microsoft Bot Framework is a bot-building platform from Microsoft. The framework enables developers to create bots that interact with users via natural language processing and voice recognition. The bots can be used to perform a variety of tasks, such as providing customer support or booking appointments. The framework is based on the Azure Bot Service, which is a cloud-based service that provides the infrastructure necessary to run bots. The framework is available for free, and developers can use any programming language to create bots.

Each of these voicebot platforms has its own strengths and weaknesses, so contact centers should carefully consider which platform is best suited for their needs.

The future of voicebots

Voicebots are slowly but surely becoming more prevalent in customer service. While they will never be able to fully replace the human skills of customer service representatives, they can augment and improve the overall customer service experience.

Voicebots can provide 24/7 availability, quick and accurate responses to simple questions, and can help to free up human customer service representatives to handle more complex issues. In addition, voicebots can help to create a more personalised customer service experience by remembering details about previous interactions and using them to provide tailored recommendations.

As voicebot technology continues to develop, it is likely that they will play an increasingly important role in customer service.

The rise of automation in customer service has become more prominent within many industries. But along with the positives and time saving tasks it can provide, it can also prove to be a deterrent for its users.

How many times have you needed to contact a company and struggled to find the correct department or even just a central phone number? Did you try to go though a chatbot to quickly find an answer to your question only to be directed to the FAQs, articles, or a customer forum? If you’ve answered yes, you’ve probably undergone the same frustration that, no doubt, many users before would also have felt.

As a customer service professional, a company that makes it so difficult to access their contact information seems to be an alien idea. We are taught and encouraged to make the customer experience as smooth as possible, yet some brands are struggling with the simplest of things. It is our instinct to want to help when contact is made, whatever channel it comes through. So, why when we are living in a world of instant access to information, do we have such bad customer communication bots?

One of the qualities that the customer service sector prides themselves on is communication. Complicated barriers, such as chat bots that do not work, or badly designed websites, make this skill redundant. How will a customer believe that you will communicate effectively and solve their query or issue if they cannot find a way to talk to you? Unnecessary frustration by systems which do not answer the customer’s queries can cost a company dearly.

Loyalty takes a while to earn and can be lost in a heartbeat especially as it is now easier than ever to share an unsatisfactory experience with our many channels of social media. Let us remember that accessing reviews can prove to be the downfall or success of a brand. If you read a scathing assessment, you are more likely to steer clear, but if you read mostly goods things, you’ll give them a try.

Personally, I find the automation side of the customer experience to be not quite fit for purpose. I have experienced both good and bad in bigger and lesser-known companies. For me, it does not have the personal, individual touch that a human has, and it does not solve issues with the same accuracy, empathy, and resourcefulness that a trained member of a business can. Perhaps I am biased being directly in the customer service sector but, when I am a customer myself, I expect to have my issues resolved in a timely manner through a team that I have easily accessed.

Automation and chat bots work best when they can provide customers with their desired information, but I see so many examples where this is not the case. In identifying the areas now in which there are some difficulties, the customer experience can be updated for companies where customer communication is key to their success.

About the Author

Tabitha Langley is a technical customer service specialist working in the security industry. She has a background in manufacturing environments within supply chain, operations and technical support. Tabitha can be found on LinkedIn.

Jen Snell, VP Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy, Conversational AI at Verint explains why its time to move from robotic chatbots to those capable of true contextual conversations.

Chatbots and Intelligent Virtual Assistants are on the customer engagement frontlines, interacting with consumers every day. Leveraging conversational AI to support rich two-way dialogues, they help facilitate seamless real-time communication and resolution, as well as help build a company’s brand credibility and boost engagement.

In 2020, the global pandemic led to an unprecedented surge in the usage of AI-powered customer service. The combination of a reduced labor force and high volume of support inquiries caused a 426 percent increase in chatbot usage as businesses began to rely on virtual assistants more than ever before. In fact, this trend is slated to continue with industry estimates for chatbot growth set to grow at a CAGR of 34.7 percent.

Despite the growing prevalence of chatbots in the customer service realm, chatbots are not without their own challenges as revealed in a recent survey we conducted of 1,000 U.S. consumers of 18 to 65 years of age.

Our survey results reveal that consumers just aren’t sold on chatbot efficacy, and many find chatbot experiences flat-out frustrating. They’re registering multiple complaints against chatbots as they continue to demand more from their digital-first experiences.

Nearly one-third – 32 percent – say they rarely or never feel understood by a chatbot. Only 28 percent say they always or often feel understood, and 30.5 percent say a chatbot rarely or never fully answers their questions.

Due to this failure to communicate, over 30.8 percent say they always or often abandon their efforts to resolve an issue when interacting with a chatbot. As a result of the inability to resolve issues or have their questions answered via chatbots, more than half of consumers turn to human agents for help – 54.5 percent say they always or often must request to speak to a human after speaking with a chatbot.

A common frustration noted by more than 60 percent of consumers was having to re-explain a situation to a customer service agent after starting the interaction with a chatbot.

Beyond problems with comprehension and issue resolution, consumers voiced frustrations with lackluster chatbots including:

• 7% say the options aren’t sufficient
• 7% say chatbots lack context for their unique situation
• 4% say chatbots don’t have all the information that they need
• 1% say the interactions feel impersonal
• 3% say the experience is too time consuming

Respondents said they are most comfortable using conversational AI for simple use cases such as retrieving account information, scheduling appointments or services, and travel bookings and do feel chatbots are increasingly effective for 24/7 assistance and quick responses in use cases such as healthcare – particularly in scenarios such as increasing patient adherence.

With businesses continuing to increasingly rely on chatbots as a key channel in the digital-first approaches, the next generation of chatbots must be more intelligent, personalized and effective. Negative experiences with outdated or poorly deployed chatbots will hurt overall adoption rates. Companies need to provide a high-quality experience with their conversational AI solutions, given higher customer demands and expectations.

Chatbots need to move beyond micro-smarts to become intelligent systems that deliver advanced understanding, assistance, and intelligence. ‘Beyond the bot’ conversational AI systems can carry on true contextual conversation, complete with clarifications or a subsequent choice by users.

These supercharged chatbots are supported by deep domain expertise, so their comprehension of user intent goes way beyond generic Natural Language Processing. They are also highly integrated with many systems of record to ensure effective issue resolution and the delivery of the right information. This also includes when the conversation is moved to a human agent and delivering all relevant context of the interaction, so customers don’t have to repeat themselves and agents can be successful by quickly resolving issues.

Conversational AI can be a key element of every organization’s digital engagement strategy, but only if those digital experiences keep customers coming back for more.

Click the link for more information and to download a copy of the report, Conversational AI Barometer: Chatbots and Next-Gen AI.

About the Author

Jen Snell is VP Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy, Conversational AI at Verint.

The best chatbot initiatives start with good planning. Magnus Geverts at Calabrio shares his top tips for an automated assistant strategy for improved employee and customer satisfaction.

When combined with the latest Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) solutions, chatbots have the power to improve workforce flexibility, employee satisfaction and the customer experience all in one go. Reports indicate their influence is set to continue especially among the younger generation. Most recently, Calabrio surveyed over 250 contact centre agents and discovered that more agents aged 30-44 years think chatbots will have a greater impact on their job than they did in 2017 (22% versus 10% respectively). They are also more likely to believe chatbots will have a greater degree of impact than agents aged 45-49 (10%).

However, like all technological advances, effective chatbot implementations depend on a thoughtful approach that blends the needs of the organisation with those of the customer.

Step-by-step guide to scaling chatbots successfully

Here is a six-point plan to getting started:

1. Outline clear roles and responsibilities – as chatbots rise up the digitalisation agenda, it is important to establish a dedicated team of experts.  Gartner has identified “three pillars of chatbot responsibilities: business domain, conversation management and technical implementation.” Focus on each of these areas to collectively “drive effective business oversight and decision-making, optimise interactions and customer value, and enforce application integration and data management best practices.”  

2. Involve the right people from the beginning – who are the people who will make or break the chatbot project?  They might be those responsible for deploying the technology or the leaders of the customer service department.  More often than not, they are the budget holders. Next, set realistic expectations and measurable goals – it’s crucial to define expectations as clearly and tangibly as possible so that everyone understands what constitutes good and bad results. 

3. Establish the common questions customers ask – starting with an FAQ project for customer facing chatbots by taking a look at your website’s FAQs. If they are already written in the customer’s words and prioritise the most common queries, that’s a good sign. It shows that the contact centre has analysed customer needs and created well-informed responses. If FAQs are regularly updated, a chatbot begins on solid foundations. To extend the value of automation further and be even more accurate with trend mapping/grouping use a modern speech analytics engine to identify common questions.

4. Translate agent training and evaluations over to chatbots – when coaching agents to interact with customers, a key lesson is to use plain English and remove jargon. The same principle applies to chatbot scripts. To ensure that customers don’t have to wade through technical information and complex phrases, pass these scripts through a readability assessment. A simple, online test that uses a Flesch–Kincaid readability score will do the trick. However, even with well-crafted scripts and innovative solutions, chatbot success cannot be guaranteed. There remains plenty to consider from a people, process and technology perspective. Just as the contact centre uses quality assurance for agents, monitor chatbot performance over time too. Tracking metrics such as customer satisfaction, deflection rates and user numbers can provide valuable insights into whether the pre-defined scripts are landing well with customers. Analytics systems that monitor and predict sentiment, predictive QM scores, goal completion rates and spot trends take this to the next level to further improve the customer experience.

5. Don’t apply chatbots to emotional, complex queries – while customers expect ‘quicker response times’ (93%), they also desire ‘human agent availability over bots’ (68%). It is when bridging the digital and human worlds that chatbots really come into their own. Although technology is evolving rapidly, currently chatbots work best when managing routine and transactional queries. They’re not so good when things get complex and emotive.  One approach is to analyse the top reasons for customer contact and consider which can be resolved with a rigid response and could be dealt with by chatbots. This is often a customer’s preferred method of resolution for simple questions.  For the more complex questions left on the list, create process flows and identify further chatbot features that can deliver the required responses possibly combined with a human agent.

6. Use automated assistants for workforce management and agent wellbeing – automated assistants can do much more than interact with customers. Take a workforce management (WFM) virtual assistant as an example. It informs employees when they can work overtime to earn extra cash or take voluntary time off. Planners also benefit as the bot sorts through absence requests, saving time for them to concentrate on more tricky forecasting and scheduling tasks.

Then, there’s intraday automation. By monitoring service levels, these bots offer   advisors opportunities to change their breaks, helping to better meet incoming demand. The result is increased operational efficiency, empowered employees and improved work-life balance.

To read Calabrio’s latest Health of the Contact Centre 2021 – Agent Wellbeing & the Great Resignation Report and for more ideas and inspiration, visit www.calabrio.com.

About the Author

Magnus Geverts is VP Product Marketing & Management at Calabrio.

Calabrio is the customer experience intelligence company that empowers organisations to enrich human interactions. Through AI-driven analytics, Calabrio uncovers customer behavior and sentiment and derives compelling insights from the contact centre. Organisations choose Calabrio for its ability to understand customer needs and the overall experience it provides, from implementation to ongoing support. Find more at calabrio.com and follow @Calabrio on Twitter.

Chatbots continue to grow in popularity and offer a wide range of benefits for businesses. A chatbot is a great way to provide instant support to your customers without having to hire additional employees.

Together with a comprehensive knowledgebase, many businesses are beginning to utilize this AI driven technology and now is one of the best times to take advantage of these innovative services. If you are still undecided, here are some of the main pros and cons of using a chatbot for your business.

Pros of Using Chatbots for Your Business

1. Around the Clock Availability

One of the top benefits of using a chatbot is that they are always available, whether it is early in the morning or in the middle of the night. Customers can receive immediate support without having to wait on hold. Ultimately, this creates a much better consumer experience and is much more effective than hiring more employees to handle these duties.

2. Maximize Employee Efficiency

Another advantage of chatbots is that they are much more efficient in handling a large number of customers at the same time. On the other hand, employees can only handle one client at a time, which creates a much longer wait time and a more frustrating experience for each customer. However, employees can focus on their core job tasks in the workplace, while chatbots can handle many other types of interactions with customers.

3. Saves Your Company Money

Businesses are always looking at different ways to save money and improve the bottom line. Using a chatbot is a great way to reduce operational costs compared to paying additional employees to handle customer requests. Chatbots can also be a low investment, which saves your company a lot of money in the long-term compared to paying more employees.

4. Automate Routine Tasks

Answering the same questions over and over again is never a fun or productive experience for employees. However, you can automate many of these routine tasks by using a chatbot to answer common questions and concerns from clients. Automating these everyday tasks will increase productivity in the workplace and create a much better working environment for employees.

5. Showcase New Products

Chatbots are not only a great way to answer questions but can also showcase new products and services for your business. You can showcase these new products by using push notifications to send to customers based on their interests. Ultimately, this is a great way to increase consumer engagement while playing a key role in marketing new services for your business through the use of chatbots.

Cons of Using Chatbots for Your Business

1. Risk of Misunderstanding

Although chatbots have come a long way, they cannot yet replace the flow of human conversation with all its nuances such as colloquialisms, humor and subtle emotions. They may be up to scratch for use in formal settings, but they are a long way from replacing humans in more personal applications. At present, the risk of a misunderstanding occurring remains quite high.

2. Difficult to Make

It can be a major challenge to create your own chatbot. Investment in software engineers and technology experts may be large and ongoing support will most likely be needed. Luckily, there are ready-to-use chatbots on the market you can purchase for a one off cost or on a monthly subscription.

3. More Security Needed

When you are collecting your customers’ data, it must be stored securely. Using a chatbot opens up another data channel with customers and additional security measures must be taken. Third-party chatbots must be able to provide secure channels and keep their software updated. Extra privacy concerns can be costly and need to be considered before deployment.

4. Not Popular with Everyone

Chatting with what is essentially a robot is not for everyone. Many people are wary of the advance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and refuse to participate in this new technology. Some customers will always prefer the human touch and chatbots will not be for them. Additional support resources may still be required to serve all your clients.

5. Can Do More Harm Than Good

The worse thing you can do is implement a chatbot that is not suitable for your business. A badly designed and trained chatbot will end up frustrating your customers and your business will suffer. Always give the option to clients to speak to a human if your chatbot fails to satisfy their needs.

Final Thoughts

Chatbots will continue to play a key role in customer relations and offer immense benefits for businesses of all sizes. Around the clock availability, improving employee efficiency, saving your company money, automating everyday tasks, and highlighting new products are only a few examples of the many advantages of using a chatbot in the workplace.

Utilizing an AI chatbot enabled by a knowledge base is a great way to gain a competitive edge and better meet the unique needs of your clients. Be sure to examine the pros and cons to see what opportunities chatbots can bring to your business.

About the Author

Prabhjot Singh is Marketing Team Lead at Knowmax. Knowmax is an enterprise grade knowledge management platform that helps in findability of actionable information from an ever increasing ocean of information.

2020 was a year that saw plenty of new technologies and customer journeys entering the mainstream as businesses got creative in order to continue catering to customers that couldn’t interact with them in a traditional, face-to-face manner.

Despite businesses beginning to open their doors again, this trend has continued with consumers flocking to contactless and omnichannel options like click and collect or curbside pickup.

Like omnichannel customer journeys, chat apps have been around for a number of years. However, in 2020 their use really extended from personal messaging and interoffice collaboration to business-to-consumer communication.

Chat apps enable businesses to interact with their customers in a more informal and free-form way. They provide the benefit of being a seemingly low-stakes form of communication while also giving brands more opportunity for engagement with their customers and target audiences. They do, however, come with some unique challenges for businesses, especially when it comes to testing the CX to deliver an enjoyable and intuitive end user experience.

Here are three things’ organisations should keep in mind when developing a chat app.

1. Make User Experience the Priority

A customer’s experience with a chat app will determine whether or not that app is successful. Having the chat app provide the correct answer is of vital importance (of course), but if the user experience is not up to par, then the customer is not likely to return to the chat app again, even if they did end up with their answer.

To deliver an excellent chat app experience to end users, brands should first make sure they understand why they are building a chat app – what problem are they looking to solve. Only then can they determine the right course of action and decide what kind of chatbot they should build and what tone, ethos and persona the chat app will take on. These are all informed by the purpose of the chat app and will directly impact the user experience and customers’ relationship with the app.

2. Chat Apps Must Account for Various Inputs

A chief benefit of chat apps is that they allow brands to interact with customers on a more personal level. While this has its benefits, it can also be wildly unpredictable. One doesn’t have to search far to see why this is the case – messaging apps and chat platforms are littered with different inputs, from emojis and gifs to images, slang and abbreviations. Never mind that misspelled words and oddly phrased sentences are bound to occur as well.

To be successful, chat apps have to be prepared for these inevitabilities and be ready to respond appropriately, regardless of the input.

Sourcing the right data during development is the key to having a chat app understand the end user and respond in the most correct way. When building a chat app, development teams should focus on sourcing a large amount of data that is not only high quality and from trusted sources, but that is also diverse and matches the target audience. This will help limit unintended biases in the chat app and also help the chat app understand and provide the right answer when faced with otherwise unexpected inputs like emojis and slang.

3. Meet Audiences on Their Preferred Channels

A great benefit of chat apps is that customers can interact with them anywhere and anytime; they provide a level of convenience and availability that is unmatched by the majority of other customer journeys.

Yet, many consumers are still apprehensive about using chat apps. To ease these concerns – and ensure that customers can use the chat app where they are most familiar – brands should make sure that the chat app is available wherever their target audiences are most comfortable navigating.

This means making the chat app available across different channels of access. Not only should the chat app be built into a company’s website and mobile app, but social platforms like Facebook Messenger should also be considered in order to make the experience for the user as easy, intuitive and seamless as possible. Consumers are used to personal messaging on these types of platforms so it makes sense that they would prefer to communicate with their favorite brands in much the same way.

Keeping the End User Experience Centre Stage

Chat apps are most successful if they are engaging, intuitive and useful. To make sure that a chat app checks all these boxes, it is important to keep the end user in mind throughout the development process. Chat apps should be conversational, so they need to understand natural language on a deep level in order to detect user needs and appropriately act on them. Bringing user experience, various data inputs and sources, and a broad perspective into the fold during the development stages will only help a chat app become more useful and widely engaged with.

About the Author

Inge De Bleecker is Senior Director of User Experience at Applause.

Inge has been designing and testing web, mobile, voice and multi-channel experiences for more than 20 years. She builds and leads UX teams and evangelizes customer experience principles throughout organizations. Her mantras are “design for everyone” and “test early and often.” As vice president of CX at Applause, Inge leads the practices and studies for CX, accessibility and conversational AI. Prior to joining Applause, Inge held several positions in conversational interfaces, as well as web and mobile design and research. She holds an MA from the University of Texas, Austin.

Inge is a published author. Her book, Remote Usability Testing: Actionable insights in user behavior across geographies and time zones, which she co-authored with Rebecca Okoroji, is listed as one of Book Authority’s best new usability books of 2020. Along with Okoroji, Inge created the USERIndex benchmark — a standardized means of measuring the user experience of a digital interface. As part of the USERIndex, Inge believes that an exceptional user experience is determined by 4 USER factors: usefulness, satisfaction, ease of use and reliability.

Sarah Al-Hussaini, Co-Founder and COO of Ultimate.ai, explains why chatbots must be part of the customer journey if their full potential is to be realized.

When it comes to chatbots, there are generally two types of sentiment in the market amongst customer service leaders.

The first is that customer service leaders feel pressured by their C-level teams to acquire this burgeoning technology, which they assume is a kind of “off-the-shelf” “plug-and-play” solution. (It’s not.)

On the other side, there are leaders who are protective over the customer experience they work hard to deliver and reject the idea of adding an “impersonal and cold” chatbot. (Which it needn’t be.)

But both of these sentiments falter by oversimplifying exactly what a chatbot is — and the fact that it isn’t a stand-alone solution.

When evaluating new technologies to adopt, you need to be thinking in the context of your customer journey.

Disruptive brands are already reaping the rewards of creating more intelligent customer journeys. Look at Spotify and Netflix, which have used AI to revolutionize the way we discover music and film. Or Amazon, which has done the same with shopping through its recommendation engine.

Each of these services are so seamless that the customer doesn’t even feel the powerful technologies behind them — which is a key component to any great CX tool — and have transformed the customer experience landscape.

For many businesses, a chatbot can be a way to add the same intelligence to their customer service offering. Chatbots can help drive retention and customer advocacy by improving the post-purchase experience you deliver.

But if not implemented in line with your customer journey, a chatbot risks having the reverse effect.

What is a chatbot, and why do you need one?

A chatbot is like a super customer service agent: it works 24/7 without rest, providing consistently positive customer experiences day in and day out. It can take all your repetitive cases off your plate…forever.

But how does it work?

Think of a chatbot as an intelligence layer that is embedded into your customer service. This layer allows you to provide your customers with a self-service solution to solve their simplest cases easily and consistently.

You’ll be very familiar with such cases already: password resets, account unlocks, plan renewals, order status, ticket rescheduling, and even simple FAQ answers like reciting a return policy. All of these are great examples of cases a chatbot can empower your customers to resolve without your team’s help.

Not only does this make your human agents’ jobs less stressful and more fulfilling, but your customers actually prefer helping themselves — Millennials and Gen Zers in particular. According to the Customer Experience Index, three out of four Millennial consumers prefer solving their customer service issues on their own.

Training a chatbot to hold the ground at the frontline of your customer service also puts you less at risk for spikes and seasonality. During times of high consumer traffic – like what the coronavirus outbreak is doing to today’s travel industry – your chatbot will work overtime (and won’t complain about it!) to handle all the repetitive inquiries, and cases that require escalation to a human agent will be far more manageable.

As you can see, businesses stand to gain and win across the board with a chatbot. The customer experience is better, making them more likely to buy and/or return. The demand on your team decreases, freeing up your human agents to tackle the higher-value interactions. And finally, your agent turnover is likely to decrease as their work becomes more rewarding.

But a chatbot is not a silver bullet. These helpful little bots can only do all the things described above if it is seamlessly embedded into your customer journey. To illustrate the role the customer journey has to play, consider the following example.

Imagine a customer that wants to update their bank that they’ll be going on holiday to Mexico for a few weeks. So, they log into their app and start a conversation. It goes something like this:

Hello, I’m Eve the ABC Bank chatbot. How can I help you today?

Hi there, I wanted to let you know that I will be travelling with my card next week.

I’m happy to update your account with your travel plans. Can you let me know which country you will be visiting?

I’m going to Mexico.

Great! And how long will you be travelling for?

For 3 weeks.

Thank you. I have now updated your account. Is there anything else I can help you with today?

No thanks, bye!

[Eve the chatbot marks the case as resolved and tags it as a travel plans update case.]

It looks simple, but a lot is going on here. Consider the following:

• First, the chatbot is inside the app; an interface the customer knows and loves.
• The chatbot has been trained to understand the customer question and knows the right workflow and follow up questions to ask so that it collects all the information.
• The chatbot is able to update the customer’s information within the accounts system, just like an agent would.
• Finally, the chatbot resolved the case in the Contact Center and tagged it for your analytics.

In other words, the chatbot has been designed to recognize your real customer questions and has the tools to resolve them. The chatbot has been designed with your real customer journey in mind.

By embedding your chatbot into your real customer journeys, you can deliver great automated experiences at scale. You can be there for every customer instantly. You can free your agents. But it only works when you design your chatbot in line with real use cases, trained on your real customer service data, and connected to your real systems.

Bad bots are born from misleading marketing boasts that you can “build your bot in 60 seconds!”. If your chatbot is not built in a way that is complementary to your customer journey, it is doomed for failure.Common pitfalls to avoid when implementing a chatbot

Implementing an intelligent chatbot may seem like an obvious choice, but it isn’t exactly a one-size-fits-all solution that will fit every company, as we’ve demonstrated. Here are some common mistakes to avoid when integrating a chatbot.

Connect to your Contact Center

Most businesses have their entire customer journey recorded in their CRM — and by extension their Contact Center — from the moment a customer signs up, throughout the lifespan of their custom with the company. Businesses invest significant time and resources to perfect and personalize this journey.

So it doesn’t make sense to set up a chatbot as a stand-alone widget on your website, without linking it to your Contact Center. Your goal is not to disrupt your customer journey, it’s to supercharge it. Making sure your chatbot is seamlessly embedded within your existing Contact Center ensures that.

If this step is missed, the chatbot will be unable to conduct personalized interactions, seamlessly hand over cases to human agents, and do all the incredibly handy and helpful tasks that intelligent chatbots are designed to do.

As a short anecdote, I recently saw a well-known brand with chat available on the right-hand side of the page, and a chatbot icon on the left. Customers will be confused by which channel to reach out to. Worse yet, when the bot needed help resolving my question, it was unable to transfer me to an agent and instead I was forced to open a new chat (on the right this time!) and re-explain my issue. Avoid making the same mistake.

Train your chatbot well

Remember: your customers will use your chatbot touchpoint a lot. The second you put it live. Trust me. So you need to get this right, right from the get-go.

Think of adding a chatbot as being like adding a new customer-facing team to sit on the frontlines of your customer support. Train your chatbot just like you would a squad of new agents.

When building a new team, you need to clearly define its responsibilities — in this case, the questions you want the chatbot to handle. You need to train the team to recognize each of the common customer issues — through giving your chatbot a lot of example data of each of the ways the question may be asked. And you need to show them what success looks like — i.e. design ideal chatbot responses and workflows.

Keep in mind that when a customer talks to your chatbot, they’re talking to you. So the interaction must be just as professional, seamless, friendly and effective as you would expect of any other interaction with a human agent. As such, it is essential to give your bot the training and testing it needs to reach such an intelligent level.

Training your chatbot well is the single highest-impact thing you can do to ensure you deliver great automated customer experiences. Some chatbot vendors also offer this training as a service, which can support your team in getting a high-quality solution up and running from the get-go.

Commit to automation

Proper training, testing and maintenance of your chatbot requires assigning a responsible person — if not a specialized team — to the case. This is not just for the chatbot’s set up, but throughout the duration of its life with your company. Don’t make the mistake of allowing your chatbot to do its own thing unmonitored, or you could end up with some very unhappy customers.

One great approach to start with is to put your chatbot in the hands of your customer service experts, by promoting one of your agents to manage the bot. This agent will soon be doing the work of ten agents, with the same resources.

The best businesses already have automated experience teams, chatbot teams, or automation strike teams as they’re popularly called, as part of their customer service family.

These teams work specifically with the chatbot, train the bot, track the data, continue to improve and scale it so it can handle more cases.

Due to the scale of how much an intelligent chatbot can offer, I can assure you that automation teams are here to stay, and they’ll become more and more integral to the customer experience journey as we progress into the future.

Consider augmentation as a first step

Finally, a chatbot should be supporting your agents as well. An automation-only solution, you see, is too shallow for today’s customer climate. The big trend right now is to have a human+machine approach — also known as augmentation. This means that in addition to automating your most straightforward cases, your chatbot also works behind-the scenes with your agents to suggest them answers, which not only helps speed up and take the pressure off the human agent, but also trains the chatbot as it goes.

This augmentation process has a bonus effect of giving you a no-risk way to test your bot with your agents, before ever putting it in front of a customer. Once live, this side-kick status also helps greasing the wheels for buy-in from your agents, who may otherwise have been apprehensive about a new technology that they may fear could be out to replace them.

Augmentation works. Look at Finnair: in 2018, the Nordic airline deployed an augmentation-only chatbot to their customer service, supporting agents with suggested responses as new questions came in. The chatbot provides 24/7 support in multiple languages, helping agents give on-brand answers faster on everything from flight details to reservation changes. Finnair sped up response times by almost 40% and their agents were able to handle 12% more chats an hour with the boost to their performance.

In 2019, Finnair scaled to add automation and today their well-designed bot handles almost 40% of all cases without the need for an agent. When an agent is looped in, the chatbot moves to a supportive role, guiding agents with answer recommendations in real time.

Action steps for integrating a chatbot into your customer journey

• Link your chatbot to your Contact Center
• Invest time in training your chatbot well, or select a vendor who will do this for you
• Assign a person or team to be responsible for your chatbot
• Start by augmenting your agents first

The fact is a shallow chatbot-widget on your website will not add real value. Chatbots need to be deeply embedded in your customer service workflows to truly enhance your customer journey. They need to be connected to your Contact Center, trained on your most common cases, supporting your agents, facilitating seamless handovers, connected to backend systems to execute actions.

Customers are done testing experimental solutions. Rising adoption of Google Home and Amazon Alexa show us bots are here to stay. It’s time to bring the technology into the customer journey.

Quite simply, a chatbot cannot work on its own. But with the right training, testing, implementation and maintenance, it can do wonders as an integral part of your customer service offering.

About the Author

Sarah Al-Hussaini is Co-Founder and COO of Ultimate.ai, leading the scaling of one of Europe’s fastest growing AI companies. Sarah is an expert in customer experience, artificial intelligence and the Future of Work. Sarah was awarded Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2019.

Bots, and the underlying AI that drives them, have become increasingly popular in many Customer Experience and contact center circles, and for good reason.

Bots offer extended functionality and enable customers to find answers or support without the involvement of a live agent. Implemented and maintained properly, bots have the potential to significantly improve customer and employee experience.

However, without a defined strategy and optimized implementation, bots can lead to frustration for customers, agents and leadership.

How can you seize the potential bots offer, without negatively impacting your customers or agents? Keep these key factors in mind when developing your bot strategy.

Focus on developing transparent but conversational interactions

Companies that fake their way are creating a bad experience because they are not being authentic. Authenticity is a key criteria of a good customer experience.

With that in mind, it is important to remember that chat bots are tools, not an actual replacement for an interaction with a live person. Few users are likely going to believe that they are interacting with a real person when typing a question into a chat bot window – attempting to fool them into thinking a bot is a real person is a mistake. Transparency is key.

Alexa from Amazon is a good example. Everyone knows Alexa is fake. She isn’t trying to fool people into believing she’s a real person chatting with people all over the world. In this case, Alexa is intentionally fake and transparent. This transparency allows users to temper their expectations of an interaction with Alexa.

When users see a chat window pop up that says “Hi I’m Sam, how can I help you” at 3:00 am on a Saturday morning, they know that the company is trying to fool them into thinking a live agent is reaching out to them. This isn’t ideal.  A bot that says, “Hello. It’s 3:00 am all of our real people are sleeping. I’m Sam, our automated response technology. I can help you with most of your questions” – or something to that effect – is a much better, more authentic approach.

Be up front with your customers about each bot interaction. Focus on creating a conversational engagement between your customers and the chat bot, but don’t try to fool them into thinking they are speaking to a real person. Develop detailed user personas and leverage them to map and create naturally flowing conversations and responses.

Be realistic

When implementing a chat bot, it can be easy to get carried away and attempt to create a solution capable of answering every possible customer question or addressing any potential issue. Short of spending years in development and countless dollars, you’ll likely not be able to achieve this goal.

Leverage customer data to focus on the most common questions or issues your customers have and develop your bot to address those first. Then create an ongoing roadmap for adding functionality to your bot, adding answers to more and more questions as they become relevant for your business. This approach will likely achieve far better results than attempting to solve every issue or answer every potential question up front.

Develop integrations

To be truly effective, a chat bot must be capable of actually helping your customers. To help your customers, the bot must be able to access and source certain data sets or reroute the interaction.

When developing your chat bot, ensure that the solution is integrated with any other technology platforms necessary to achieve its objective of supporting customers. Explore the potential of each integration carefully, and weight the benefits against the associated costs or risks. Create a roadmap for adding further functionality or integrations to continually improve the capabilities and effectiveness of your bot.

Create seamless transitions

It is important to realize that not every customer issue can be resolved via a bot interaction, and that bots are just one potential touchpoint in a larger customer journey. Plan for natural and seamless transitions from the chat bot to a live agent. Ensure that the agent fielding the interaction has access to the chat transcript to avoid conversational redundancies and continue the interaction without unnecessary interruption.

The potential to reach customers through chat is massive. By carefully planning each aspect of your chat bot implementation, you can empower customers and reduce the stress on agents while ensuring optimal experience for everyone involved.

To further explore the potential of bots and viable strategies for implementing them, visit “Blended AI: Bots in the Contact Center.”

About the Author

Kurt Schroeder is the Chief Experience Officer and leader of CX consulting practice at Avtex, a full-service CX consulting and solution provider focused on helping organizations create better experiences for customers. Avtex partners with leading technology vendors like Microsoft and Genesys to address CX challenges through CX design and orchestration.

Kurt and his team help organizations thrive in the experience economy by creating meaningful experiences in every interaction. Kurt has pioneered methodologies and approaches to customer experience over 30 years for companies in financial services, agriculture, manufacturing, health care, distribution, insurance, consumer packaged goods and non-profits, including GE, 3M, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, United Health Group, numerous credit unions and manufacturers.