As businesses continue to prioritize the customer experience, chatbots have become a popular tool for providing quick and convenient customer service. Chatbots are computer programs designed to mimic human conversation, allowing customers to communicate with a business through messaging apps, websites, and mobile apps. By incorporating certain features, chatbots can be highly effective at hooking in customers and improving the overall customer experience. But what are the features that customers value the most? Below we’ve highlighted what we think are the most impactful.
Personalization
One key feature of chatbots that can help to hook in their customers is personalization. Chatbots can use information about a customer's preferences and past interactions to provide personalized recommendations and offers. This can help to make a chatbot more relevant and valuable to the customer, improving their overall experience. For example, a chatbot could use data on a customer's past purchases to suggest similar products or provide information about new products that may be of interest. Personalization can also be extended to the way the chatbot communicates with customers. For example, a chatbot could use a customer's name or mirror their preferred tone of communication to create a more personalized experience.
Convenience
One of the biggest advantages of a Chatbot is that it can be available 24/7. Many customers these days choose to do their personal admin in the evening whilst watching TV or during other activities, so availability outside of office hours is a must. Others may have physical challenges that prevent them from visiting a store or office, so the ability of a chatbot to be available all the time on the device of the customer's choice is a real bonus. Chatbots can also be integrated with instant chat platforms that customers use every day like the WhatsApp for Business Platform, SMS, and of course on the company website. Which brings us to….
Multichannel Access
Integrating a chatbot across multiple channels can also be an effective way of keeping customers satisfied. By being available on a range of different channels that the customer may use in their day-to-day lives such as WhatsApp, SMS, iMessage, websites, and other popular instant messaging apps, chatbots can make it easy for customers to communicate with the business and make the experience comfortable and familiar. This multichannel approach can help to improve the overall customer experience by providing a seamless and consistent experience across different channels.
NLP (Natural Language Processing)
Chatbots that use NLP can understand and respond to customer requests in a more human-like manner, improving the overall experience. For example, a chatbot could use NLP to understand a customer's request for information about a specific product and provide a relevant response, rather than simply offering a list of options. By using NLP, chatbots can understand and interpret more natural language spoken by the customer, allowing them to request specific information or complete a transaction without following a predetermined script. This can help to improve the customer experience by making the chatbot more intuitive and easier to use.
Proactive Engagement
Chatbots can use AI to identify opportunities for engagement and proactively reach out to customers with relevant offers or information such as an upcoming sale, a new product that the customer might be interested in, or a service update. This can be an effective way to keep customers engaged and drive repeat business.
Speed of Service
Chatbots can also be used to improve the speed of the customer service process. By providing quick responses to customer inquiries, chatbots can help to reduce wait times and improve the overall efficiency of the customer service process. This can be particularly valuable for businesses that handle a high volume of customer inquiries. Everyone’s time is precious these days so any features that reduce waiting times will be appreciated by customers and businesses alike.
A Hybrid Approach
For most companies, a blended approach that uses chatbots as frontline support to deal with FAQs and routine customer service tasks, combined with live agents to deal with more complex issues is the winning strategy. It has the double benefit of automating the majority of routine queries quickly and efficiently and therefore freeing up agents to spend more time on the more challenging issues that need one-to-one attention. The key here is to identify the point at which human intervention is required and the use of AI and NLP has proved very adept at this, as has to have the option to ‘talk to an agent’ readily available.
Conclusions
By incorporating some of the features highlighted above, businesses can create chatbots that are effective at providing customers with a great level of service and improving the overall customer experience and these are the factors that will hook customers into using a business more regularly. Whether through personalization, convenience, multichannel access, proactive engagement, speed, or the ability to seamlessly transition to a live agent, chatbots can be a valuable tool for enhancing customer service and driving business success.
If you’d like to learn more about how your business can benefit from a chatbot boasting these features, talk to Unifonic today
