Leverage Bots For Your Customer's Valentine's Day

Whether or not we like to admit it, Valentine’s Day is stressful. From buying gifts, to making sure they arrive at the right time, to booking reservations, to keeping track of all the Valentine’s Day promotions, it’s easy to start dreading a holiday that’s supposed to just be about love — from both a consumer and brand perspective. Leveraging Valentine’s Day bots can change that.

This is particularly true for customer service agents, who every year receive a massive influx of tickets related to promotions, express shipping, and guaranteed arrival time. Your customers may love your special edition heart-shaped boxes (looking at you, Chick-fil-a), but do your CX agents?

Yet this year, there’s a solution that agents and customers alike will love: Valentine’s Day bots. By strategically using a few different bots that work in tandem, you can deflect tickets, decrease time to resolution, and decrease backlog — all while delighting customers with speedy responses and effective solutions. Recent data shows that more than half of all customers would prefer to speak with a bot to save time, and this number will only increase as the experience improves.

Here are three ways that you can alleviate some of the added stress on your support team this Valentine’s Day.

Main Takeaways:

Use an QuickSearch Bot to deflect holiday-specific frequently asked questions
Use custom dialogue and emojis to humanize your bots without detracting from their efficiency
Use custom Valentine’s Day bots and workflows to optimize returns and easily automated inquiries

1. Enhance self-service V-day specific FAQs

As with many other holidays, Valentine’s Day comes with a host of its own specific frequently asked questions. These can range from questions about special promotions, to guaranteed shipping, to gift receipts, etc. This year, you can get ahead of these questions by optimizing these FAQs so an QuickSearch Bot can take the answers and deflect more tickets with them.

In order to do this, first identify the categories of frequently asked questions you expect to receive this Valentine’s Day, and revamp existing knowledge base articles or write new ones that address these questions. Once these articles are added to your knowledge base, the QuickSearch Bot will then respond to your customers instantaneously when they ask about V-day themed gift wrapping, the terms and conditions for your V-day promotion, or whatever the case may be for your specific brand.

By leveraging this bot, you allow your customers to better self-serve, and also decrease ticket volume for your team.

2. Give your Valentine’s Day bots some pep with custom dialogue

One of the biggest problems with the early bots of 2016 was that they focused more on sounding fun than on being effective. Because of this, chatbots have historically been perceived negatively by the public. However, it is possible to reach a happy medium between the human-sounding but ineffective chatbots of the past, and the ultra-efficient, somewhat monotonous based chatbots of today.

Sprinkle your Valentine’s Day specific bots with holiday themed language. For instance, have the bot sign off with “Happy Valentine’s Day! ?” or other holiday themed emojis, such as a bouquet or chocolate. This helps give your brand a personal touch while still giving customers efficient routes to solutions.

3. Leverage decision tree based bots for pre and post sale requests

Remember that in the customer service world, the Valentine’s season doesn’t end on the 14th of February; it continues for several weeks after, with customer service questions continuing to pile up about items not arriving on time, returns, lack of gift receipts, etc.

Custom decision tree-based bots can be easily created to address these questions. For instance, if a customer has a question about returning a gift, you can have a Valentine’s Day bot first ask questions regarding the order number, return/refund method, whether or not a gift receipt was included, the delivery address, etc. The bot can then move on to the next step of providing instructions for how to print the return label, and allow the customer to complete the return without an agent ever needing to enter the conversation. Once the customer issue is resolved, the bot can then ask for feedback and a CSAT rating.

Note: while this automated process can work for many situations, it is also important to always consider including an “escape hatch” that allows the issue to be escalated to an agent — a valuable capability to avoid potential customer frustration.

Don’t just share the love on Valentine’s Day: make a habit of it

The automation strategies outlined in this article can be applied throughout the year, as well as for other holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving. By leveraging bots, you can give your customers and your agents their time back, so that they can focus on doing what they love year round, not just on February 14th.

Not sure how to get started with bots? Don’t be intimated: leveraging bots and creating custom workflows has never been easier. With Helpshift’s custom bot builder, there’s no technical knowledge required. Check out The Beginner’s Guide to Using CX bots here.