The New World of CS Automation Part 3: Offer Conversational Bots that Consumers Love
Automate routine interactions and eliminate customer wait time with SensAI bots.
Today’s Bots Enable the Most Seamless Experience Possible
The chatbot hype of 2016 has finally become a reality. Chatbots are ubiquitous in industries ranging from travel, to hospitality, to insurance, to retail, to banking. You can even order food or get a weather report through a quick conversation with a bot.
Today’s commercial bots are effective because they lead customers down predetermined paths. Instead of relying on Natural Language Processing (NLP), the vast majority of chatbots use decision-tree structures in which users choose from menu options and are led down a subsequent path (see the screenshot below from Amazon.com). Some of these chatbots also have limited NLP, but the interaction is not dependent on high-levels of accuracy. This format — offering specific options based on each user input — has been adopted by companies spanning numerous industries, from Geico to Iceland Air. The use of this type of bot minimizes the risk of inaccuracy and error from NLP, and also integrates with auto-classification and routing.
Customers are increasingly willing to interact with bots in these scenarios, particularly on mobile or tablet devices. A recent Helpshift survey found that 58 percent of consumers have positive feelings toward chatbots, and furthermore, 67 percent of consumers said they would welcome chatbots that significantly reduced the time it took to explain their problem to an agent.
Despite adoption across other industries and this positive public perception, though, customer service has been extremely reluctant to integrate chatbots into support flows, particularly in the form of native in-app chat. SensAI Bots are here to change that by facilitating every part of the customer service journey and seamlessly working with with predictive auto-classification, and real-time analytics.
SensAI Bots: Customer Service Bots That Actually Work
SensAI Bots are foolproof: they don’t go rogue, they don’t rely on half-baked NLP, and most importantly, they simplify instead of over-complicate. These built-in bots ship with five primary functions:
1. Gathering Initial Issue Information
This bot collects information about the type of issue (i.e., identifying whether it is a login question, a shipping issue, a payment problem, etc). This information then prompts either a guided-issue filing bot or AI-powered classification.
2. Allowing User to Select a Category
This bot provides a list of category options in a conversational “one-click” interface. Once the user selects an applicable category, the bot will then hand off the conversation to an agent or knowledge suggestion bot (below).
3. Suggesting Knowledge Articles
This bot uses NLP to suggest relevant knowledge articles to customers — and deflects tickets in the process. If the knowledge article answers the user’s question, the ticket is effortlessly resolved. If the article is not adequate, the bot immediately hands off the issue to an agent to avoid any potential frustration.
4. Requesing Additional User Information
This bot can further empower your agents by collecting information such as name, email, account number and order number to verify accounts and expedite ticket resolution.
5. Collecting Feedback
At the conclusion of an interaction, this bot asks customers to rate their experiences. By offering CSAT collection within the same chat window, there is an increased likelihood of response (as opposed to emailing, or even worse, calling back).
SensAI Bots are built for conversational, native experiences. They guide users from one step to the next, and minimize time that agents spend either answering the same question over and over again, and/or collecting basic information.
Using these bots has immediate, tangible benefits including:
- Faster time to resolution
- Lower ticket volume
- Instant responses
- Unlimited scalability (bots can handle countless conversations simultaneously!)
- Happier customers
These benefits aren’t only on the consumer side, though— bots massively improve the agent experience too. Agents no longer need to waste time asking customers what device they’re on, what their order number is, or gathering any other routine information. Give your agents their time back, and allow them to do what they do best: solve problems.
SensAI also has a custom bot-builder available for businesses that want to develop interactions specific to their use case. The bot-builder is simple and intuitive — meaning that no external contractors, data scientists or developers are necessary. For example, bot flows can be easily created to automatically resolve access issues without ever making it to an agent. That alone can decrease ticket backlog enormously.
Integrate Bots Into an AI-Driven Customer Service Journey
SensAI Bots are seamlessly integrated with the other two SensAI features:
- Predictive auto-classification
- Real-time insights
SensAI Predict auto-classifies issues, and then invokes an action that can either be bot-based or agent-based. Customer service managers can monitor in real-time how both agent and bot-driven interactions are working through SensAI Insights, and track and mitigate emerging issues. Together, these three capabilities create a cohesive and efficient path for customers and agents.
Integrating AI and automation into the customer service journey should be viewed holistically, but implemented incrementally.
Learn more about Helpshift’s AI and Bots
That’s how SensAI tackles gaps in the current customer service journey, ensuring a seamless path to resolution. The next deep dive will outline how SensAI Insights uses AI to give customer service managers an unprecedented view of the entire customer service journey — and actionable insights into emerging brand and product issues to improve business functions as a whole.
