Here we take a look at some simple ways you can ensure your customers will love your contact centre’s chatbot, rather than loathe it!
Chatbots have become an essential aspect of many modern contact centres. Chatbots are invaluable to agents at busy times of the day, fielding basic queries from customers, allowing live agents the chance to focus on more complex cases.
However, just because your chatbot is a useful tool does not mean that your customers have been completely won over by it yet. Yes, chatbots offer fast responses, 24/7 use and can deal with multiple queries at once, but a poor experience could leave your customers frustrated. We take a look at some simple ways you can ensure your customers will love your chatbot, rather than loathe it!
Usability
The key purpose of a call centre chatbot is to answer customer queries, so it is crucial that your bot can achieve this simply and easily for your customer. The bot should be able to answer each question in as few steps as possible. The longer it takes to come up with a solution, the more frustrating it can be for customers, who may then turn to a human agent. Usability is essential for forming a positive customer experience, so ensure your bot offers tools such as speech recognition and user-friendly menus to input data, so that it can be accessible for everyone. It should also be easy for a customer to escalate their contact to a human agent if necessary – whether that be requesting a call back or entering a call queue.
Well-developed chatbots should provide a customer with a two-way conversation, utilising natural language to understand questions – no matter how they are phrased by the customer.
Use Your Analytics
The worst thing you can do is set a chatbot running and not check in on it. It is possible that some areas of the chatbot may fall short of the expected customer experience. Your analytics should be able to pick up on where customers are struggling with the functionality of your bot. There may be certain questions where the chatbot is unable to find a relevant answer to a query that should be simple and puts the customer through to a live agent. New information will need to be fed into the chatbot to fix any errors in the responses given by the bot, or to teach it answers to new questions.
Give it a Personality
While you shouldn’t be trying to pass your bot off as a real person, it can be a good idea to give it human-like qualities by introducing a personality and character traits to your chatbot. Adding in small talk or humour to your bot’s chat functions can make the bot more loveable and will establish a better connection with your customers. A chatbot’s character has been found to play a significant part in customer opinions of it, so ensure that the balance between personality and functionality is spot-on.
Listen to Feedback
At the end of a chatbot conversation with a customer, you can request for feedback to be provided regarding the way their query was handled by the bot. This can provide you with invaluable information that will make your customer service experience so much better, as it can ensure the bot is as user-friendly as possible. Customer feedback on the chatbot must be listened to, and the chatbot should be updated accordingly.
If you have any additional suggestions on how to get customers to love your chatbot, then why not leave us a comment below?
