Transform User Experience with a Customer Service Chatbot

How many times have you visited a company website, and you’re greeted with a customer service chatbot message that read, “Hey, I’m so glad you’re here! Tell me, what do you need help with?”

That’s it. Sometimes, that’s all it takes for the visitors to stay on the website and improve their experience. Is it too far-fetched? It may seem like it, but in reality, 77% of customers have improved perceptions of a business after chatting with their conversational AI online. 

It’s no secret that a consumer experience makes or breaks a brand. According to Gartner, 81% of companies expect to compete based on customer experience, and this experience is at the core, regardless of what product you’re selling or what industry you’re in. All your strategies are directed towards making the customer experience a memorable one.

One of the prime elements of a good consumer experience is communication. Blogs, case studies, and your on-page content- there is a strategy behind every word on your website that ultimately aims at generating leads after creating a positive experience for the visitor. But how is communication effective if you’re the only one talking? What are you, as a company, doing to involve the consumer to simply just understand what they want? What can you do to make the communication ‘conversational’ rather than ‘informational’?

Customer service chatbots are your answer. The benefits of chatbots for a business are many, but your customer is the real winner here. Why are chatbots their new favourite, and what makes them so special in elevating the consumer’s website experience? Let’s have a look!

Quick responses 

Consumers today demand instant gratification. Think of your business from a consumer’s perspective. Consumers are not aware, nor do they care about your limited resources. They want to be heard, and they want to be responded to instantly. Till now, the top use of chatbots remains to provide quick answers to consumers. 55% of users expect to get an instant response from chatbots, and it is why most businesses are even using chatbots. Chatbots also dramatically reduces the waiting time for the consumer. For Tier 1 inquiries, chatbots are cutting the waiting time from an average of 36 hours to 5.4 minutes!  It reflects that chatbots really ensure the ‘instant’ in instant messaging and provide real-time solutions to customer problems.

The 24/7 benefit

Bots can quickly solve most customer queries, and your brand value shoots up if you have a bot on the website, addressing the customer’s need on a Friday evening. Chatbots on websites communicate with visitors 24/7, drastically saving you costs in hiring full-time employees and catering to the customer during off business hours. Moreover, it’s easier for your customers to get hold of a chatbot than an employee since they’re widely accessible at any point in the day. 

No matter how much successful your business, if you get a chance to optimise your resources, wouldn’t you opt for it? Employees also have their limitations. Apart from working for a limited number of hours, their productivity is also impacted by encountering a rude customer or dealing with repetitive queries. Bots eliminate all such problems, paving the way for a smooth complaint resolution. And how does the customer benefit? With most of their queries solved within minutes, you’ll have a happy customer at the end of the day, one that will return to use your services. 

Personalised conversations 

One of the many limitations people perceive that chatbots have is their lack of personal touch to conversations. Conversations seem robotic and fail to provide personalised experiences. I’ll give you one solid reason why that’s a myth: Rule-based & AI bots are developed by humans. Humans create a pre-determined conversational flow, set the questions, and write the responses. So if conversations turn out to be robotic, it means that the user failed to give it a personality and make the conversation humane. 

Consumers are enjoying the lively chats on customer service bots. Your consumers can know they’re speaking to a bot, but that doesn’t mean they cannot enjoy the experience by getting a friendly vibe. How to achieve that? Ask yourself, “Did I utilise bot features to the fullest? Does my bot deliver a sympathetic tone? Did I add emoticons?.” Automated conversational tools can fulfil all the parameters if we set them right. Consider the following customer service chatbot example:

Although both customer service bots communicate the same thing, it’s rather the way through which you approach your customer. It is up to you to determine how you want to develop the conversational flow. It also majorly depends on your industry to determine which tone is best suited for you. You can add humour in chatbots, make them quirky, and have them mimic human-like conversations, all the while staying true to their identity of being a bot.

Brand personality

Many of the consumers prefer talking to customer service chatbots on websites and also prefer they know that they’re speaking with a bot and not a human. As a result, brands have integrated the best of both worlds while developing chatbots for websites. Your chatbot needs to have your brand value integrated into the form of the chatbot name, or in their conversations, or simply in its outlook. Just give it a thought; what if your brand was a person? What personality would you give it? What would its main goal be? How will it achieve it? You can elevate the consumer experience if the consumer identifies the bot to its brand. 

Consider the following customer service chatbot example: Bank of America has deployed a website customer service bot named ‘Erica’ that speaks with visitors and helps them understand the products and services. The bot has created a unique standing in delivering Bank of America’s core values and catering to customer requests. The bot has now served more than 10 million users since its launch in 2018.

Dominos Pizza has deployed a customer service chatbot on their website named ‘Dom” that helps customers order pizzas on the bot. Dominos has also retained its classic blue in the bot and added its logo to make the bot unique to its representative company.

Embedding your brand personality in your chatbot can also help you develop conversational flows in the future to enhance customer engagement on websites. Adding a brand image to bots helps the consumer connect better with your brand as it works towards building a brand-consumer relationship while also adding to the positive customer experience.

Option for a Live Chat

No matter how effective your customer service bot is, situations will always arise where your customers will need the option to speak to a live agent. My suggestion?- Let them. Even the most advanced customer service chatbot for websites may sometimes not fulfil the requirements of a customer. This is one of the reasons that chatbots’ primary use is handling only simple complaints. What do you do with the ones that are complex? You allow for a seamless human handover in chatbots to keep the customer experience intact. Train your bot to pave the way for an agent to take over rather than training them to solve issues beyond their technical reach. You only integrate automation where you need to. If it fails, your customer will get frustrated, and rightfully so.

So, what if the customer asks for a live agent at 2 AM? On WotNot, you then opt for an automated response that communicates that live agents are not available. Your customer service chatbots can store the query for the agent to look at the next day. This may not solve the problem in real-time, but it can still deliver a smooth solution that doesn’t harm the customer experience or impact it negatively.

Today,  80% of customers believe that a company’s experience is as important as its products and services. Chatbots help companies deal with the pressure of providing an authentic customer experience. But we fail to understand that while deploying chatbots, our goal isn’t to make it exactly human-like but to make it helpful so that it fulfils its purpose of assisting the customers. Strive for a value-based conversation with the consumer, keeping their issues at the forefront rather than showing what your bot can do, and you’ve achieved your goal. 

Building conversations is easy on WotNot’s no-code bot builder. Why not try it out and provide a wholesome consumer experience by integrating chatbots on websites?