Chatbot development may seem a daunting task to take up, but it isn’t as complicated as it seems. According to Oxford Dictionaries, a chatbot is, A computer program designed to simulate a conversation with human users, especially over the Internet. It is a technological assistant that interacts with people through text messages, a virtual customer support representative that brings entrepreneurs closer to their customers by harnessing and combining the power of websites, applications, and instant messengers. It is a simple yet powerful technology that alleviates the redundant customer support tasks, saves your time and money significantly, improves the overall customer success metrics, and boosts sales and ROI for your business. In this article, we have outlined some tips that will aid you throughout the process of chatbot development.
Study the use cases of your chatbot and plan accordingly:
Flow.ai, a Netherland-based, popular chatbot development firm, allows enterprises to build chatbots without having to actually code the bot. The company consists of a team of designers and developers that claim the bot to be analogous to software like Adobe Photoshop in terms of user experience.
Flow.ai builds bots that help enterprises fulfill customer support-specific purposes. It adapts to customer interactions in real-time leveraging a technique called NLP (Natural Language Processing). By adopting a chatbot like Flow.ai, you can integrate various services into your retail workflow, ascertain the use cases and communication channels, design your customer support flows and add multimedia, train your bot to serve the customers better, determine KPIs and most importantly, evaluate with test subjects.
Implement automation strategically without replacing the human side:
Though chatbots leverage AI to be intelligent enough to make basic judgment calls, it cannot be emotionally intelligent to replace human empathy. Adopting and investing in chatbots can be a clever business move especially when a company is looking to minimize its costs.
However, from the customer satisfaction perspective, things can be completely different. You can still make your bots to give verbal cues such as mhm when conversing with customers to ensure someone’s listening. But they cannot apply empathy and morals to tricky, complex situations. Therefore, when you consider implementing bots for your customer care centers, implement them to enhance the productivity while allowing humans to interact with and foster customer relations. This can be a key differentiator for your brand, ensuring your business doesn’t become a faceless entity.
Have you implemented chatbots for your retail business? If not, what are your views on leveraging it to automate the redundant customer service conversations and tasks? Share it with us using the comments area below.