Conference at Customer Experience World London - omni-digital customer care and chatbots

Let's review together what as shared during these two roundtables.

Roundtable 1. The new challenges of omni-digital customer care

• Challenge 1.
  Your customers expectations have changed. Companies like Uber, airbnb and Amazon have raised the bar. Your customers now look for convenience, speed and mobile experiences. They use less and less phone and more and more digital channels. You need to identify these channels your customers favor and be available there.
• Challenge 2.
  Identify your customers: there is nothing more frustrating than having to explain your problem and identify yourself over and over again. To reduce your workload as well as increase your customer satisfaction, you need to recognize your customers in the digital world.
• Challenge 3.
  Manage large volumes of traffic. Being available through multiple channels can be complicated and you need to find ways to handle this traffic while respecting your SLAs. You will need to equip yourself with tools to manage your channels and balance your workload.
• Challenge 4.
  Offering a consistent customer experience across channels. When your customer care teams are organized around different tools, you have technological silos and your customers enjoy a different experience based on the channel they use. Studies show that 58% of customers claim to be frustrated by an inconsistent service level across channels. You must find ways to regroup your teams around a single tool to provide a seamless experience.

Rountable 2. Pros and cons of having a chatbot

Do I need a chatbot?

You do not necessarily need a chatbot. There are some bad reasons for adopting a chatbot. If your reason is within this list, you probably shouldn't spend any time on this project: my shareholders suggested it, my competitors have one, I want it to respond to all my customer inquiries at no effort.

What you can expect from a chatbot:

If you select the right bot for your specific business case and set it up correctly, here are the effect you can expect from it:

• Availability increase: your customers could reach you 24/7 and get a quick response to their most basic inquiries
• Workload reduction: your chatbot can handle up to 30% of incoming messages. Simple questions and redundant problems can be easily managed by a machine.
• Information gathering: sooner or later, your chatbot reaches its limits and needs to pass the conversation to a human agent. Along  with the conversation, the chabot can pass contextual information to help the agent respond more efficiently.
• Agent promotion: if your chatbot handles the most redundant and simple questions, your agents can focus on value-added inquiries that require more empathy and thinking, making their job more interesting.

Working with microbots

A microbot is a chatbot with a very clear and limited perimeter around a specific business case. "Do-it-all" chatbots don't usually work and generate additional frustration for customers. Start small: a microbot is the right approach to customer satisfaction.

Prerequisite for chatbots

Sooner or later, your chabot will be overwhelmed and need some human assistance. You have to think about your handover strategy: how to pass the conversation back to a human agent to provide a seamless customer experience.

Julien Rio.