A satisfied customer is one that gets a quick, efficient response: this is true in 2018 and will be even more so in the years to come! Considering that three out of four clients will contact customer service at least once a year,¹ offering a relevant online help solution in real time has become a must—and a massive challenge! For your company, the challenge is triple: you must be responsive, available 24/7 and precise in your responses. All of this in order to decrease call volume while increasing customer satisfaction. Is it an impossible equation? Not anymore.
Ensuring the quality and continuity of customer service
Customer dissatisfaction, besides representing an immediate loss in revenue, is also contagious. Dissatisfied customers tend to share their bad experience an average of 10 times with the people around them!²
Mediocre communication with your clients—especially when there are competitors and online reviews everywhere you turn—can pose a significant threat to customer retention and the reputation of your brand. Therefore, it has become essential to offer quality and continuity in customer service, even when users need to reach you outside of business hours.
Reducing the number of calls
Many companies have found a solution to this problem. For example, Caisse d’Épargne “hired” CloE, a smart virtual assistant who has come to support the 35,000 banking consultants in her network. CloE never sleeps, is always alert and responds to the inquiries of users in France and its overseas departments and territories, thousands of miles away, at all hours of the day and night.
Supported by a substantial centralized knowledge base, she not only responds, but also “pushes” the information to the staff, thus avoiding numerous unnecessary calls. The result? Less direct contact, but more satisfaction! That’s the chatbot effect.
At the heart of the customer experience
According to your strategy and your online client relationship needs, your chatbot will be positioned at various critical points in your website. It can effectively intervene at each stage of the customer journey:
- Before the purchase, by welcoming visitors and determining their expectations in order to guide them.
- <During the purchase, by helping visitors log on or by responding to their inquiries regarding, for example, the ordering, delivery or return process.
- And after the purchase, as an ambassador of your post-sales service, to inform visitors of the status of their orders or to suggest additional products and services!
As a result, users exhibit a decreased need to call your customer service department, except in the case of specific problems that the virtual assistant doesn’t know how to handle (yet). Installed at the very heart of the customer journey, a chatbot offers contextualized assistance, like Olivier, for example, the virtual representative on the Suez website.
A personalized client relationship for greater satisfaction
Chatbots will be responding to an increasing number of customer inquiries with maximum responsiveness and quality. Like CloE, they answer 80 percent of the most common questions, providing relief for your live agents by freeing them from tasks with little value added. Like Olivier, they’re becoming the preferred channel for online assistance, effectively establishing themselves all along the digital journey and dialoguing with nearly 40 percent of the site’s visitors!
However, CloE, Olivier and all the other chatbots and virtual assistants aren’t intended to replace client relations teams. They provide an immediate response and preliminary analysis, and then when necessary, can direct those users who need personalized assistance to your agents.
While it’s true that your customers expect immediate responses at all times, what they want more than anything are responses that are adapted to their individual situation. The winning strategy is online service with smart avatars, complemented and backed up by teams of experts who are available to provide assistance!
The key to customer satisfaction is immediacy—a need created by the internet and now considered a must by users. So it’s all the more true that your company must be deeply involved in the digital transformation and the industrialization of its processes. However, you mustn’t forget that immediate response doesn’t necessarily mean effective response. To meet your customers’ needs, you must respond rapidly, of course, but more importantly, in a way that’s relevant. The adoption of a chatbot connected to customer service will enable you to solve this complex problem—a problem that is faced by all companies today. The professionals make no mistake about it: between now and 2022, digital assistants will be capable of managing 70 percent of all interactions.(3)
(1) http://visionarymarketing.fr/blog/2017/06/chatbot-star-de-la-relation-client/
(2) https://www.lesechos.fr/idees-debats/cercle/cercle-169728-la-relation-client-veritable-moteur-de-croissance-et-de-rentabilite-financiere-lorsquelle-est-bien-geree-2084848.php
(3) https://fr.watcheezy.com/comment-les-chatbots-peuvent-reduire-de-30-les-couts-du-service-client-de-votre-entreprise/