It was for the fourth time in the day that Martha had written in to confirm exactly when the company would be able to process her claim. He knew they were running short on capacity, and it wouldn’t be soon enough when they would be able to help her out appropriately. But he didn’t quite know how to communicate that to her compassionately, calmly, and reassuringly enough that should keep her running sane through the crisis.
Contact centers of businesses across geographies and time zones are collapsing as a global pandemic is ushering the world into a new order.
The fabric of customer support teams across industries is coming untethered. As the grip of the novel Coronavirus on a briskly reshaping world tightens, and the pendulum of time oscillates further to the unknown, it’s not hard to determine what problems are plaguing the current customer support infrastructure and what would be the right antidote.
1. Anxiety
No one is immune to it. Customer support executives are as human as customers. They falter on quicksand. They cannot be expected to deliver excellence undeviatingly. Putting your customer happiness solely in the precarious hands of such support agents means exposing your brand value to uncalculated risk. A blighting world could precipitate chaos and mark the end of your distinguished customer experience at any time.
You don’t want your business to be caught off-guard. In increasingly uncertain times, when providing consistent customer support is more urgent than ever, intelligent AI-powered automation chatbots serve as virtual agents to provide seamless customer experience, 24/7.
These AI-powered automation chatbots are capable of indefinitely learning from every interaction. They are quick to integrate with your CRM and extract all the data about the customer lifecycle stage, purchase history, past requests, and more, to reference it in real-time and provide personalized chat responses. Armed with logic and emotional intelligence, AI-powered automation chatbots can understand and perceive what the customer exactly wants and know what, when, and how to respond to them to ensure meaningful interaction and sustainable customer happiness.
Per a study of American Express, customers are more likely to buy from a brand with great customer service. They are even willing to pay 17% more for such a seamless experience.
Another report from HubSpot reveals that 93% of customers initiate repeat purchases with a brand with exceptional customer service.
2. Insane Volumes of Requests
A tsunami of customer requests is tearing into live chat boxes of organizations, taking away the last semblance of what you would even mildly term as a ‘conversation.’ Mailboxes are swamped. Call centers, more like madhouses, are turning into epicenters of chaos. Customer request volumes are surging like never before, and businesses are scrambling to attend to each or any of them with an appropriate response.
Teams cannot scale fast enough to keep up with the business. As a result, long wait periods keep eating into the valuable time of the customer. That, in the middle of an accelerating pandemic, when a swift response with correct information is more indispensable than ever!
Inherently scalable AI-powered automation chatbots can handle multitudinous requests through an intelligent collaboration with customer support employees. These AI-powered automation chatbots reduce the manual effort for support representatives by around 80% by shouldering their share of mechanical, mundane tasks like sending repetitive responses all day. The employees, then, with an expanded bandwidth, can instead focus on more rewarding goals of resolving critical customer issues, ensuring customer happiness, and preventing the threat of misinformation.
3. Depleting productivity
High employee attrition and long onboarding times are already severing the operational efficiency of most contact centers. Shared crises, like COVID-19, demand exceptional speed of service, which can be even more challenging when businesses are already crunched on capacity. Hiring temporary employees to cover up in such critical hours makes the business vulnerable to disseminating wrong and inconsistent information to customers and running into compliance issues.
Intelligent AI-powered automation chatbots can empower your support team and your business by helping you skip the threat of attrition or the burden of onboarding. AI-powered automation chatbots keep your business still connected to your customers, while your customer-facing employees may be occupied or not available. Additionally, you are also empowering your customers to self-serve by leveraging a powerful, integrated virtual assistant.
