How you can help your frontline employees by using an AI chatbot for customer service
For a global fintech company, a rising number of queries had the customer support staff bogged down with repetitive requests. They were struggling to effectively address customer concerns since support employees were rarely available after business hours. The subsequent delays in replies were corroding brand trust and business.
We integrated a Conversational AI chatbot for customer service into their core systems and this changed everything.
The interactive AI chatbot for customer service, apart from leveraging its advanced Natural Language Processing capabilities to map a request to a correct intent for sending appropriate responses, could fetch open invoices and process payments securely. In cases, it was unable to understand a query, it would hand over the conversation to a support agent to ensure customer satisfaction.
Within 3 months, the intuitive AI chatbot for customer service was able to handle over 20% of all incoming traffic, with a consistently high accuracy level of over 90%. This freed up the customer support employees to invest more time in understanding the customers’ needs rather than answering repetitive FAQs all day. The higher value conversations never failed to demonstrate to the customer the brand’s empathy with them and culminate in a successful relationship.
The importance of frontline, customer-facing employees cannot be understated. As the people who directly engage with customers, they are at the forefront of your business as the face of your brand. Alleviating their strain and empowering them with added tools and intelligence is conducive to the collective success of the enterprise.
Here’s how leveraging AI-driven chatbots for customer service can help your customer support reps:
1. Enable easy access to the right information
Most support agents find customer queries increasingly complex and do not have the right answers owing to a lack of proper training, lack of an updated knowledge base, or difficulties in accessing information in real-time. Many resort to outdated information and tend to make mistakes while trying to resolve issues even when they know that first-call resolution is key to customer satisfaction.
This gap in knowledge and disorganization not only ends up disappointing the customer who’s at the receiving end of such interaction but also the agents themselves. Not being able to meet customer expectations erodes their morale and breeds failure in the long haul.
Smart AI-powered chatbots for customer service mines and store infinite customer data in real-time and can help support reps access customer information immediately when required. They empower them with intelligent insights into the problems and help them successfully solve complex issues with an increasing degree of precision and efficiency. Collaborative intelligence of AI and subsequent faster response times keep them perpetually motivated to take on greater challenges and ensure customer’s success.
2. Increase employee productivity
AI chatbots for customer service are inherently scalable and can emulate human cognition to take on the L1 tasks of the customer support staff. The bots alleviate the burden off support representatives by around 80% by shouldering their share of mechanical and mundane duties like answering repetitive FAQs, creating tickets, fetching invoices, etc.
The employees, then, with an expanded bandwidth, can instead focus on more rewarding goals of resolving critical customer issues and engaging in quality and value-adding conversations to ensure customer delight.
3. Reduce employee stress
It is imperative that you keep your customer-facing employees unencumbered since they are the face of your brand and as such, its prime advocates. However, towering routine requests, mounting query numbers, inefficient workflows, and even certain annoying customers are bound to cause employee burnouts and often, more frequently than expected.
Without the right tools and technology to tackle these issues, the reps can find themselves strained and demotivated to carry on.
A stressed mind impacts their capacity to hear the customer out, empathize with their worry, diagnose their pain points, and resolve their problems. What’s worse, the agents could end up passing on their frustration to the customers themselves. An AI-leveraging chatbot for customer service could keep them from losing it. Agile virtual assistants can single-handedly manage 60–80% of incoming traffic to keep the support reps free for more mindful activities.
An intelligent collaboration could significantly allay the threat of anxiety and stress, paving a way for employee happiness and eventually, customer happiness.
