Email is the most preferred communication channel by consumers today while contacting a service provider. Only 35% of companies manage to send out real-time responses that meet customer expectations, 14% don’t respond to customer emails.
– Source: Forrester Research
Creating great customer experiences has become a top priority for businesses today. Due to the rapid shift in customer behavior, they now prefer going after brands delivering great personalized experiences over products and pricing. No matter how good your product is, if the customer email is sitting in a queue for days waiting for responses, it will backfire, causing higher customer churn.
86% of buyers are willing to pay additional charges for receiving better customer service today. Per the Walker report 2020, CX will surpass price and product as the key brand differentiator.
Email overload and manual triage is central to sending delayed responses to users. Leverage the power of natural language processing and artificial intelligence to initiate prompt, targeted digital interactions with customers. An email automation solution like ERA integrated with advanced technologies such as AI, NLP, and RPA will triage through thousands of incoming emails for classification, route them to respective departments for processing, and auto-respond to each sender in seconds.
In this blog we will discuss the applications of NLP and how it will strengthen your customer experience capabilities with automated email responses.
What is NLP?
NLP is a branch of Artificial Intelligence that bridges the gap between how a person communicates and what a machine understands. Its advanced algorithm enables computers to analyze and understand natural language.
It applies a rule-based approach to search through linguistic terms and derives an interpretation out of it. For example, if it comes across terms like ‘love’, ‘sensitivity’, ‘empathy’, it frames a positive interpretation of the sentence. Its ML-powered statistical techniques train algorithms to comprehend or predict sentiments.
NLP and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) conduct syntactic and semantic analysis to derive meaningful interpretations of complex and varied natural language. Syntactic analysis refers to understanding the grammatical structure of how we speak, and semantic refers to the actual meaning conveyed in what we say.
Deriving structured data out of thousands of siloed data sets has been a significant challenge for organizations. 80% of data available to us is unstructured, be it emails, documents, media, etc. Using the intelligent analysis of NLP’s intelligent analysis, you can convert these siloed data sets into structured data and gain actionable insights to deliver transformative business outcomes.
Integrating AI and NLP opens endless possibilities to enhance your CX efforts. It decodes user emotions by analyzing various tones of comments to help marketers know their target customers better, identify trends, and improvise the customer journey to achieve better results.
How is NLP Augmenting CX with Email Response Automation?
According to Mckinsey’s report, a worker spends 28% of his working hours in a week sorting, reading, and answering emails, which totals to approximately 11 hours. Reducing this manual effort to sort emails will save hours of employees, letting them concentrate on handling complex issues and thus will boost productivity.
NLP comes into the picture here in automated email management as it serves as a personal assistant that extracts the right meaning from each email in seconds without the need of employees reading word-by-word.
It optimizes text classification by decoding the language structure and context. NLP techniques utilize probabilistic methods to minimize the scope of error in classification and auto-response and thus enhance the quality of the Intelligent Email Reply algorithm.
Let’s look at the key benefits of NLP:
1. Email Sorting and Routing
NLP eliminates the manual work by categorizing and sorting received emails into specific ‘buckets’. Another significant application of NLP is email routing that redirects incoming emails into the right departments to speed up the process.
2. Insight Surfacing
It’s impossible to remember each email’s content when your inbox is filled with hundreds of emails everyday. Moreover, manual reading through all the responses and then analyzing to develop valuable business insights will consume plenty of time, hurting your business’s bottom line. NLP and machine learning do the heavy-lifting here as they identify and extract the common patterns to bring out actionable insights from your customer feedback.
3. Contact Data Extraction
Gone are the days when businesses used to invest in manual data entry. With the application of NLP, you can now extract data from emails automatically. NLP efficiently extracts usernames, contact details, email addresses, physical addresses, and additional key information and ensures your database is up-to-date.
4. Intent Determination
NLP has the potential to recognize the underlying user intent. It helps agents to prioritize customers with high buying propensity over the ones with general queries. Analyzing the words determines where the user stands in the buying cycles and thus gives important suggestions.
5. Sentiment Analysis
NLP identifies the underlying emotional tone embedded in an incoming email. It categorizes each keyword and phrase based on different sentiments such as positive, negative, or neutral.
NLP’s complex algorithm maps customer emotions for marketers, providing them the scope to offer personalized support to customers with emotional intelligence.
What Enterprise Bot’s Email Response Automation (ERA) Does?
Companies today are making every possible effort to deliver exceptional customer service, but still, there is a disconnect. It is due to a lack of speed, consistency, and human touch.
Deploying Enterprise Bot’s ERA application will enable you to triage and respond to massive volumes of email at speed with today’s market demands. It not only generates auto-responses, but focuses on providing customers with solutions and personalized messages to ensure their long-term association with your brand.
ERA has the power to take your intelligent email automation to the next level. It utilizes NLP’s advanced text analysis to understand the topic and context and maps critical information. As emails don’t follow the same structure, and often information is provided in attachments, it becomes difficult to interpret. With NLP’s text analyzer, this information can be easily analyzed.
ERA sorts complex or unique queries in no time and immediately forwards it to the right department for taking it to completion.
We feed the application with continuous updates by capturing data from all communications to enhance accuracy and update the changes.
Plenty of NLP applications are out there in the market to augment your customer experience. Before you pick a solution, don’t miss out to check on these critical factors:
- Is the solution equipped to meet your business goals?
- Is it scalable?
- Can it be easily integrated into existing systems?
ERA will Automate your email response with AI, ML, and NLP to reduce operational friction, boost productivity, craft personalized customer experiences, ensure an uptick in CSAT, and raise ROI.
