Chatbot Customer Experience Strategy

Greg Kihlstrom writes, in the June issue of Forbes, about using Chatbots as part of your customer experience strategy. He states that “8 in 10 companies have already adopted” chatbots as part of their business model (Kihlstrom, 2018). Most businesses are, therefore, recognizing the benefits and potential of Chatbots. While Chatbots and AI are being adopted, they aren’t being utilized to their full potential.

Cielo believes the call center is being left out of the Chatbot strategy; with most enterprises believing chat and chatbots are a digital-only solution. Integrating Chatbots into the Contact Center call queue helps deflect the customers with more routine inquiries – while they are on hold. Thus, reducing abandonment and freeing up the live agent’s time and expertise to answer the more complicated – and profitable inquires.

The key to the success of deploying Chatbots in the Contact Center will be through integration with existing enterprise systems. Cielo creates better, more profitable conversations through integration of a platform designed for today’s communications. A Chatbot that can access and immediately review and resolve customer questions in real-time will surely redefine the customer call center experience.

Kihlstrom also points out that using a Chatbot, in some ways, can be more personal, because, “it doesn’t ask the user to search through a myriad of lists and answers to other irrelevant questions”; that of which, you would undoubtedly find in the classic frequently asked questions (FAQs) sections (Kihlstrom, 2018). Many customer questions tend to be quite similar (hence, the aforementioned FAQs section): What if you could free up this repetitiveness instead of simply trying to streamline it with highly skilled live-agents? What if it was completed in real-time by an integrated Chatbot that could seamlessly access the needed information over many databases and formulate an immediate, real-time response to answer your customer’s problem? You may just find yourself with satisfied and more challenged live-agents; a happily surprised, newly loyal customer; and a Chatbot to empower your business and brand far above your competitors.

Kihlstrom stresses that successful implementation of a chatbot comes with “a consistent method of organizing and updating information” as well as, a good support system and environment in which the chatbot can thrive and offer consistent results (Kihlstrom, 2018). Cielo’s core belief is that integration into a business’s Enterprise Systems is so critical for this successful implementation. Integration gives the Chatbot the ability to work for you and not only solve and complete tasks, but to intelligently communicate with your systems to empower your users. Chatbots are quickly transforming the channels from a place of abandonment and queues to a place of optimized customer relationships and conversations!

Read the full article at Forbes.com here.