COVID -19 has affected many sectors including customer service where the customers are not being replied by the customer care to cater to the needs such as travel cancellations, ask for refunds, inquire about bill payment extensions, etc. Lack of proper infrastructure for the customer support team is leaving the company in loss and to revive in this situation is only by the introduction of AI chatbots, live chat, etc.
Customer service is going to be the major beneficiary of chatbots and many customers prefer to connect with a company via live chat than any other means of contact. There are ways in which the customer services can be boosted to support agents working from home and many companies have been successful.
Chatbots can be used to provide 27x7x365 services to the customers as they do not require any break, unlike a human. Using chatbots can free the human agents from a lot of burdens and make them focus on work which requires human intelligence and effort. Chatbots can pass the customer queries to the next available agent until the solution is obtained.
A progressive chatbot called Flo helps the customers in filing claims, viewing payment dates, and also getting quotes for their auto insurance. Even though it deals with serious and formal issues, from the customer perspective it makes a warm and pleasant conversation. The primary benefit of chatbots is instantaneity which means it provides immediate action for the customer queries and processes their messages faster until the customer is satisfied.
World Health Organization (WHO) launched a chatbot on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp to combat the COVID -19 misinformation that was spreading. The chatbots guided the readers based on accurate information on a timely basis. Without too many errors chatbots provided efficient and effective solutions to the readers.
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’ multilingual chatbot offers detailed and expert assistance for basic FAQ-type, routine questions. The chatbot uses Facebook Messenger where users can opt-in to access booking details, check-in notification, flight status, boarding pass, etc. The multilingual chatbot turned out to be successful as the bot is known to respond to over 15,000 social conversations in a week.
Agents can lose their cool and patience when dealing with too many customers and that is where chatbots are coming into the role. Chatbots can deal with any number of the customer as it has no human bias and judgment. After introducing the chatbot, the brand’s volume of Facebook messages jumped by 40 percent reaching 1.7 million messages sent across by over 500,000 people.
Various other chatbots such as Lego’s bot –Ralph, Kik bot of Sephora has also helped the customers to get engaged in a whole new experience and also increased the customer base of the companies in a short period. Chatbots when used in collaboration with the human agents can provide an extraordinary customer experience that delivers them with accurate information and conversations which are more interactive and dynamic.
