Handling frequent customer complaints can be a hassle sometimes. If left unattended, they lead to long negative reviews, impacting your future sales and business reputation.
Chatbots play a vital role in dealing with customer complaints quickly and efficiently. In fact, 69% of consumers prefer to use AI chatbots for speedy communication with a brand.
To ensure your chatbot handles customer complaints effectively, here are some tips you can follow.
5 Ways to Improve Customer Service with Chatbots
Presence Across Multiple Platforms
Today’s customers are no longer satisfied with just one channel to reach out to brands, view products, get information, and make purchases. In fact, an average customer uses at least eight channels to interact with the company.
To meet such ever-changing expectations, it’s imperative to enable customer service across multiple digital channels, such as mobile messaging, web chat, and social media.
However, handling different platforms is almost impossible without some level of automation — especially if you’re a big business. Plus, hiring different individuals for every platform is a troublesome and expensive task and thus, we recommend collaborative hiring.
This is where chatbots come in.
Chatbots help brands handle customer complaints on multiple platforms without any delays. A quick and valuable response might save you from negative reviews.
Start by checking your analytics to find the channels that get the highest traffic for your business. Avoid implementing a chatbot on Instagram if only 5% of your prospects use it to communicate with you.
Next, find the most common customer questions on their preferred channel and program your chatbots to answer those requests. This provides customers with immediate responses to their queries in real-time and saves a lot of time for your support reps — a win-win situation for both.
Remember that different digital channels offer different features to the users. So, make sure your chatbot solves customer queries according to each channel’s experience and coordinates the interactions across all these platforms.
Monitor Activity
A chatbot isn’t something you can build, set, and forget. You will want to know the effectiveness of your chatbot and how your prospects use it.
After all, it’s just not about the implementation; it’s also about updating your chatbot with a knowledge base until you achieve your KPI.
A simple way to monitor KPI through chatbot analytics, which can help you keep an eye on how your customers interact with the bot and how well the chatbot responds to customer complaints. Plus, it can also provide insights into opportunities for business growth and customer retention strategies.
In short, you can find answers to:
- What do users think about your bot?
- Are they happy with the responses they get?
- Is the chatbot successful in having a positive impact on recurring conversations?
- Are the chatbot answers directing the customers towards taking certain actions?
The key metrics you can evaluate are:
- Total number of users who interacted with your chatbot;
- Number of new users;
- Number of active users who engage with your chatbot on a daily or weekly basis;
- The volume of questions your chatbot has answered;
- The average length of interactions between chatbot and customers;
- Number of times your chatbot fails to respond;
- The number of conversations started and successfully completed, and so on.
After tracking these metrics, identify the loopholes and fine-tune your chatbot to improve the communication process. Make sure you optimize your chatbot based on your business goals so that you can provide the best possible solutions to customer queries.
Avoid Narrow AI
While communicating with a chatbot, we often use wrong pronunciation, double meanings, misused phrases, slang, etc. Now imagine the message typed by a super angry customer.
Do you think a chatbot with narrow AI will be able to handle such queries?
While chatbots with narrow AI are commonly used by businesses, they can only handle a limited number of tasks and lack artificial consciousness and the ability to handle unfamiliar situations.
They use rule-based programming to match customer queries with potential answers. If they receive a request beyond their scope, they will be unable to assist and end up replying with a “Sorry, I don’t understand.” message.
Here’s a great example of how a chatbot shouldn’t respond:
If you want to handle different projects effectively and build meaningful customer relationships, contextual chatbots can be your best bet.
Contextual chatbots are programmed to understand and learn from conversations and reply with the same sentiments and behavior according to the users’ intentions.
Plus, they remember previous customer interactions and queries and come up with plausible answers, just like humans.
Suppose a user wants to order food. If he had already given his location and preferences, the contextual chatbot would not ask these questions again. Instead, it will ask for confirmation and place your order immediately.
Sending the right message at the right time to the prospect is what makes these chatbots unique. Who wouldn’t appreciate that whenever a user comes to your website, the chatbot greets them nicely, asks relevant questions about their queries, and, based on that, presents a thoughtful answer?
Here’s a great example by Dominos:
However, designing a contextual chatbot requires complex architecture, time, and strategic planning.
This is where Botsify can help.
It is a no-code chatbot-building platform that allows you to develop your own chatbot according to your business needs. Plus, it comes with personalized support, flexible pricing plans, and hundreds of third-party integrations for your chatbot.
Create Interactive FAQs
Customers often ask about your business. Having an FAQ page on your website allows them to address common concerns about your product or service.
But, instead of having customers browse through your web pages searching for answers, what if you can use a chatbot to bring solutions to them?
A chatbot makes it possible to deliver the right answers to the FAQs to the right person at the right time — in a conversational manner.
First, upload your FAQ content on your website and program it into your chatbot AI interface. Your customers can enter their query in the bot, and it will use the “pull mechanism” to provide them with the best possible answers.
Chatbots use natural language processing (NLP) to recognize language as it’s used in everyday interactions. This makes your customers feel satisfied as they get the answers they’re looking for, improving the overall customer journey.
Your customers appreciate how chatbots provide quick and efficient resolutions to their problems. Plus, your agents will stay focused on more complex tasks instead of answering repetitive questions.
Personalize
Suppose you purchased a laptop from a physical store, but after a few days, you notice that it’s working too slow. So, you walk into the store to complain about it.
The shopkeeper greets you nicely and asks you some questions to improve his services. This allows him to provide you a personalized customer experience that caters to your specific needs.
This is exactly what efficient chatbots can do for your brand.
Today, personalization is the focal point of every business. The more personalized treatment you give to your customers, the more satisfied they’ll be with your services. This will make them feel special, plus will increase their chances of buying.
Just like you train customer service agents to be friendly, program your chatbots to do the same.
Here’s how you can do it:
- Greeting the user by their first name, changing the salutation based on the time of day, or welcoming the repeat users in different styles is a great start to boost personalization in customer service chatbots.
- Use AI-driven chatbots as these can understand natural language and typos. Your customers will feel more comfortable engaging with them in their everyday language.
- Create fun digital downloads with gifs and images. It is a great way to surprise the customers. Plus, they’ll never forget how you made them feel.
The goal here is to show users that they’re not interacting with a robot but instead with a real person. This level of personalization is sure to boost customer satisfaction, which ultimately results in increased conversion rates.
Check out this great example of a bad chatbot greeting:
Instead, this is how you should welcome your customers and engage them in a conversation:
Wrap Up
If you’re looking for ways to spice up your customer support, it’s time to look into chatbots. When implemented correctly, they can ensure your angry customers end up being content with the answers they receive and improve your credibility.
Make sure your chatbot is present on the platforms your customers prefer. Offer them a personalized support experience to make them satisfied. Plus, create and load interactive FAQs in your AI interface for a speedy resolution of customer problems.
Use contextual chatbots instead of bots with narrow AI for meaningful interactions. And don’t forget to monitor your chatbot activity to prevent any bad customer experience from happening.
Remember: Angry customers are a blessing in disguise as they provide you with valuable feedback. This allows you to know the gaps in your support system and make necessary changes in your chatbot to prevent future consequences.
