We’ve all jumped on a website and had a little box pop-up, asking if we’d like help or have any questions? Sometimes this can be a bit distracting – in much the same way as a sales assistant approaching us in a store, while we’re just browsing. However, sometimes we do have a question.
Nowadays, we could be talking to an actual human being or we could be conversing with a bot. Having said that, there is a third variation. We could start talking to a bot and end up being moved onto a human, if our question is too complex or we need more information than the bot can cope with or the bot has established what we need help with and has directed us in the appropriate direction.
If you’re looking to add chat to your website, we can support you in adding live chat software which can be embedded on your website. If customer service is top of your agenda and you might look at a custom development customisation for your chat function, tailored to your specific requirements and we’d be ready to work with you to integrate that into your website.
Customer service
Chat can offer customers a simple way of getting an answer to their query without having to pick up the phone. Nowadays, we are used to Googling and generally clicking to find answers to life’s questions and there are actually an increasing number of people who simply don’t want to make a phone call.
Having chat also means that customers can hopefully get an answer quickly – rather than waiting for somebody to respond, perhaps by email, and this can improve customer satisfaction and engagement.
All customers are looking for a personalised user experience and using chat will enable a business to gather information about their visitors, such as their preferences and needs, in real-time. This data can be used to instantly personalise the user experience, offer tailored recommendations and provide targeted marketing messages.
If chat works effectively, then it’s another touch point between you and your potential customer which means it can serve as a valuable tool for lead generation, sales and support. By engaging visitors in conversation, you can guide them through the purchasing process and answer their questions.
Offering chat can give your business valuable insight into your customers’ behaviour and what they are looking for. This data can help you refine your website, improve your offerings and optimise your customer support processes.
Investment and resources
For a business, having a bot which answers your customers’ queries also means your resource costs could potentially be lower. As a business, you might not need to employ as many customer service operatives or you could free up their time to focus on answering more complex customer queries.
The rise and rise of AI for bigger companies in particular could mean a real shift in staff numbers over the next few years. According to a report on the BBC website in May this year (2023), BT is looking to shed up to 55,000 jobs by the end of the decade, mostly in the UK and up to a fifth of those cuts will come in customer services as staff are replaced by technologies including AI.
"Whenever you get new technologies you can get big changes," said chief executive Philip Jansen, although he added that AI would make services faster, better and more seamless, adding that the changes would not mean customers will ‘feel like they are dealing with robots’.
Adding chat to your website is not as simple as pressing a button and waiting for enquiries to be answered and sales to come in. It is a business transformation decision – as you will really need to think about how it’s going to work and what processes you will need to service it.
Maintaining a chat feature requires allocating resources, both in terms of human staff and infrastructure. You need to ensure you have enough support agents available to handle incoming chats.
You also need to invest the time to make your bot work well for you and you can only really do that by helping it to learn from feedback. This could mean asking a similar question different ways. As a business, you need to know which questions your customers will typically be asking. You’ll guess some of those at the outset but you might also be surprised.
Of course, even if your bot is working to the best of its ability, you need resources behind the scenes to deal with that and potentially the increase in enquiries and, hopefully, sales. As business, you’ll need a clear Service Level Agreement (SLA) in terms of the service you are offering through your chat function.
If you choose to offer round-the-clock chat support, what happens if a human needs to jump on and continue that conversation? Will you have support agents on hand 24 hours a day or will you simply add a message to your chat to say that somebody will be back to you within office hours?
Human contact
We’ve all had really exasperating ‘chats’ with friendly bots when they either keep coming back with the same response or simply don’t understand what you want. We tried chatting with one of the national delivery firms online and the bot just kept ignoring our questions and requesting our tracking number.
While many bots can be pretty convincing, most customers don’t want to be led into thinking they are talking with a human, when they’re not. If your customers are dealing with a bot, then be honest and introduce them as a ‘guide bot’.
However authentic your bot might be, they are not human and this can lead to miscommunication and misunderstandings. If a customer is unhappy, then dealing with a repetitive or non-emphatic bot won’t ease the situation. Training can help but nothing replaces the connection with another human being.
Miscommunication can happen even quicker if your customer is speaking in a language which your chat function doesn’t recognise. If you regularly deal with customers outside of English-speaking territories, then factor that into your chat.
Privacy and security
Chat systems involve the exchange of personal and sensitive information. It's crucial to implement appropriate security measures to protect user data and comply with relevant privacy regulations, such as encryption and secure data storage.
Integration
If you are collecting data from your customers via chat, do you have processes in place to deal with it? Some businesses will funnel any potential sales enquiries from their chat into their CRM system, so leads are dealt with efficiently and not missed.
Also, are these conversations being allocated to a customer’s records? If your bot has offered them a particular deal – or they claim on a phone call later that they did – it’s good to have a record of the conversation as ‘evidence’. If your chat is simply out on a limb with no integration, your customer relationship can get messy very quickly.
If you want to find out more about adding chat to your website, do get in touch on tel: 020 3397 3222.