Go Beyond Chatbots: AI at the service of your Customer Service

Talking to the customer service of a brand should feel like talking to a friend. Too often brands do not feel like human entities capable of building two-way communication. Communicating with them feels like being lectured by someone. Companies are made of people and customers who want to communicate with them in a human way.

What customers expect is to have the same human interactions that they normally have in their daily lives—conversational, effortless, real but with brands. If users start communicating in one channel and then decide to shift to another, what they expect is to be able to do so without having to repeat everything all over again. The key to keep your customer satisfied and understood is to maintain: the context of the conversation. 

We understand that achieving this can sound complicated but missing the opportunity to conceive the best customer experience could be very damaging for your business, reports show that around 59% of customers would switch to a competitor after having multiple unpleasant customer service experiences but 17% would do it after only one bad experience. 

Fostering two-way conversations not only encourages loyalty and reduces churn rate but, overall, increases customer satisfaction and a positive feeling towards the company.

Every company has to accept that to be relevant and have a long-lasting relationship with their clients they need to focus on improving their digital customer support and Vivocha with their partners can help you exactly with that.

What about digital customer service?

Digital customer service is the result of the evolution of customer support in the past decade and is the answer to the demands of the digital customer. Such customers use online channels to connect with brands, their content, and the possibility to make purchases using digital channels such as web, mobile, social etc. Digital customers use multiple channels to communicate with brand representatives such as social media, live chat, email and text. What they expect is to have a personalized and seamless experience every step of the way.

There are so many channels that are gaining popularity this digital version of the traditional customer care: Facebook, and their messaging app Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. While traditional channels like phone and email remain popular across all generations, new customers, mainly Millennials and Gen Z, have shown a strong preference for chat and social messaging apps. 

So now what we need to investigate better are the main features of this powerful resource which is social media customer care and the solutions that can help you with that.

Let’s dig deeper into social media customer care!

Social media customer service is the newest and most popular version of customer support available. It implies offering support through social channels, like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and the key to its success is the possibility for customers to communicate with their beloved brands whenever/wherever they are and have questions answered quickly. Over 60% of customers think solving issues rapidly is the most important part of a successful customer support. 

Social media have evolved throughout the years into something more than just marketing and advertising platforms. Today, they’re also valuable channels for consumers to get customer service, especially with the growing prominence of conversational business.

What are the costs of social customer care? If it is structured in the right way, this version of Customer Care has extremely low costs compared to the traditional service (up to  ⅙).

Unfortunately, given the low experience of multiple companies in this field, and the risks related to making a mistake on these channels, there are still a number of companies that don’t invest in this technology. The best way to optimize, not just economical costs, but also human resources and time, is to employ technologically advanced tools, that allow you to automate the process, or part of it.

Knowing that digital customer care, and now social media customer care, is the new normal companies are working to keep up with new trends and expectations but are extremely sensitive about a few challenges that they are facing such as: 

	Dispersal of information: every customer can get in touch with the company using many channels, making almost impossible to create a comprehensive picture of each customer Image source: <a href="https://storyset.com/data">Illustration by Freepik Storyset</a>
	CRM integrations: not all channels can be directly integrated with your CRM, causing management difficulties and making omnichannel a distant dream  Image source: <a href="https://storyset.com/business">Illustration by Freepik Storyset</a>
	Longer response times: customer service operators are directly responsible for identifying all relevant contents across all channels and decide how to manage them, which results in an increase in response times Image source: <a href="https://storyset.com/web">Illustration by Freepik Storyset</a>

What technologies could help you conceive an excellent digital customer service?

Most companies today rely on artificial intelligence, often in the form of a chatbot: tools that allow an instant interaction with the user, simulating a conversation based on structured and pertaining answers. But that’s not always the right and only solution required to solve the problem. Let’s understand how Stip’s AI technology for digital customer care can ensure an absolute advantage not only for end-users but for companies too.

In addition to the linguistic complications and the not “very smart” interactions that characterize almost every chatbot for structural reasons (failure rate estimated around 70%), there is another element to keep in mind: empathy, a unique human feature, hardly replaceable through technology and chatbots don’t possess it.

Stip founders think that the solution to this issue is a: platform able to automate the main activities of Digital Customer Care using its artificial intelligence but without forgetting the importance of interacting with a human agent in order to build and strengthen a long-lasting relationship with your clients. 

Main benefits of STIP? 

This solution allows users to get the answer they were looking for in real-time, without useless steps and avoiding waiting on the phone, being able to always count on communicating with a Customer Service agent, at its complete disposal.

But which are the main advantages for the companies? 

• Improve the performance of their customer service teams by over 300%
• Reducing ticket handling time (problem to solution) by 80% 
• Saving over 67% on customer service related costs

Thanks to the support of artificial intelligence, Customer Service agents will be able to make their workday way more efficient compared to the past, optimizing response time and having access to all the relevant information possessed about the client and about every request but most of all not focusing anymore on non value-added tasks.

Co-edited with:
Alice Felci, CMO of Stip, Content Marketing professional. Passionate about advertising and digital campaigns management.