It is not just the mobile in your hand that has changed the way brands and marketers reach out to customers and prospects. Customers themselves are more mobile today and grown under the ubiquitous influence of internet.
Take for example the case of digital natives. They turn to the internet for information, consideration and even purchases. Every stage of the buyer’s journey has gone online today, and this applies to all industries – food, apparel, or even real estate. Brands that feed customer micro-moments always stand out.
Catering to a generation where smartphones have become a lifestyle? Your brand needs the power of conversational AI.
Why do you need conversational AI?
Let’s put it crisply. To serve a customer with an intent, brands need to cater to them in the spur of the moment, i.e., immediate- just like how the search engine serves you thousands of results within seconds.
Your customers are accustomed to getting everything really quick and delivering exceptional brand experiences in the nick of time is more important than ever. From a marketing perspective, feeding customers what they want in the micro-moment is a total gamechanger. Conversational AI lets you do just that.
Some of the most successful brands today have leveraged the power of chat and voice bots. Sinch is witness to numerous such companies that have put customer experience (CX) at the forefront. CX is key because brands want to educate, engage, and convert customers, non-intrusively. Traditionally, this was what marketers, customer care professionals and sales personnel took care of. So why did the switch to chatbots become inevitable?
Well, your marketers are budgeting and banking on more user-generated content that is marketable than going ahead with humungous ad spends. Your support professionals are tackling high volume of customer queries through the day and even a 24/7 support team doesn’t seem enough. Your sales department is juggling between fetching content that will appeal to a prospect and then converting them into business. In short, a bit of automation could help.
With Chatlayer, a no-code, multi-functional SaaS platform from Sinch, businesses around the globe have been able to automate up to 90 per cent of interactions and save thousands of hours spent in answering frequently asked questions.
Businesses should be mindful about the following
Don’t ignore the data
With Conversational AI, businesses get to save close to 30-50 per cent on support spends. Customer satisfaction also pumps up. But that’s not all. An important facet here is the access to your customers. The more your business interacts with customers – the more they know them – the more they understand their preferences. Consequently, your business/and departments will be able to make better decisions.
Chatbots do not discount the power of human intervention
As long as your brand is catering to people, it cannot undermine the importance of the human element. So, even with chatbots, your support team has a crucial role to play. Complex queries, for example, are best answered to the satisfaction of customers by real people. However, what is vital is to be prepared for hundreds of FAQs, product updates and other information on demand that come in at the same time.
Customers can get impatient, unforgiving and may even turn their search to competitors if they are kept waiting for long. So, human-like chatbots that are multilingual, omnichannel and trained to understand language is the best bet for businesses of the future.
Futureproof your business
It is a fact that COVID-19 was a catalyst to conversational AI usage across sectors.
Gartner predicts that it sees a major chunk of businesses adopting conversational AI to bridge the gap between brands and end-users. “By 2022, 70% of customer service interactions will involve emerging technologies such as machine learning (ML) applications and chatbots,” a Gartner study said.
Hence, AI as a frontier to provide connected experiences cannot be discounted. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that industries like telehealth and online food delivery saw an uptick in sales even during the pandemic. One of the reasons being that the most known names within this industry had futureproofed their business.
Going forward, conversational AI coupled with new age technologies have immense potential to keep customer as the focal point. This translates into cost-effectiveness, improved efficiencies, actionable insights, and calculated decisions for your business.