Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) Replace Call Center Agents?

A robust customer experience (CX) has the potential to either make or break a business. Adopting a proactive approach towards how you observe and engage with your customers is critical, starting even before they become familiar with your brand, and enduring it till they are well-informed about your distinctiveness and actively involved with your products and services. 

Rising Customer Service Expectations
Advancements in technology indicate customer expectations are also on the rise. Be it the delivery process or the real time updates on their orders, customers hate to wait.
According to a recent PwC survey, customers across numerous industries are willing to invest 16% more for better service. The survey also suggests that speed and effectiveness are the foundations of the customer experience with 52% prepared to pay higher rates for efficient processes.
No doubt most businesses are mindful of the fact that they have fused quite a few changes to guarantee speedy delivery and services for their patrons. Nevertheless, the same is not true of the customer experience offered by a majority of companies.
As per the customer service benchmark research the usual email response time for customer service is about 12 hours. Astonishingly 62% of companies do not even bother to retort to customer service emails. Besides those that do, only about 3% send a follow-up email to customers to confirm if they are content with the response or not.
Speed is Important
Customers demand speed, be it for customer service or simple delivery processes. As per the CMO council, fast response rates are imperative to boost your customer service. So, by giving prompt responses, you meet their expectations which is crucial if you wish to stand out in the market.
Regrettably, as customer satisfaction research displays, only 12% of customer service managers are fixated on responding to their customers on time. The number seems depressing but also offers a chance for the brands that listen. By employing techniques to improve cx, brands can grasp a large share of the market and nurture a trustworthy breed of customers to produce their business expressively.
Customer Journey Mapping

Mapping out the customer journey is very important for businesses to enhance their customer experience. Being aware of how your customers can reach you, where your customers are from, what ways they can interact with you can assist you in discovering what will work out and what will not.

Drafting a map of your customers journey is not difficult and does not require any details. A simple outline can give you the needed information to make any immediate amendments.

Essential Parts of a Customer Journey Map

Touchpoints

These refer to the various points of interaction between the business and the customer. They comprise social media interactions, website visits, emails, phone calls, live interaction.

Persona

This is basically an explicit description of the customer segment of focus for a better understanding of the customer's perspective. They include behaviours, demographics, pain points and goals.

Stages

These include awareness, consideration, purchase, usage and loyalty-the key phases a customer goes through.

Emotions and Actions

Outlining the actions the customer takes and the emotions they display are very important to boost your cx. This gives an insight into the mindset of the customers at each stage.

Channels

The numerous channels the customer communicates and interacts with like the website, social media, physical store and mobile app.
What is Live Chat?
With a huge number of contact centres adopting an omnichannel approach, it is no doubt that the customers can have access to various modes of communication like telephone and email service providers. Just recently a new addition has been made namely the ‘live chat’.
Live chat is basically an online channel of communication which facilitates website visitors in interacting with your customer service agents asking questions, seeking help with navigation and gaining valuable insight.
Live chat helps customers easily find answers to queries, which helps them achieve instant gratification and thus another way to improve cx with chat support services.
How to Improve Customer Experience through Live chat?
Customer experience can be enhanced in multiple ways, but the key is to adopt a multidimensional approach. Gartner suggests customer experience initiates more than two thirds of customer loyalty outdoing brand and price collectively. Some of the tips to improve cx through chat support services are as listed below:
Keep it Out There
The icon of live chat should be visible to anyone who browses through your website through his desktop or the phone. Making a person wait to get connected with the customer support representative is likely to lower the likelihoods of delivering a good customer experience.
So, if you are wondering how to manage this, all you need to do is use a computerised message feature which welcomes the user with a customised greeting. These messages can be scripted on the basis of the user’s action and the data you have of them in your records.
When it comes to enhancing customer retention, a customer who happens to be revisiting can be greeted with a message that says, welcome back, nice to have you again etc. Similarly, for customers from another country, they should be welcomed in their native language.
Though a ‘chat now’ icon is imperative, it is still important that you send a timely chat invite to anybody who visits your page in case the icon gets lost in the flood of other information.
CRM Integration
Requesting your customers to log into the chat form and share their contact data is likely to boost your cx. You could initially start chatting on a first name basis then store the information in the CRM. You can collect information and data of each customer as per the platform which will benefit your sales process as well as market research.
This will prove as an added bonus for your business maximising customer experience optimisation and creating lasting bonds between your business and clients. You can also offer the clients with distinct, tailor-made information and deals based on their preferences making them feel special and valued.
Remember it’s a ‘Chat’
When interacting in a chat, you must keep in mind that this is not a transaction, or a formal setting in which you are setting up terms and conditions for a business, it is just a chat. So, your best chat practice is to try and make the conversation as real as possible. You should consider what you would say to a customer face to face while typing in the live chat.
Stay Active
You must know that your customers' time is valuable, so it is best to be quick and active when helping. Real time messaging is essential for troubleshooting, onboarding and nurturing customer relations.
When customers reach out to you, you need to ensure that an agent is there to assist them. It’s also important that you prescribe an average response time on the chat window. When a customer asks a question its essential that you are prepared with the appropriate response that resolves their query.
If you need some time to collect the required information, it is sensible to mention the appropriate waiting time to the customer. This will indicate that you are there to respond to their needs and develop the patience to get the information.
Moreover, in another case if the agent happens to be on a break, then its is suggested that they change the default window settings. This will ensure that the customer gets connected when they are available.
Attention to Detail
Attending your customers' concerns and inquiries is the prerequisite to boost your cx be it a dialogue on the telephone or a live chat. As you get a better understanding of each minute detail of your customer, you get a better idea of how to reach the optimised solution.
You do not have to pay attention to the customer's appearance when writing a statement during the chat. This will only divert you from prudently considering the customers concern and henceforth not let you to deliver the required solution. Always bear in mind that it is not important to offer an instant solution but the requisite solution that could assist in achieving maximum CSAT.
The Final Verdict
Delivering great customer experience through chat support services requires some time and effort. Agent productivity and acquiring of customer data is conducive to providing a good customer experience on a chat support service. If successful, these can aid in transforming your visitors to buyers and thus loyal customers.