The Growing Importance of Self-Service
In Customer Support
Self-service is generally not a new concept in the world of retail and customer support. In fact, a survey conducted by Zendesk found that 67% of consumers now prefer to resolve their requests or issue without speaking to a company representative.
Many businesses have already sought to deploy methods to deliver on this demand, with a wide range of content and advice available on websites – from FAQ pages to videos. However, the challenge with these solutions is that customers are still required to navigate sites and find the information they need. On larger sites, this can often be time-consuming and frustrating for customers if the answer cannot be easily found, resulting in them still needing to contact support teams. Adding time to resolution points, negatively impacting experiences and increasing the pressure on contact centre teams.
The advancements in AI have meant that Conversational Assistants could offer organisations a solution to broadening their self-service offerings to customers. Conversational AI Assistants can now converse with customers in a much more natural and intuitive way, delivering more engaging and meaningful outcomes – regardless of the time of day or communication channel.
Crucially, the functionality of Conversational Assistants can now be extended far beyond traditional FAQs and many platforms can also support tasks such as checking the status of an order or requesting a refund. This elevates the Conversational Assistant far beyond the traditional transactional chatbots that have been deployed to date
Conversational Assistants can securely gather all the necessary information needed via the natural course of a conversation, integrating with a business’s internal system via APIs or RPA bots to validate, retrieve and update information as and when a customer needs it. Additionally, enabling more personalised experiences through these integrations. This not only significantly improves the customer’s experience by providing them with 24/7 actionability, but also delivers efficiencies to contact centre teams through greater contact deflection. Freeing up teams to focus on more critical tickets and strategic tasks.
It is estimated by Juniper Research that Conversational Assistants could save businesses more than $8 billion per year. These savings are delivered through a combination of the above-mentioned benefits. It is no wonder then, that so many organisations are now looking to implement the technology for their own customer support processes, as well as in other areas of their front office processes such as HR and IT.
If you would like to find out more about Conversational Assistants or the benefits they can enable within a contact centre, follow the below links or get in touch today.