Customer service automation has become a must-have for enterprises. With automation, you can ensure engaging, conversion-inducing customer engagements that are highly personalized to each of your customer.
There are many ways to optimize automation to work to your company's benefit and make your customers feel welcome and cared for. A few tips on how to apply a more personalized customer service using automation are discussed below.
1. Prioritize "intimacy" in customer interactions
Across all industries, business leaders use artificial intelligence (AI) the most in personalized customer service. Sixty percent of all business owners who participated in a recent survey revealed that this is their favorite department for the AI's deployment. That number will grow to 73% in 2022.
One thing that makes AI and automation so useful for this facet of business is the level of intimacy it offers for your customers. Since chatbots and virtual assistants are made entirely of customer-driven data, they can be uniquely crafted to fit your customers' personalities and preferences.
Entrepreneurs worldwide use AI to achieve greater depth in understanding and customization centered on "predictive engagement."
Predictive engagement enables the system's AI to execute its customer interactions appropriately. Based on the individual's identity, what stage they're at in the sales funnel, the specific product or service they're purchasing, and their unique communication patterns, your AI will devise a strategy to engage with them.
There are two recommended ways that the AI achieves this:
Event: This process lays the foundation on which your AI can interact with customers. It accesses the "source" of data, meaning your consumers and their behavior. The AI will retain this data, and search it for "actionable information" (data it can use to engage customers). Finally, the AI creates and communicates that information to your customer.
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- Note: Once the "event" is over, your AI will assess that action's impact and use that analysis to improve its customer exchanges further. This leads to the second method, "Improve."
Improve: There's always an opportunity to perfect customer service, including in the application of AI. For this reason, this phase requires the continuous monitoring of the engagement quality. The AI measures the following factors to adjust interactions as needed:
- Effectiveness of the communication and engagement.
- Quality and effectiveness of the assets provided to the customer.
- Significance of the interaction's impact on the customer.
This data collection will sculpt your AI precisely to your customer's needs, dramatically improving their experience with your brand and products. Further, since the AI collects all the above data from each individual customer, it will specially craft all interactions to their needs.
So, you'll never have to worry about the chatbot firing at an awkward moment or providing irrelevant information. Every AI-driven communication will be uniquely shaped to your customer and their history and projections.
2. Provide valuable customer recommendations
Most customers love a helping hand when they're shopping. They need to get input from another's perspective, whether that's in the manner of validating their existing opinions or offering a bit of encouragement to get something they want. With automation, you can put together personalized customer service recommendations based on real-time data.
For instance, imagine that your customer wants to purchase clothing. Using Conversational AI, your company's chatbot can communicate to that individual based on their preferences and behaviors so far.
So, if your customer asks the virtual assistant for information on purple dresses, the system can craft a response and unique recommendation based on their behavior and question. Such personalized advice is one of the many core functions of Conversational AI.
One of the best examples of this mechanism at work is on Amazon. Admittedly, the Amazon Assistant doesn't operate quite like chatbots or virtual assistants. Still, this and the "Frequently Bought Together" or "Customers… Also Bought" sections are excellent forms of personalized product recommendations.
These suggestions appear not only in the virtual store but in email marketing campaigns as well. You can take things one step further by incorporating the program into an AI-powered chat.
In fact, unlike the previous example, your customer doesn't have to initiate the interaction to receive buying suggestions. By combining the predictive engagement technique discussed above and the following Conversational AI engagement strategy, your AI can take the initiative in offering advice and answers to your shoppers.
- At the most opportune moment, the virtual assistant greets the customer and asks about what they're shopping for today.
- The customer inputs the name or description of the product or service they're looking for.
- Based on the input, the virtual assistant will search the available databases and mine the data to craft a unique recommendation for your customer.
- Keep in mind that your bot is not limited to providing suggestions alone. For instance, suppose that your customer had a question about how to use a product. Your AI can either provide a brief explanation or link to FAQ pages, in addition to advice on which specific item to buy.
There are a few ways you can put this process in motion. For example, instead of basing the Conversational AI's recommendation capabilities on real-time data, you can integrate a specific engine to determine what products or services customers are encouraged to buy.
This is useful for marketing campaigns that aim to highlight a limited-offer product or draw customers to a staple product unique to the brand.
This application of Conversational AI will streamline the most pertinent personalized customer service inquiries, helping each customer feel personally cared for when they need it most.
3. Improve accessibility to your brand
In this day in age, there's no excuse as to why your brand wouldn't be accessible to everyone interested in what you have to offer. Conversational AI is instrumental in increasing and maintaining accessibility, particularly in the following ways:
- Elimination of entry barriers: You may have differently-abled customers who require assistive technology to navigate online spaces. Conversational AI can drastically improve the ease with which they access your products and services. One example of this advantage in action is described below.
- Text-to-speech dictation: Many chatbots can receive customer queries via voice input in addition to text. Customers who struggle with impaired vision or fine motor control can opt to speak to your chatbot instead and get the recommendation or answer they need with little to no hassle.
- Overcoming language barriers: Natural language processing (NLP) is another hallmark of Conversational AI's value. This mechanism allows the chatbot to take the customer's speech or text and decipher its meaning to develop a contextual response.
- Note: In many cases, the bot will auto-translate the customer's query as well. This has several advantages, primarily because you can make each buyer feel welcome in your company by offering information in their native language and cut costs for hiring multilingual representatives.
Maintaining this level of attention to accessibility is crucial to businesses across all industries, but it is vital to small businesses. Recent estimates show that as much as 71% of customers will abandon a website altogether if it is difficult to use. Without optimizing your AI to meet the needs of all your customers fairly, you could be throwing away endless conversions.
Unfortunately, such an issue would take you quite a while to recognize, regardless of the magnitude of its impact on the customer experience. About 90% of customers stated that they wouldn't bother to take the time to complain about a site's inaccessibility (perhaps because it's a hassle to do so!)
On that note, another tip for a more personalized customer service with Conversational AI is to offer an easy, approachable channel to submit complaints and service requests.
4. Personalize complaint resolutions and service requests
Handling customer complaints is perhaps the most difficult part of customer service. Often, when someone is submitting a complaint about a product or service, it is because they feel that the company did not deliver on the marketed promise. Remember that this essentially means that your business did not hold its end of the deal in the transaction in your customer's eyes.
In these moments, your customer is looking for a fast solution packaged in a compassionate response. Customer service automation can work swiftly to retrieve the necessary data and develop a meaningful, actionable resolution.
Experts assert that the following pillars of B2C (business to customer) communication, particularly in the context of personalized customer service, are non-negotiable when handling complaints:
- Helpful tone and outlook: The virtual assistant is designed to serve and assist your customer as thoroughly and attentively as possible. Its programming and real-time data collection on the shopper's communication preferences will never fail to convey a genuine desire to solve their problem
- Personal attention: Each of your customers wants to know that they are uniquely important to your business. Your conversational AI can accomplish this by clearly demonstrating accountability for the complaint and offering advice to resolve their specific issue.
- Functional product knowledge. Too often, customers engage with representatives who have limited knowledge of a product, which can harm the customer experience. Conversational AI can pull directly from a database and draw from the customer's communication history and preferences to provide a practical answer to an inquiry.
- Customer service experiences that are personalized based on these three pillars can do wonders for conversion and foster customer loyalty. The truth is, no business owner can afford to ignore this advantage of Conversational AI.
Just the fact that 45% of customers will abandon their transactions altogether if they don't get a quick answer to their support inquiry is enough justification for integrating automation as soon as possible. Since 83% of online shoppers require the assistance of a chatbot or virtual assistant while browsing through products and services, the time for a new bot is now.
How Cognigy.AI help personalize customer service
Conversational AI and automation are the key to in-depth personalization and improvement of the customer experience.
By perfecting the intimacy of each interaction, offering personalized recommendations, improving accessibility, and compassionately handling customer complaints, Conversational AI will take your brand to new heights.
With Cognigy's AI-based customer service automation platform, automated phone exchanges, AI assistants, and voice automation, you can grow customer loyalty and amplify conversions as efficiently as possible at lower costs.
