Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 298 | Strategy & Business Model | 2

Extractive summaries of and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Week 298 | May 26 – June 1, 2023.

Eight Comms Pros Share Must-Have Features In Customer Service Chatbots

Forbes Councils Member | Forbes Magazine | June 2, 2023

Listen to the Extractive Summary of the Article

Chatbots have been featured on company websites for quite some time now, helping to reduce costs and make customer service teams more productive by providing instantaneous responses to common customer questions around the clock and collecting data. With recent advances in the capabilities of artificial intelligence tools, many more businesses may be considering jumping on the chatbot bandwagon.  Before deciding to integrate a chatbot into a company site for improved customer service the following must-have functionalities are so key to success:

1. Effective Engagement.  For a chatbot to make an impact on consumers, it must communicate using the brand’s voice while acknowledging the consumer’s tone. To achieve success, it takes a combination of both virtual and human interactions to respond faster and intelligently and know what actions you need to take.
2. Seamless CRM Integration. Not only will this allow the chatbot to access and utilize customer data, but you can also enable the bot to transfer the conversation seamlessly to a human agent when needed, providing a smooth and consistent customer experience.
3. Personalized Self-Service Experiences.  This can entail knowing the user’s name, account and order details, as well as personalizing based on engagement channel, saved preferences, member status, location, language and more. 
4. Natural Language Understanding.  NLU is crucial for accurate message interpretation, understanding context and offering relevant responses. Implementing NLU can enhance the customer experience, encourage user engagement, reduce escalations to human agents and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
5. A Path To Reaching A Real Human Being.  It is important to ensure there is a path to reaching a real human being, even though communication may start with an AI bot.
6. The Ability To Track Visitors’ History On The Site.  The ability to identify visitors and track their visit history by page, clicks and downloads; and the ability to engage in real time via a chatbot with NLU would be critical success factors in a custom chatbot.
7. Natural Language Processing.  It is essential to enabling the chatbot to extract the intent behind the customer’s message and provide accurate and relevant responses. NLP enhances the user experience by enabling more interactive and human-like conversations with the chatbot, making it easier and more intuitive for customers to interact with the system. 
8. Clear Lines Of Communication.  We need to ensure that these messages are funneled correctly from day one so that questions reach the right people. There’s nothing more frustrating than asking for help and being directed to the wrong person

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Chatbots have been featured on company websites for quite some time now, helping to reduce costs and make customer service teams more productive by providing instantaneous responses to common customer questions around the clock and collecting data. 
2. With recent advances in the capabilities of artificial intelligence tools, many more businesses may be considering jumping on the chatbot bandwagon.  
3. Before deciding to integrate a chatbot into a company site for improved customer service the following must-have functionalities are so key to success: it must communicate using the brand’s voice while acknowledging the consumer’s tone; ensure seamless integration with your CRM system; personalized self-service experiences; implement natural language understanding; should have the ability to track visitors’ history on the site; ensure natural language processing to enable the chatbot to extract the intent behind the customer’s message; and messages should be funneled correctly.

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Topics:  Business Model, Technology, Marketing