Chatbot 18: Customer Engagement, Support and Marketing
By Anush Clive Fernandes / In Case Study / November 14, 2017 / 4 Min read
By Anush Clive Fernandes / In Case Study / November 14, 2017 / 4 Min read
This article is the fourth and last part in a series Chatbot 18, called “Chatbots – Customer Engagement, Support and Marketing”.
#1: Our Predictions for the Industry
#2: An Indepth Analysis into Chatbot Language
If this is your first post, I recommend reading the first three before getting into this one.
To understand how and why chatbots are so good at what they do; it helps to understand how the current system fails customers.
For the better part of a century, customer engagement and support has remained largely unchanged;
The channel for this lead generation process has undergone cosmetic changes, from post to phone calls to most recently, BPO’s. But the underlying inefficient principle has remained; companies forcing themselves into the view of their consumers, crowding their airspace and inbox.
This wasteful enterprise requires the presence of this 24/7 human support, which is not only incredibly expensive ($15, PER HOUR for your average BPO), but also volatile; a single bad representative can mean hundreds of disappointed and frustrated customers.
And this is just the company’s point of view, because customers simply hate phone calls. Think about it, when was the last time someone sold you something over a phone call?
Webpages and FAQ’s would seem to be a modern solution, but those often do more harm than good. Most software engineers are convinced FAQ’s are some of the most hated customer support tools. Which makes sense because would you rather chat on your phone or scroll down on a 40 question FAQ page? Webpages aren’t any saving grace either, typical webpages have an average conversion rate of just 3%.
The Economist reports that all of this a larger trend towards text-based services for Marketing and Support, and for good reason.
Research has shown that the average American spends over five hours a day on their phone, with that number being higher for developing countries like China and India. A majority of this time is spent on messaging applications, particularly on what is considered the “Messaging Big 4” (WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, and Viber), so much so that messaging has officially surpassed social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin) in user count. Companies that fail to implement chatbots will go through the same pains as companies that failed to implement social media back in the day.
Facebook has taken notice of this transition and has invested heavily in the market. Facebook introducing bots wasn’t some new, revolutionary tech. However, it was a massive mainstream player making a massive move. But moving away from just raw statistics, Facebook Messenger VP David Marcus also highlighted some specific organizations that have seen a benefit from bots during his presentation. According to Marcus, companies “reported a 60 per cent improvement in customer satisfaction following the deployment of a Messenger customer service bot.”
As the industry grows, more competitors will enter the market, and growth will be exponential. Verloop’s chatbots will soon be almost indistinguishable from their human counterparts, if anything, even better.
To read Verloop CEO Gaurav Singh’s strategy heading into the future, feel read to read this article.
Content and Marketing, Verloop.io
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