We know that digital self-service remains a top priority for both customers and brands. Recent Emplifi research found that 75% of consumers find it important for a business to provide them with a fully self-service customer care option.
So, what should brands look for when launching a bot for the first time, or refreshing their bot strategy?
Together with evolving customer needs, bot technology creates many opportunities to engage, connect, support, and delight customers. Voice of Customer (VoC) solutions are one effective way to gather customer intel via surveys, but what else can brands do to gain insight from their customers and create impactful experiences? A comprehensive, dynamic bot is instrumental in this.
Here are a few things to remember when looking at your brand’s bot.
1. Bots should deliver value to multiple teams
When you say “bot” or “chatbots”, customer service typically comes to mind. Rightfully so – the most common type of bot is a customer service chatbot, helping handle more common customer questions and freeing service agents to focus on more complex concerns and provide effective, efficient customer experiences.
However, the right chatbot should be able to grow beyond only customer service. It should also bring the same efficiencies across the organization. So, how can bot technology help other departments beyond customer service?
Let’s consider a couple of examples:
IT teams
A strong bot solution can integrate directly with existing systems and knowledge sources with minimal IT intervention, helping your brand protect data and processes. The best bot solutions can be built once, and deployed on all relevant channels – without a heavy IT lift.
Consumer Relations teams
A chatbot can’t prevent a brand crisis, but it can help you communicate consistently across all channels. In an emergency, you can enter urgent updates or keywords into the central chatbot system to help deflect calls from your contact center. Intelligent escalation triggers can also quickly be revised to ensure that the right agents get the right tickets and that each issue is properly resolved.
The rise of AI chatbots has opened the door for brands to empower not just their customers, but themselves, too. Today, it's now table stakes for bot solutions to give you the flexibility to do both.
2. Bots should deliver timely, tailored messages to customers
Customers today want experiences that are personalized to them. In fact, Accenture reports that 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them.
So, how can brands connect with their customers to deliver these personalized experiences nowadays? Messaging apps, in particular Facebook Messenger, offer a solution.
Consider these findings (Learn more in our guide "Improving experiences across the customer journey using messaging channels"):
Over 66% of consumers feel messaging makes them feel more confident in a brand,
Over 55% of consumers say it helps them feel more personally connected with it.
There are one billion Messenger users globally, so what’s an effective way to get in front of your customers on a familiar app they’re already using?
With Meta’s recent launch of Recurring Notifications, and how it plugs into bot technology, customers can now opt-in to the content they want to receive from their favorite brands. They can also choose how frequently they want to get these notifications. Customers get access to products, events, newsletters, and more, while brands can push valuable content right to people you know want to see it.
Example of how users can manage recurring notifications in the Emplifi platform.
Recurring notifications are also helpful in the world of compliance. With laws set forth through legislation like GDPR and others, brands must handle every customer communication sensitively. With recurring notifications, you know that you’re reaching out compliantly and with content they care about because they’ve subscribed to it.
Building a strong online following is one thing, but engaging with that audience in an impactful way is another. Be sure your bot solution allows you to go beyond canned, impersonal messages to offer tailored experiences.
To learn more about Recurring Notifications and using chatbots to deliver tailored messages with customers, be sure to check out the following interview featuring Lori Spruijt (Strategic Partner Manager, Business Messaging at Meta) and Jay Baer (Marketing and CX Expert) that took place as part of a recent Emplifi event.
3. It should help you harness the power of conversational AI
It’s essential to recognize that a bot is only as good as the knowledge it has access to. Without this knowledge, you risk delivering canned responses that do not engage or support the customer. Plus, manually authoring every possible response for your chatbot will limit the customer experience and value.
To provide a truly personalized, next-level customer experience, your bot must be able to access multiple sources of information and AI-powered natural language processing (NLP) to provide the right content back to the customer. Conversational AI can be particularly helpful in bot technology when trying to build brand loyalty.
By first implementing a multi-use case bot (as outlined in point 1), followed by setting up recurring notifications through Messenger (shown in point 2), customers are now comfortable with using bot technology for many of their brand interactions across their journey. When turning to a bot equipped with strong conversational technology, customers get consistent, reliable responses and are more likely to come back time and time again.
The takeaway
Bots have evolved with time, just as customer expectations have. Implementing a strong bot for your brand is table stakes today, and having the right one in place to change with the times is imperative.
Take full advantage of the art of the possible with bot technology. From resolving customer concerns to pushing relevant content to your fans and followers with recurring notifications, the three items covered in this post are a great foundation for implementing a successful bot.
Learn more about Emplifi’s digital self-service capabilities, or book a demo today to see these features in action – including how Meta’s Recurring Notifications work with our proven AI chatbots.
