PODCAST | How Chatbots can improve your Customer Engagement

Customer support automation supported by AI driven knowledge management and NLP technologies is definitely making the difference for companies today. Whether for internal or external purpose, the advantages offered from Chatbots are huge regarding customer & product support. Discover more how Chatbots are revolutionizing the customer experience.

Our Business & Decision Expert Podcast strive to answer business questions in the domain of Data & Digital for your company’s digital transformation. For this episode, our experts will discuss on Customer Engagement related to Chatbots. What we will discuss in this podcast episode:

• How will Artificial Intelligence & other new technologies will impact Customer Engagement?
• How can we integrate chatbot into customer support channels?
• A chatbot cannot answer ALL your question but it help you to do some triage and save precious time

Gerrit Denayer, Business & Decision Marketing Director, received around our table three Data experts to answer those questions:

• Carlo Schots, Belgium Sales Director at Business & Decision
• Yves Van den Brande, Regional Tribe Lead Customer Engagement
• Christopher Savio, Product Marketing Manager at LogMeIn

Listen to the full podcast:

Gerrit: I think the the chatbot, and the NLP technology is one of the most practical implementations of AI that currently are in the market, because there’s a lot of talking, obviously, about AI. But the NLP and more specifically, the chatbots, and voice bots, are more active more and more nowadays. And as you say, you know, there’s many people that have some wrong expectations on how these technologies work. And certainly, if we look at the latest adoption curve, that researchers publishing every year, we see that, what is called the enterprise intelligence assistance market, is much more than just a chatbot. And we’ll dive into this question as well.

Today, we are in the stage where we are just abandoning the early adapters, and we go into the early majority. So I think, from a market perspective, that there’s a logical and large opportunity and growth future for for those type of support levels. And maybe it’s good to have Yves for a minute here as well as our Tribe Lead for customer engagement. And we know we are doing a lot of assessments with customers, specifically on the on the customer support level, they now start talking to us to see how can we integrate this into into their support channels.
So if maybe you can shed light on that as well, from your perspective, and then the talks you have with customers?

Yves: Yes indeed, the feedback that we hear from our customers shows that they are all thinking about the future. And most of the time, they’re thinking about “how can I be more proactive towards my customers? And how can I give proactive advice and recommendations and so on.” And at the same time that you realize that being proactive also means freeing up time and getting people employees away from doing very repetitive tasks in the area of customer service. So would that be the greatest challenge for them? That is a topic that indeed comes across many times.

But what we also see is then then they’re thinking about, “okay, how could chatbots solve this, this key business challenge?” How can chatbots solve, on the one hand, taking in a very repetitive tasks from my service teams? And on the one hand, is there a means for engaging with chat bots to become more practice? Chris, what’s what’s your opinion from from Bold 360 point of view on those key business challenges, the repair and solve apps and also the proactiveness?

What I see that Chatbots do well is that they are very good at qualifying questions. By automating some of the tasks and being like the gatekeeper, the AI part will identify the real question, the intent of the question and then make a wise decision to answer it.

Gerrit Denayer

Christopher: I think that and this goes back to what I was saying, when I introduce myself, I think that those are tangible benefits that businesses should expect to receive. But if you just set yourself up and run into this to say, “All I want to do it, we have these 10 things that are overly occupying our support team and we just want to offload all of them”. You don’t sit back and say, “Well, why are these the 10 questions that customers are coming to us with?” or “Why are these the 10 support situations?” Right? And should they all be offloaded to a self service type situation like a like a chatbot? majority? Yes. You know, there’s an opportunity if you look at the underlying needs for some of these questions that are coming through, they could potentially drive with human engagement, some additional cross sell or upsell opportunities, right or to further engender loyalty with the customer rather than just handing it off. So I would 100% agree that if an organization that is underwater, in a sense, from the volume of calls, or the repetitiveness that they have coming in with things should definitely look to offload the right ones and they will see that right. And that’s probably a primary thing that people come to us with is like, “well, I need to drive ROI. By being able to handle our calls coming in, or chats coming in staff more appropriately, or to deflect spikes that they might see in different volumes for seasonality or things like that,”

Carlo: In fact, getting the robot out of the of the humans they can interact more on the human side where they can make difference.

Christopher: Exactly. I mean, humans, the benefit of a support individual, or humans in general, which AI cannot do at this point is that empathetic understanding of a conversation and relationship building situation. Bots are very transactional in nature, and so they have their place, but they’re not going to help to build up in my opinion, greater loyalty or a personal relationship with a brand.

Gerrit: What I see that they do well is they are very good in qualifying questions. And as you say, you know, obviously automating some of the tasks and being like the gatekeeper and say, hey, what type of question is this estimate, what the value is, you know, the the AI part will identify the real question, the intent of the question and then make a wise decision in: ” Should I answer this?” as the bot “Should I get this information out of my, my knowledge system?” Or “should I invoke a transaction or invoking a BPM and business process management flow or robotic Process Automation flow or cognitive flow? “And if that is not the case to get the right qualification questions in to then hand it over to human being, whether it’s because of emotional, whether because it’s content value, I think that’s one of the main cons with the main advantage of having these these robots are these chatbots in place?

Christopher: You brought up a great point there that I think a lot of businesses don’t think about right is that even if the bot can’t solve the situation for you, right, if you’re dipping into other systems, or driving automation from it. A lot of the effort by support teams and time is spent on those triage things right on that collecting of information beforehand, in a support call when 20 to 30% of your time can just be collecting certain data, and all that can be accomplished through some kind of voice or chatbot, prior to it. So you’re handing over this warm opportunity, you’re handing it over to the right person, right, so you can help the smart route. So even if you know they can’t solve the question or problem, you can probably reduce your handle time for a live agent by doing some of that grunt work with the bot beforehand.

Business & Decision Expert is a podcast where we talk about Data, AI & Digital topics. ​We receive every month Data & Digital experts to discuss how Data is revolutionizing our daily lives and we strive to answer business question related to digital transformation.​ We aim to gather a community of Data passionate people around our podcast where everyone can learn something in a relaxed and fun way.
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