AI and Digital Transformation seems to be the buzz words of the moment, but where do you even start using this technology in your contact centre?
Have a Clear Purpose
First, look at your overarching strategy and articulating how you seeing the technology fit into your desired customer experience. Let’s talk about chatbots – for many businesses, the desire to reduce waste is often the primary reason – but how can you do it effectively? If not thought out well, you may well end up with creating unintentional touchpoints for your customers, your agents and ultimately reducing your customer satisfaction.
Here are some tips for implementing a chatbot in your contact centre:
- Identify your use case and why, without a clear purpose you may end up adding additional, unnecessary touchpoints for your customers and hence risk creating dissatisfaction. For example, do you want to use a chatbot to provide self-service options, handle FAQs, collect customer information and triage, or escalate to a human agent? Think about the benefits and challenges of each scenario?
- What does success look like for you? Will you use your bot as a deflection tool or is it a resolution tool? How will you measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your chatbot? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will track and optimize? Some common metrics include customer satisfaction, resolution rate, containment rate, average handle time, and cost per contact.
Get Keyboard Curious!
When comparing what’s out on the market now, don’t be tied to your industry for inspiration – if you work in food, look at fashion too or even airlines and banking. Inspiration is everywhere. See how other chatbots interact with customers, what features and functionalities they offer, and how they integrate with other channels and platforms. Learn from their best practices and find out what you don’t like.
Develop Some Design Principles
What is off the table and how do you want your customers to interact. For example, having a simple principle around not asking your customers unnecessary questions will help keep your desired experience in scope. Think about the tone, style, and whether you want your chatbot to have a persona. How it will greet and guide customers, how it will handle errors and exceptions, and how it will end the conversation. Make sure your chatbot is consistent, clear, and concise.
Who is best in your organisation to bring the voice of the customer and the agent in designing your journeys? By using people from the front line, you will be harnessing some of your most knowledgeable customer experience professionals and helping them cultivate skills for the future. Involve your agents and customers in the chatbot development process, get their feedback and suggestions, and test your chatbot with them before launching it to the public. This will ensure your chatbot meets their needs and expectations, so that they embrace the change into their environment..
Test and Learn
There is so much to say for going small, learning some lessons, make some mistakes and having a plan to fix forward. The MVP is your friend here! Start with a simple and focused chatbot that covers the most common and important use cases, then iterate and improve based on the data and insights you collect. Monitor your chatbot’s performance have people on hand to read through transcripts and journey flows to analyse the customer and agent feedback and identify the gaps and opportunities for enhancement. Be agile and flexible in adapting your chatbot to the changing customer needs and preferences.
Developing a chatbot is not a one and done activity, you need to ensure you have a robust people infrastructure to keep the bot on track. Think about a traditional contact centre and what’s needed to keep agents trained and on track to deliver their best performance? The same stands for your chatbot, they like your agent population; need to be consistently trained and performance managed so don’t underestimate the investment that’s needed to ensure that happens.
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