Our biggest goal of 2020 was streamlining communication through automation and chatbots. In doing so, we released a completely new suite of chatbots, including Answer Bot for frequently-asked-questions, Guide Bot for routing, and the Chatbot API for custom solutions.
Now, it’s time to make our chatbots even better.
Guide Bot improvements are officially here!
Have you noticed that chatbots can appear to have only a few use cases? We have. A chatbot with only one function is hardly worth spending your entire budget on. Chatbots should be customizable enough to fit your organization, not a cookie-cutter copy of everyone else.
For that reason, we’ve adopted a top-level mindset on what chatbots should accomplish to drive revenue, growth, and retention.
- Reduce time to interaction
- Reduce time to resolution
- Reduce time to revenue
Why now?
A good automation experience helps both the visitor and organization. Executing on business goals doesn’t have to be as granular as, “Route more chats to my sales team”. Rather, business goals tend to be more high-level and tied to revenue-generating activities.
As we learned in our 2021 State of Chat Report, the top measure of success across all industries in Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). CSAT is so powerful because it can be measured across multiple channels and is useful for teams of all sizes.
Companies who can reduce their time to first interaction with customers and solve problems quickly will grow their revenue that much faster.
Reduce time to interaction
Prospects and clients today are more informed than ever before. They’ve done their research and may only reach out with a quick question that they can’t self-find an answer to.
Prospects today also have more options than ever. A quick response to a high-intent prospect can be the difference between gaining their business and never getting their contact information.
The quicker you can reach web traffic, the better. Chat continues to have the fastest response times across channels, including stacked against phone and email support.
SnapEngage chatbots have an average response time of 1 second over hundreds and hundreds of conversations. Trigger a chatbot to fire at just the right time for maximum responses from qualified prospects.
“As we developed a virtual platform this year, SnapEngage proved to be a powerful tool and allowed us to answer live chat questions seamlessly for over 15,000 attendees from countries all over the world.”
Reduce time to resolution
Time to resolution is a customer service and success metric used to measure the time between when a customer interaction (or ticket) is created vs. when the interaction is resolved.
Time is perhaps the most valuable currency. You value it, as do your customers. A customer will be more satisfied with an answer to their question today rather than the same answer three days from now.
Responsiveness and effectiveness is directly correlated to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. A shortened time to resolution can be easily accomplished by deploying task-centric chatbots and automation tools.
Quickly identify the issue and either solve the question during the conversation (either with a chatbot or human), or flow all relevant information into a ticketing system.
New use cases and automation examples to try in 2021
As we’ve mentioned, chatbots are customizable and not exclusive to the list below. However, we highlighted here our newest Guide Bot enhancements to take your automation strategies to the next level.
If you have a specific use case you don’t see or would like to discuss your strategies further, schedule a complimentary chatbot strategy session with us today.
Custom surveys and feedback
Create and execute simple or complex surveys without using human bandwidth. Launch surveys when you want to gather only the information you need. Use survey information to close the feedback loop. Responsiveness to client questions isn’t the only way to drive customer satisfaction.
Survey responses are now more actionable. Reach out to high and low survey responses alike to see a well-rounded look at how your team is performing.
Use case 1: A chat ends with a human (or other bot!) and the visitor is immediately transferred to your very own “Survey Bot”. You choose the questions and length to fit into your CSAT goals.
Use case 2: Create proactive chat rules to fire different surveys for different events, locations, and more.
Use case 3: Start a survey after every purchase. Clients can provide immediate feedback in an interactive way, because no one likes forms.
Offline answering
A chatbot solely used to capture information is becoming obsolete. It’s become a fancy form-fill, which again, no one likes.
The key to using the new Guide Bot for offline answering is customization and configurability.
Communicate that you are offline and give visitors actionable options. You aren’t gathering an email address to spam them, after all.
Use case 1: Give clients the option to submit a ticket, search for help on their own, or leave a message. Whatever options you choose to display, clients know where they stand and what to expect from you.
Use case 2: Configure the Guide Bot to collect exactly what you need to take the quickest action. For instance, collect name, email, and type of problem. Bonus: gather this information in any language!
Use case 3: You’ve asked the client for information, now what? The Guide Bot can use Labels that are based on the responses to help automate your downstream workflows. Labels are easy to view in analytics so you can track what kinds of messages are left most often.
Gather required information
How often do you go into a conversation cold, knowing nothing about the person you’re talking to? It can take awhile to break the ice. Use automation to gather information before a chat even starts.
Sound like a form? It’s much better. While forms are proven to decrease engagement, chatbots can gather information conversationally. Gather name, email, and whatever is important to you before handing the chat over to a live agent.
Today’s smart chatbots can save up to 30% in customer support costs alone. When over 21% of companies plan to use chatbots only to handle off-hours requests, conversational bots are the best way to stand out.
Go further, and gather information specific to your business; for example, product serial number or version history.
%
customer support savings from smart chatbots
%
companies planning to use chatbots for off-hours requests
%
of clients plan to build custom SnapEngage integrations in 2021
Sales qualification and lead capture
Guide Bot has historically been used to ask questions and route visitors accordingly. We’ve added improvements!
There is a new range of question and answer types that give you even more powerful ways to qualify sales inquiries. Of course you can use multiple-choice questions, but now you can ask visitors to provide free-form answers as well.
Use case 1: Ask for an email address and allow the visitor to type it in.
Use case 2: Ask a client to detail their exact question rather than select from a pre-made list.
Use case 3: Allow prospects to include days and times they are available for a call.
Deliver this information directly to your team to build powerful, automated workflows.
We’re excited about these updates and opportunities it brings to our customer base. Stay tuned for more updates in 2021, we’re only getting started!