Shopping online is great!
But who should we talk to when there is a problem or just a little confusion? There’s no shopping assistant ready to offer their advice and support. And if something goes wrong there’s nobody you can complain to. There is somebody, actually, but they are invisible and unidentifiable. Phone calls, e-mails, long queues, and background music, just waiting for a service that is often ineffective. Customer service is both a blessing and a curse for any online business: essential for the customers’ satisfaction, but also capable of compromising the customer-business bond forever if not properly managed.
So here are 5 reasons why you should entrust customer service to a virtual assistant:
1- You can automatically manage repetitive operations.
On one side you have the customers, often frustrated by waiting for long periods, and on the other, the operators, forced to answer the usual questions: “Can I return this product?” “When will my order be delivered?” “I haven’t received a refund yet!” “can I change my order?” – questions suitable for automating. How? Entrusting them to a chatbot: an intelligent conversational interface that can be embedded with your eCommerce platform or CRM, capable of answering simple questions but also solving very complex tasks like returning a product, sending an invoice, canceling an order, subscribing to the newsletter and any other operation that can be automated.
2- You have a 24/7 assistant.
A chatbot replies at any hour of the day, any day of the week, without any waiting or delay: the customers are happy because their problems are solved and the Customer Service operators are happy because they can focus on more complex tasks.
3- Higher efficiency, lower expense.
Higher efficiency and simpler procedures, thanks to the reduction of at least 30% of the incoming requests, means saving a noticeable amount of money: according to research done by Business Insider (The Chatbot Explainer, 2016), the potential savings in Customer Service would be more than 23 billion dollars in the United States alone.
4- You can make the customer buy through conversation.
As we said, a bot is a conversational interface, and this means that it doesn’t simply solve problems, but it’s able to improve the customers’ shopping experience by offering them their favourite products or the most tempting promotions, notifying them about the existence of coupons and discounts and alerting them when a product they looked for is available again.
5- Personal shop assistant, lead generation, and marketing automation.
A chatbot can improve a store’s sales and the customer experience in many ways: for example, it can offer products that are similar or complementary to the ones already purchased, memorise the customers’ preferences and offer them a shopping experience that is tailored to their tastes and needs. Or it can follow the incomplete orders and abandoned checkouts, and help the customers thanks to specific triggers related to the problems it has spotted in the different touchpoints through the purchase path: a true shopping support system for the whole customer journey.
There are so many reasons why every online business needs a chatbot that you should ask yourself, “Can I really live without it?“
Let's talk about your project
Together we will find the solution best suited to your business needs.
