Zendesk AI ChatBot - AI-powered support staff
If you have been working in customer support for some time, you might have heard about the increasingly-popular AI ChatBot. Well, that is no coincidence, as this technology has been rapidly evolving in recent years. In this article, we’ll explore how your business can use Chat Bots to improve the customer experience.
Tireless helper
One of the first features I’d like to shine a light on is the always-on support. Every business has a schedule and most of them have dead hours, in which all support staff is away. Well, for all the night-owls looking for speedy support, the ChatBot is always there to greet them with a smile and offer the assistance they need.
This doubles down for holidays and otherwise busy times when the usual channels just won’t do. The bot can be set to constantly run and even greet your site’s visitors and offer to help after they’ve spent a certain amount of time on your site.
Also read: Why using Zendesk chat is important for your business
Self-help guide
It’s no secret that self-help is the most efficient, cost-effective and mutually beneficial type of support. A world in which any client can easily find the answers to any of their questions online is a world in which support is done right.
Well, the first step towards that is a well-built knowledge base website, a place where all the useful information for your clients is stored. However, this won’t do by itself. The clients still need to look through endless categories, articles and paragraphs to find their answer and, sometimes, this option is just less appealing than directly getting in touch with support. Why not just let the agents do the search for me, right?
Wrong! The average time to receive an answer from support will always be higher than the time spent looking for an answer ourselves. Yet, we still prefer to wait. This is where the ChatBot comes in. Since we’ve established that it’s always online, you’ll always be able to ask it a question. But surely it won’t be able to just give us all the answers we need, right?
Wrong again! Using machine learning technology, the ChatBot can be taught how to identify the client’s needs based on a few keywords. That way, whenever you ask about, say, a product feature, the bot can direct you to the article describing that very feature in detail.
Also read: 4 Ways of Scaling Customer Support With Automation
Frontline taskmaster
Impressed so far? Wait until you hear about the next feature! It’s called automatic request handling and it’s going to make your support department’s life a lot easier.
What this feature, or rather set of features, allows us to do is create automated sequences that the bot can take the client through, without any need for human intervention. This is especially useful for the types of requests that generate many support requests.
The limit here is the creativity and resources of your bot flow builder. Yes, that is an actual job, and one that deserves its own article. For now, you can think of it as the designer for the interaction between your bot and the pubic, along with all the functionality behind it.
Also read: How to start with Zendesk Flow Builder
Takeaways
Whether you’re looking to explore new support channels or decrease your support request intake, one thing is clear. Chat Bots are an invaluable tool in the quest towards customer support excellence and keeping up with their development will certainly prove to be a great tactic. We, at ROCA, are excited to see what the future has in store and what new opportunities this tool might bring.