Conversational Customer Service and Automation
While submitting a case and receiving an answer may seem like a simple exchange between the customer and customer service, support requests can take hours or even days before even being reviewed by an agent, much less resolved. When a customer interacts with a live agent, they may be repeatedly put on hold or tossed around to multiple agents, causing further irritation and dissatisfaction.
Conversational customer service, leveraging AI and omnichannel platforms, delivers personalized, seamless support in a single interaction, moving beyond traditional ticket-based service to enhance customer experience (CX). Let’s delve deeper into this topic.
These same service frustrations also occur during customer-to-chatbot interactions. In most cases, traditional chatbots are rule-based, and therefore limited in the types of responses they can give to customers. Due to this restriction, traditional chatbots have rigid conversational flows, lack personalization, and can only interact with customers for so long before passing them to a human agent.
As the world becomes increasingly fast-paced and hyper-digital, the shortcomings of these services are not going to do businesses that use them any favors. Modern customers expect quick resolutions and personalized interactions with a frictionless end-to-end service experience.
In response to these growing demands, many organizations have implemented AI in their customer service. Though the adoption of AI for customer service is becoming more prevalent and necessary, most organizations have not taken full advantage of this technology, failing to meet modern-day consumer demands.
To enhance customer experiences and leapfrog into the future, enterprises should understand and accurately respond to their customers in real-time using conversational automation. In this blog, we’ll explore what conversational service automation is, what it does, and how it redefines customer service for digital businesses.
What is Conversational Service Automation?
Conversational service automation, or CSA, intelligently combines overlapping categories such as data analytics, voice bots, Conversational AI, Conversational Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and user feedback history. This solution personalizes and optimizes both human-to-chatbot interactions as well as direct conversations between service agents and customers.
It functions across all touchpoints, ensuring pleasant and seamless service experiences from start to finish. How does conversational service automation achieve this? The answer lies in its advanced features and capabilities.
Making Digital More Human
As previously stated, traditional chatbots are cold and rigid technologies. They cannot identify or interpret user intent and can only interact with customers using predefined responses. Due to these limitations, traditional chatbots routinely fail to adequately respond to consumer needs and require constant human intervention, causing service agent workload to increase and customer satisfaction levels to decrease.
Rule-based chatbots are also unable to understand the complexities and nuances of natural human language. There are numerous ways to ask the same question, and while it is easier for humans to recognize and respond appropriately, scripted chatbots cannot, resulting in more escalations to live agents and disgruntled customers.
By comparison, conversational customer service is not inhibited by these same limitations. Leveraging unsupervised Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, solutions powered by conversational service automation are able to understand the context, sentiment, and user intent behind a customer’s query in real time, regardless of exactly how the questions are phrased.
In doing so, these solutions can take appropriate automated action to ensure customers receive enhanced personalization and fast resolutions.
Solutions powered by conversational service automation can also anticipate customer needs through conversational and data analytics. While traditional chatbots cannot function or evolve on a standalone basis, conversational service automation solutions autonomously learn from every interaction.
They monitor user history, detect patterns in conversations, and recognize recurring topics to understand and respond to customers in seconds. These advanced capabilities enhance not only human-to-chatbot interactions but also agent-to-customer communications.
By continuously learning in real-time, CSA solutions provide service agents with actionable insights and intelligent recommendations to give customers the answers they need when they need them.
Letting Customers Take the Wheel
The bottom line is that customers today want to be in control of their experiences. Modern consumers expect to engage with customer service on their terms, on the device or channel of their choice with zero delays or disruptions. Conversational service automation achieves this by making it easy for customers to find answers on their own through self-service.
Customers no longer have to worry about being misunderstood by a chatbot or waiting for an agent to respond. By making intelligent virtual agents available to customers 24/7 in their preferred medium of communication, conversational service automation ensures customers are well-equipped with the help they need to get their issues resolved instantly.
Conversational service automation not only eliminates long user wait times but also alleviates heavy workloads for service agents. Traditionally, case triaging and resolution are manual processes.
Human agents spend the bulk of their workday sifting through a massive influx of support requests–adding to burnout and causing them to fall behind on other work–ultimately leading to poor service performance and negative employee experience.
By empowering users to self-serve through conversational service automation, customers can solve their issues independently without interacting with a live agent. Repetitive support cases that once cluttered dashboards are then weeded out, enabling service agents to become more productive in high-priority areas.
Conversational Service Automation is Now
While it is crucial to prioritize efficiency when helping customers resolve their issues, it is no longer enough for businesses to deliver simple service experiences. Due to the effects of COVID-19 and the shift to working from home, organizations must infuse their digital support channels with personalization to provide exceptional service experiences to customers.
That is where conversational service automation comes into play. While this emerging solution ensures fast and accurate resolutions to customers with self-service automation, the memorable, personalized experiences it provides prove more valuable than speedy services.
Now is not the time for underperforming customer service; it is time for organizations to meet and exceed customer demands by providing efficient, consistent, and personalized experiences through conversational service automation.
Aisera offers the most feature-comprehensive self-service automation solution on the market, which blends Conversational AI and Conversational RPA into one SaaS cloud for IT Service Desks and Customer Service.
Leveraging these advanced capabilities, Aisera proactively auto-resolves requests to meet ever-growing employee and customer demands for quick responses, immediate resolution, and personalized interactions across all channels.
With this scalable, easy-to-deploy solution, your organization can improve service team productivity, reduce operating costs, and enhance employee and customer experiences. Book a free AI demo today