As artificial intelligence gains a strong presence in the digital marketing space, brands are rushing to realign their marketing campaigns to these new trends. A common phenomenon taking over the online business world is virtual agents or chatbots.
These inventive AI-enabled solutions are progressively proving to be useful in boosting customer service delivery and experience. Learn how you can improve customer satisfaction using digital virtual agents in the article.
What is a Virtual Agent?
A virtual agent is a strong contact center tool using a virtual character in engaging customers and acting as an online customer service representative. This AI-powered tool can provide product and service information, answer questions, or direct customers to live agents.
Engaged clients are loyal, visit regularly, and are more profitable. Not sure how they can boost customer service? Continue reading to know more, but first, let’s look at the benefits of virtual agents below.
- 24/7 Customer Support. These tools allow customers to solve basic and routine services any time of the day and automatically set follow-up calls after the engagement. Improve customer satisfaction and reduce frustrations by leveraging smart voice 24/7 conversational support. Develop a culture of automated routine tasks where service agents are free to attend to more complex issues.
- Improved Self-Service KPIs. Reduce the number of time clients needs to resolve issues and get feedback. Consistently and correctly provide feedbacks to improve key parameters of your contact centers such as average handle time (AHT), first call resolution (FCR), customer satisfaction, and average speed of answer.
- Operational Efficiency Through Conversational Routing. Assess customer intentions and direct them to relevant virtual agents. Doing this will boost service center operational efficiency by effortlessly resolving issues with minimum or no human interactions.
Live agent interactions should be customers’ fallback plan throughout their contact journey. The major benefit of virtual agents is the 24/7 support system where customers are able to get answers to common issues at any time of the day. There is always an answer to their concerns whenever they might think of it.
In case you are having a hard time keeping your customer service and basic selling points efficient, consider the following ways to use virtual agents.
1. Use Virtual Agents to Encourage Customer Self-Service.
Not all customers would love to wait for normal business hours to get help from the contact centers; most of them would prefer getting them conveniently through virtual agent interactions. As noted by the Five9 customer service platform, this type of convenience creates an intelligent rapport with the brand.
Consequently, users can resolve their issues independently without the feeling of being alone in the whole customer service journey.
2. Leverage Virtual Agents to Help Your Staff.
The more you keep your employee happy, the better they’ll treat your visitors, and the faster your brand will receive a reputation as an unmatched customer service provider compared to your competitors. Adequate employee training on how to handle customers will help you reach this goal.
One way of strengthening your staff engagement levels is by providing internal assistance and support. It is evident that your employees cannot be on full-time call support. However, virtual agents can do this without complaining.
Relieving staff of some burden and assisting them in executing problems, they feel encouraged and supported rather than overwhelmed and defeated.
3. Integrated Virtual Agents in the Customers’ Shopping Journey.
Whether you are providing services or selling products, you’ll probably have many customer journeys laid out based on their preferences and buying personas. You can leverage virtual agents to offer assistance and nudges throughout the journey.
For example, a virtual agent can be designed to pop up when a user stays on a page for a certain period of time. Prompting the customer with a question can compel them to start engagement, overcoming the user’s hesitance.
4. Add Virtual Agents Across Multiple Channels.
Having animated chatbots on websites is a common practice for most people. They can be very useful across different communication channels such as slack, proprietary apps, and social media.
Adding them across all the channels, you are using will boost your profit margins and allow you to avoid repetition and optimize your services.
Conclusion
If you have not implemented virtual agents in your customer services, then you need to act fast or risk lagging behind your competitors. The benefits of these solutions are progressively expanding, and so are their potential benefits to your business’s customer service delivery.
