by Leah Westfall, Senior Content Marketing Manager for RingCentral

Chatbots offers contact centers a convenient way to manage customer queries while alleviating the burdens on live agents. Using chatbots effectively calls for advanced planning and an understanding of common customer pain points. Cloud-based communications solutions that include chatbot functionality can streamline the operations of a contact center. 

Is your contact center optimizing its use of chatbots?

If not, you’re leaving a lot on the table. Used effectively, chatbots do a lot more than just serve as communication tools. They can also help contact centers handle a wide range of queries and customer requests while automating some of the more monotonous tasks such as answering frequently asked questions.

Here are seven useful and effective ways to strategically use chatbots in your contact center.

1. Create the appropriate management team

Choose team members who will be most instrumental in the chatbot project. Look for people on your team who have a clear understanding of what makes your customers tick and who can work together effectively on collaborative projects. This team will be tasked with implementing the technology, leading chatbot customer service, and sticking to a specific budget for the technology.

Once your chatbot team is in place, measurable and attainable goals can be set. Everyone involved should know exactly what the expectations are for your chatbot implementation and what needs to be done to achieve them.

2. Establish clear roles for your team

To ensure effective and efficient implementation and use of chatbots for your contact center, you must establish clear roles and responsibilities for your chatbot team, including conversation management, technical issue support, and domain management.

Some additional roles might be copywriter, conversation designer, AI trainer, and analyst.

3. Come up with common customer queries

Brainstorm a set of questions that are common among customers to ensure the chatbots are able to cover a wide array of queries. This can be done by looking at your contact center’s FAQs section or taking a tally of the types of questions customers often ask through more traditional communication channels. This is where updating website FAQ sections and having analytical data readily available can be beneficial.

Chatbots able to answer customer questions can help take a lot of work off the plate of agents who may have their hands full dealing with more complex issues.

4. Offer product selection and education

Effective chatbots work best when they are programmed to provide customers with some education on a product to help in troubleshooting situations. Chatbots can also be used to offer customers the appropriate information based on selection criteria.

To make chatbots more effective, work with a large dataset of customer inquiries. Because chatbots depend on machine learning algorithms, the more data you can feed into the system, the more accurate and effective your chatbots will be.

5. Provide support to reduce call abandon rates

High abandonment rates are bad for contact centers. Customers expect to have their questions answered or problems resolved the first time they make contact. Leading them down a path that does not give them what they’re working for ends in frustration.

Odds are, they’ll hang up, only to call back again. When this happens, they’re likely a little more frustrated than they may have been when they initially called,

Chatbots can offer easy-to-follow guidance and support that may provide an answer or first-call resolution. This way, customers get what they need the first time around, which will reduce abandonment rates.

6. Establish plain, easy-to-understand chatbot language

Agents are trained to use the same terminology their customers use to be more relatable. Customers will be more at ease and feel more comfortable when speaking with someone who understands their questions and frustrations.  They prefer speaking with agents who speak plainly without all the fluff. The same concept applies to chatbots.

It’s important for chatbot scripts to closely match what live agents would say. Contact center managers should keep close tabs on chatbot performance over time and track specific key metrics, including user numbers, customer satisfaction, and recall rates. These metrics can provide valuable data regarding how well pre-written chatbot scripts are performing with customers.

7. Don’t use chatbots for complex communications

Chatbots may be pre-programmed to answer a myriad of questions, but there’s no emotional or human element to these digital tools. While certain queries and issues may be appropriately dealt with via chatbots, others should be directed to live agents to handle.

Customers appreciate quick response times when they reach out to a contact center and chatbots fit the bill in this regard. But customers also want some level of human empathy and understanding, especially if they’re particularly frustrated with an issue they’re trying to handle.

Ultimately, chatbots work best for more routine issues. But when issues are more complicated, any conversations that start out with chatbots should quickly lead to a live agent. The combination of the two can work quite well when implemented correctly.

Chatbots are available for you and they are easy to implement

Chatbots are key to a modern contact center. TeleSiwtch offers cloud-based digital solutions including chatbot technology designed to help simplify and streamline contact center operations. Our partners’ innovative chatbot technology ensures a conversational experience for customers. TeleSwitch offers cloud-based solutions that are designed to help optimize contact center settings. With the right digital tools in place, contact centers can see an improvement in agent efficiency, increase customer satisfaction, and minimize costs.

Connect with our technology consultants to learn more about how TeleSwitch can make your transition to the cloud faster and without hassles. TeleSwitch and RingCentral bring you cloud communications and collaboration solutions that are easy to implement, adopt and maintain while keeping your communications more secure.

TeleSwitch partners with RingCentral, offering unparalleled leading business-grade cloud communication and collaboration solutions that are easy to adopt and simple to use, allowing you to connect and communicate with your employees and clients while having a successful digital transformation of your business.

You can find the original source and some additional information by visiting RingCentral website