Chatbots in customer service are a growing trend since 2020, as companies contend with the challenges of keeping customer satisfaction high with tighter teams. Despite some chatbot benefits to customers, many customers find chatbot customer service to be lacking. If you’ve ever spent time interacting with a virtual assistant like Alexa or Siri, you can probably relate:
“Hey Siri, call John.”
“Sure thing! Playing John Denver.”
While artificial intelligence and machine learning have made incredible strides over the past few years, they’re still not quite human. They can work well for simple queries that are plainly stated, but—as anyone who has ever worked in customer service knows—customers often have complex problems and struggle to communicate with them.
That human touch can make or break your business, and in this uncertain economic climate, customer expectations are higher than ever.
Customers want clear communication from chatbots
Let’s start with some good news: excellent customer service can solidify brand loyalty and ensure repeat business. In a recent survey of 2,000 shoppers by Verint, 88% of respondents said that excellent customer service would encourage them to make a repeat purchase and 82% said that excellent customer service would make them likely to recommend your brand to friends and family.
The flip side: 62% said they would be unlikely to make a repeat purchase if their customer service issues weren’t resolved in a single attempt.
80% of consumers are frustrated with chatbot customer service, according to recent research by UJET. Other findings from UJET’s research:
- Chatbots failed for 78% of consumers, who were forced to then connect with a human.
- 63% of respondents said that their interaction with a chatbot did not solve their issue.
- 72% felt that chatbot customer service was a waste of time.
- 73% said that brands could significantly improve their customer experience by ensuring problems are resolved on the first contact.
At TextExpander, we know that chatbot customer service can bring many benefits, so we want to help you understand how to use them to their full potential—and how to make your human reps more effective while still applying the personal touch.
Many businesses deploy chatbots in customer service to save costs on personnel but are they really saving your business money if the majority of your customers’ needs go unresolved?
An alternative to chatbot customer service
What if you could give your human reps the power and efficiency of a chatbot? TextExpander makes it possible by supercharging your team’s responses. Our small TextExpander support team uses it to provide legendary customer support.
Don’t just take our word for it. The 73-person support team at WooThemes saved 693 work hours over the course of three months thanks to TextExpander. That adds up to over 86 8-hour work days.
How can TextExpander accelerate your customer support team? Let’s say one of your reps gets this inquiry from a customer:
“Hi, the tracker said the package arrived but it wasn’t on my door when I got home. I checked my ring cam and my neighbor picked it up, but she says she doesn’t know what I’m talking about! what do I do?”
Unfortunately, packages are lost every day, which is why your TextExpander administrator created a Snippet to easily handle that response. Try it for yourself!
This handles 99% of your lost package responses, but it doesn’t quite fit in this unfortunate situation. The beauty of TextExpander is that you can edit the text after expanding the Snippet to something like this:
Oh no, a porch pirate! Contact the authorities if you wish, but please don’t feud with your neighbor on our account. We will overnight you another one at no additional cost. We’ll add a signature requirement to ensure its safe arrival. If your neighbor fesses up, please let us know, but don’t worry about sending the extra one back.
Needless to say, you’re a fun and customer-first brand.
You can also take advantage of Fill-in and Optional fields to create customizable customer responses. Our support team uses these at TextExpander to automate workflows while retaining that human touch. Below is a screenshot demonstrating one of our support team’s more-complex Snippets for handling a common customer concern.
Here’s a video demonstrating how Fill-ins work:
Not able to play the video? Click here to watch the video
With this Snippet, we can select and deselect the paragraphs that apply to the customer, and we have Fill-in fields for potentially problematic applications that could be causing the problem. With a Snippet like this, you can automate and standardize your team’s responses so they spend less time typing and more time helping customers.
If you decide to deploy a chatbot program later, you can then program it with these standardized and field-testing responses. And then even if your customer has to escalate beyond the bot, your human reps can quickly help your customer.
Try TextExpander yourself with a 30-day free trial and discover what TextExpander can do for you and your team. When you’re ready, contact our sales team to supercharge your support team. With team-based pricing starting as low as $8.33 per user per month, you’ll find TextExpander much more cost-effective than most chatbots.
