/ Automate your webshop's customer service in 6 steps
Alexander Wijninga
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5 min
Customer service is an important but time-consuming process. That is why more and more people choose to automate customer service; that way you have more time left for complex matters and you can focus on a personal service. Simple questions from your webshop visitors are handled easily and you no longer lose unnecessary time to routine tasks. Your customers enjoy a fast customer service 24/7, while only the trickier issues end up with you. Curious already? In this blog you can read everything about automating your webshop's customer service.
Automating the customer service of your webshop brings various benefits with it. You read above that you optimise your availability, but a chatbot also improves your response time directly. Your customers do not have to wait long for an answer, which means you see your customer satisfaction leap forward. Below we have lined up all the benefits for you:
Your webshop is always open, but does that also go for your customer service? By automating your service with a chatbot you make sure your customers are always dealt with, outside office hours too! That way you can not only automate your customer service, but also improve it.
With a chatbot you easily offer your customer service on all your social channels. In no time your digital employee is installed on your channels, and you keep the same tone of voice on every channel. Your customers choose for themselves which channel they prefer to reach you on.
Did you know that a chatbot catches up to 80% of first-line customer contact? This saves your customer service staff a lot of time. On top of that it is a good deal pricier to have your customer contact handled by staff, since they can only hold one conversation at a time. The flooring company Lab21 saves over 60 service hours a month with their chatbot Floor. That is because the chatbot holds as many as a hundred conversations at once.
A chatbot easily requests important information from your customers. Think of email addresses, names or order numbers. This information stays stored, even after your webshop visitor has left the conversation. This way you easily get more information about your customers, which means you can respond better to their needs on a next visit and really work in a customer-centric way.
You automate your webshop's customer service effortlessly thanks to a conversational platform. A conversational platform is an automated customer service solution. With a conversational platform you manage your entire service from one central place. Below you can read how to automate your webshop customer service easily with the help of a conversational platform.
Starting with automation begins with determining your goals. What is the goal of your chatbot? For example: your chatbot supports your customer service by catching up to 85% of first-line customer contact. A chatbot also supports lead generation by replacing complex web forms with interactive conversations.
After you have determined the goal of your chatbot, you start building your chatbot's brain. Do you want to help your customers find the answer to their question faster? In that case, take stock of the customer questions you receive a lot. This tells you which processes, or ‘conversation trees’, you should automate. You then work these questions into your chatbot's conversations. This way you make sure you know which answers to build into your chatbot.
It is also possible to have your chatbot ask return questions of your customer. This lets your chatbot hold extensive conversations with your customers. A chatbot with artificial intelligence also recognises different question variations from your customer, which means you achieve maximum results with minimal input.
Building a chatbot is not reserved for tech wizards. Within a few weeks your own chatbot can already be active on your social media channels. When you use a chatbot platform such as Watermelon you do not need programming knowledge. The customer service software is already there for you. You are only responsible for making your chatbot's ‘knowledge’: the content. These are often existing FAQs or inventories of common customer questions. Building a chatbot does not have to be higher mathematics: your own chatbot is live in no time.
To work as efficiently as possible, you can choose to connect as many tools as possible to your chatbot. By having your chatbot ask return questions, you easily request important data from your customers. Connect your CRM system to your chatbot, which means a 360-degree customer profile is built in no time and you can offer a personal service to your customers. Do you want an email to be sent to the customer on the basis of particular conversations? Then connect your email to your chatbot. After the conversation the customer automatically gets an email with the right information. Work at lightning speed by connecting your systems to your chatbot.
After your chatbot has the right information, you go and test it. By testing your chatbot, you first try it out yourself in a closed environment before your customers use your bot. After testing you put your chatbot live on all your favourite channels.
After your chatbot has been tested and is live, you measure your bot's results. By constantly tracking your statistics, you can be sure you are dealing with your customers optimally. As a Watermelon customer you have access to an extensive statistics overview. This overview is clearly structured, so that you can easily learn more about your customers and respond to it with your customer service team.
When you choose to automate your customer service, your customer service staff no longer have to carry out the routine tasks. The time of simple ‘copy-paste’ work is then over. A chatbot works faster and more efficiently than a service employee by holding several conversations at once. Thanks to Webhooks the chatbot can reach information outside its own system, which means the customer also gets information about their order status, for example, at lightning speed.
Technology can do a lot, but not everything. Customers simply need the personal approach of a human member of staff. When the chatbot cannot work something out for once, it is important that a human member of staff can take over.
When automating your customer service, you naturally want your customer to keep the possibility of speaking to a member of staff. When the chatbot cannot work it out, and the customer gets the feeling of being in a ‘loop’, the customer service agent keeps control. Thanks to Watermelon's hybrid functionality you as a member of staff easily take the conversation over from the chatbot. The chatbot has already requested the necessary information beforehand, which means the customer does not have to repeat themselves.
On top of that it is possible to categorise conversations, so that the conversation comes straight in with the right team. Should a customer have a question about buying a product, this conversation ends up with the sales team, for instance, and the customer can be supplied with useful information straight away. This gives your conversion a boost!
Choosing the right features is of great importance when starting with your own chatbot. A hybrid model and centralising data make sure your chatbot is more than a piece of technology. Would you like to know more about automating your webshop? Then download the free whitepaper ‘How do I integrate my systems with a chatbot?’.
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