Increase your level of automation with integrations
Alexander Wijninga
| 3 min
Chatbots are now a vital part of any customer service team. Not only did the search volume for “chatbots” drastically increase over the past few years, the number of successful chatbots being used by businesses has also grown. Companies across industries, including window blind maker Luxaflex, the Town of Veenendaal and the Dutch Credit Authority (BKR), are using chatbots for customer service. Improvements to the technology that powers chatbots have made them perform better but also easier to use. Many customer service departments are seeking further optimizations from their chatbot by increasing the level of automation. This article describes how to measure the level of automation and offers strategies on how to increase it!
How do I measure the level of automation?
You’re likely considering a chatbot for your customer service team because the volume of incoming traffic is too high for the team to sustainably bear. You also may be seeking ways to reduce the costs of your customer service team. You might also be looking for a way to increase the availability or reachability of your customer service team. The level of automation is a way to measure the performance of your digital colleague, the chatbot.
The level of automation refers to how much volume the chatbot takes over from customer service employees. We often bring together the ratio of the volume of conversations handled by the chatbot as compared to the volume of conversations handled by a human agent.
Increase the level of automation
You want to automate your customer service as much as possible, thus allowing your customer service employees to focus on more complex cases. One way to increase the level of automation is by further optimising the artificial intelligence of the chatbot. Another strategy to increase customer service automation is to integrate external applications with your chatbot.
You can integrate applications with your chatbot with the help of webhooks. A webhook is also known as an ‘HTTP push’ or a ‘web callback’. A webhook ensures that information can automatically be exchanged between two applications in real time. By building a webhook between your chatbot and an external application, the chatbot can exchange data with that application.
For example, a webhook between your chatbot and your CRM system allows for a data exchange during chatbot conversations. You could integrate your order delivery service and provide order status updates to customers. Integrations via webhooks allow the chatbot to answer more complex questions, without human agents needing to intervene.
Example of an integration
We can imagine that the idea of a webhook between two applications might be a little fuzzy still. Let’s walk through an example. Let’s say you’ve built a webhook to an external application. When a customer starts a chat with a chatbot, here’s what happens next:
The chatbot recognises the customer based on the customer data you’ve chosen;
The chatbot leverages a webhook to send the customer data to the external application;
The external application looks up the customer in the database;
The external application sends these details back to the Watermelon platform
The external application and the chatbot now both have the latest information about the customer that can be used during this and any forthcoming customer service conversations.
Here’s another practical example: a customer connects with your chatbot to inquire about an order status. When the conversation starts, the chatbot asks the customer for the order number. The chatbot sends this request to an external application, that searches for the order status, and gives this information back to the chatbot: “Your order will be delivered tomorrow morning at 11:00 at Havenkade 1, in Amsterdam.”
Let’s say the customer says that the address is actually Havenkade 1A. The chatbot gathers this information and sends it back to the CRM system. This means the chatbot and your CRM system both have the latest real-time data, without a customer service agent needing to manually fill in that pesky ‘A’. .
Want to try integrating apps yourself?
Want to integrate your chatbot with applications in order to improve your chatbot’s level of automation? Dive in to our public API and easily build a webhook! Request a free demo and find out more about Watermelon.
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