[Top 5 Reasons] Have Chatbot In Omnichannel Strategy

The chatbots have gained a lot of popularity in recent times and have become important integrations for an omnichannel strategy. The adoption of chatbots has been immense as can be seen through a recent data released by Gartner; it says that 50% of enterprises will be spending more on chatbots than mobile apps by 2021.

In this article, let us look at the top reasons why a chatbot must be a part of your omnichannel strategy.

A few reasons include a chatbot in omnichannel strategy are:

Conversational user experience expertise requires completely different skills that are necessary to deal with the intricacies of the natural language, proper formulating of messages for getting a set of required answers, handling of miscommunications or errors in dialogue, and a number of others. Artificial Intelligence and natural language understanding enabled conversational chatbots today to deliver customer service with near-human capabilities. The benefits are - One, they can understand and can be trained to engage with customers in a conversational format, unlike the traditional chatbots that only understood prompts and responded in pre-fed phrases. Two, they offer support 24X7 and on off-days or holidays, and three, they give an option to transfer the interaction to a human agent when a customer is not satisfied. The conversational chatbots when integrated with a CRM can deliver personalized services to every customer it can identify.

Integrating the conversational chatbot with Omnichannel ensures that an agent is aware of the interactions with a customer during off-hours or holidays. The integration also ensures that the agent can track if the customer has had related interactions on other channels and provide the customer with accurate support backed by holistic information. Having an omnichannel strategy ensures that agents get access to all the different channels of communication a business uses, on a single screen.

It would not be a very good idea to scatter the expertise throughout the organisation. What this means is to have multiple customer service experts interacting with one customers, or have a different agent engage with the same customer on different channels. This scattering of expertise often creates silos, with different agents giving different solutions for the same problem on different channels. With the silo approach, delivering a uniform business tone and experience also becomes a challenge, for example, a customer interacting with a chatbot for an issue may not get the same response from the chatbot and from the telephony agent or the agent handling the social channels, and this only leads to dissatisfaction for the customer. Integrating chatbot in your omnichannel strategy ensures that when the need comes a single agent can manage a customer across channels.

The customers always expect personalisation along with the proactive notifications in the omnichannel strategy so implemented by the organisation. Now, in this regard, chatbot is one of the most effective ways to have a personalised conversation with the customers. Integrating the chatbot over omnichannel enable friction-less synchronisation of data and events. For instance, if a customer asks the bot for a product and is shared the link to page where the product is available for purchase, becomes and event. With an omnichannel integration, a business can initiate event-based notifications for a customer. For example, if the user got the product page link, they asked for, from the chatbot but did not go through the payment and purchase. The event based notification system will send out notifications over all integrated digital channels that the product is still in the user’s cart, after a defined time has passed. With the integration, the notifications can also be sent after days, or if an offer has arrived on the searched product.

Since many product searches happen using chatbots, having it in your omnichannel strategy only makes more sense.

Time is of the essence when it comes to customer interactions with businesses. Customers today expect businesses to answer their queries promptly and deliver accurate service. When it comes to promptness, chatbots are one of the most effective channels. The quick and accurate response feature of chatbot resonates well with the principal of omnichannel. In an omnichannel strategy, a chatbot has a very strong impact on creating almost instantaneous responses where the services are provided to the customers within a matter of a few seconds. In addition to this, if the chatbot is integrated on an omnichannel platform, it will be able to provide personalised support.

We saved the best for the last! Storing your customers’ data in a single place helps with predictive analysis, allowing you to make more focused and assertive strategic decisions. Moreover, it is a great source of information about your current customers and your potential buyers. Having this information at hand will help you develop very efficient Marketing and Sales initiatives.

Integrating your chatbot over your omnichannel platform, does just that. It synchronizes the data collected by the bot with your omnichannel analytics to give a holistic view of agent performance and customer preferences.

Conclusion

Chatbot and omnichannel are two of the most powerful tools of customer experience delivery that going to gain more importance in the future. Having them integrated today will open up many insights related to the day-to-day function of your customer service department, marketing and product or service development.

We can help you in building a chatbot that is customised for your business from the grounds- up. We can also help you with an omnichannel platform to integrate your distributed channels of communication.