Nearly 9 out of 10 customers will leave a brand after a single bad experience. Conversational AI can be the key to keeping them happy.
Here’s a startling fact: According to Harvard Business Review, bringing in new customers can cost 25 times more than retaining your existing ones. And yet, only 18% of companies are focused on retention. Instead, 44% admit their focus is attracting new customers.
You might be thinking, “Why on Earth are brands not addressing this gigantic elephant in the room?!” — which, by the way, is costing businesses as much as $1.6 trillion dollars, according to an Accenture study.
It may be the fact that only 4% of customers complain about the support they get — and that doesn’t mean everyone else is happy. A Huffington Post study found that only 1 in 26 customers will publicly admit to being dissatisfied. So the complaints a business receives are just the tip of the iceberg.
Where the rubber meets the road is in customer behavior, and here the numbers tell the real story: Almost 9 out of 10 people will switch to a competitor after a bad customer experience.
So what can a company do to satisfy this silent majority? More and more brands are realizing the potential of conversational support.
What exactly is conversational support?
Conversational support is a customer service strategy that goes beyond simply resolving customer queries. Instead, it recognizes that through real-time communication channels that understand context and intent, brands can deliver personalized experiences that make a customer feel heard and understood.
Its benefits include:
- Helping you gather customer data in a frictionless way.
- Letting customers express their needs naturally.
- Faster resolution times through conversational automation.
So how can you apply conversational support to keep your customers satisfied?
The goal is offering your customers support with a personal touch. Here are four ways to do it:
Add a conversational chatbot to your customer service flow.
This isn’t your parents’ chatbot! Today’s Conversational AI-powered chatbots can process natural human language and respond quickly and accurately. This helps reduce support costs, automates huge volumes of support requests, shortens resolution times and lets you handle repetitive low-value queries 24/7 while freeing up resources to focus on complex or high-value interactions.
On top of that, Conversational Al is explainable, giving you full transparency and control over the way the chatbot responds and letting you guide the conversation.
Focus on personalization.
Conversational support thrives on personalization. In fact, 33% of customers who left brands did so specifically because of a lack of personalization. Extracting and saving customer data lets you tailor your support answers and product recommendations and direct the full customer journey.
With a Conversational AI platform like Inbenta’s, you can store customer data and reuse it later to personalize customer interactions. You can even detect customer sentiment to adapt your support strategy to customer needs.
Go omnichannel.
If you want your customer support to be truly conversational, the transition from one channel to another needs to be seamless. Nobody wants to keep repeating their information over and over just because they’ve switched channels — from a contact form, say, to an email, to a chatbot or web page. A great customer experience is channel agnostic.
Provide smooth support escalation.
Let’s say you’ve implemented a conversational support platform, and everything seems to be going great. You have high ticket deflection rates, and 90% of your tickets are automatically resolved. Yet your CSAT score isn’t where you want it to be. Why not?
Studies show that 77% of customers feel the process of reaching a live agent is too long or complex. For some, it’s the most frustrating part of the support experience. Not the way you solve tickets, not the channels you use, but the escalation process.
Make sure only one agent is assigned to a ticket, and that the agent is the most appropriate person to answer the user question. And remember, you can use your chatbot to help your agents support your customers!
