How to deliver excellent customer service with a voicebot?

Customer service is one of the most important functions of every company – its quality determines whether the customer will be interested in using the organization’s services at all. What is good customer service? The most important thing is its high quality, availability and quick resolution of the problem. This is where a voicebot – an automatic and intelligent voice consultant – can help, supporting the work of a customer service hotline. What can it do and what are its advantages? What are the rules for customer service using a voicebot?

How to serve a customer using a voicebot?

Voicebot is an artificial intelligence-based automatic voice assistant, i.e. a machine that talks to the customer just like a customer service consultant and handles matters over the phone (and for 68% of customers the telephone is the favorite contact channel with companies).

It can handle many things, including answering frequently asked questions, changing the form and delivery date of a shipment or confirming its status, booking an appointment with a doctor or beautician, changing the account password, blocking a bank card, making a transfer, and so on. In fact, a voicebot will work well in any company that has a telephone customer service office.

Voicebot in customer service – the most important advantages

Why is it worth hiring a voicebot in your customer service department? What is most important in customer service and how can a voicebot respond to these needs?

It understands people

Thanks to natural language processing, voicebot is able to understand a person regardless of the words in which they ask a question or express a request. Thanks to this, the conversation is very natural and does not require any effort from the human. Example? Let’s say a customer wants to make a transfer. They can say: “I would like to make a transfer”, “I want to transfer money”, “I am interested in making a transfer” and so on – regardless of how the intention is expressed, it will be understood by the voicebot. However, if the customer says something unclear and the voicebot does not fully understand the message, it can ask the customer to repeat the request or question.

Because voicebot – as we have already said – works based on artificial intelligence, it is learning more and more with each conversation. Therefore, each subsequent case it solves expands its knowledge base and allows it to solve future customer problems more efficiently.

Voicebot can handle multiple intentions simultaneously during a one-off conversation and supplement the CRM with new information.

It reacts immediately

90% of customers believe that the speed of customer service is (very) important. Simultaneously research indicates that if they have to wait, 5% hang up immediately, and 28% do not wait longer than 5 minutes. And here comes the great advantage of voicebot – it answers the phone immediately because it can, as a machine, talk with thousands of customers simultaneously (voicebot can process up to 5,000 calls per minute). 

This feature of the voicebot is also important in another situation – let’s assume that the customer service department wants to provide all customers with important information. A voicebot can do this for them – what would take many days (which is often unaffordable) and would be tedious and frustrating, in the case of a voicebot will take several minutes (especially since it calls each customer until successful, at the same time clearing the database of inactive contacts). 

It is always available

You could say that voicebot never sleeps and never takes time off – can work in the customer service office 24 hours a day. This is important because many customers contact the support department after consultants’ working hours – sometimes because that is the only time they are able to settle their matter, and sometimes because the problem is urgent and cannot wait (for example, the bank card was stolen). In this case, voicebot is the perfect solution – especially for smaller companies that cannot afford to maintain 24/7 customer service departments due to costs or have seasonal peaks in customer inquiries (for example in an online store around Christmas).

It gets straight to the point

A voicebot was created to solve customer issues. It’s not a machine for entertainment or talking about the weather, so interacting with it won’t take more time than it should. Voicebot focuses on the customer’s intention and problem, finding the shortest and simplest way to solve it. 

What if a customer calls with a very unusual issue? How do you ensure excellent customer service in such a situation? In the case of more complex problems, the voicebot can directly transfer the customer to a customer service consultant who will further handle the matter. In the vast majority of situations, however, the voicebot solves the customer’s case on its own – we have implemented over 50 different voicebots, and our statistics show that:

• the case resolution rate by voicebot is 80% – based on data from customer projects over a period of 2 years;
• no more than 15% of cases were referred to consultants (based on depersonalized conversation analysis).

It speaks many languages

If a company has customers in multiple countries, organizing effective customer service is a challenge – employing a separate, full-scale customer service office in each of them generates high costs and potential problems related to cultural differences. Therefore, a good solution is to organize a network of customer service departments based on voicebots that will handle standard matters – in this case, the number of customer service employees may be much smaller, and managing customer service standards in different countries will be much easier.

Apifonica’s voicebot speaks over 150 different languages, so it can serve customers just like a local consultant. It is also not a problem to take cultural differences into account – the scenarios on which voicebots work can be adapted to them. For example, in one country a voicebot may use a more formal language, while in another country it may communicate more directly.

It sticks to the standards

Voicebot has been programmed to apply uniform standards and principles of customer service every time. Thanks to this, it always provides everyone with the same, complete information, which makes it easier to organize the work of the customer service department. Moreover, the voicebot communicates in a polite manner and always uses the correct language, which makes conversations with it satisfying and stress-free for customers. The client can also be sure that their case has been successfully resolved, because a voicebot is able to send a confirmation SMS after the conversation.

As we have already mentioned, after the conversation ends, a voicebot also completes the data in the company’s CRM, so customer service agents have one task less to complete. It is worth adding that Apifonica’s voicebot is integrated with over 2,000 services and platforms such as Hubspot, Zoho, Pipedrive, Salesforce and others. We also offer tailor-made integrations with any CRM or IT ecosystem.

How to ensure the quality of customer service with a voicebot?

What should customer service via voicebot look like? We have already said a lot about the advantages of voicebot in customer service, but it is worth adding a few words about how to properly use a voice assistant so that it serves its purpose well.

First of all, you have to create an appropriate scenario for it. Some of Apifonica’s voicebots possess already developed preliminary scenarios for selected standard processes – such as delivery or arranging appointments. However, it is worth personalizing this script, adding the name of the company, the name of the virtual assistant or the tone of communication typical for a given organization.

There are also custom-made voicebots that can handle any other process as part of customer service – here you have complete freedom to create a scenario, so that it best suits the specifics of this process.

You should also set the rules of customer service that will guide the voicebot in its work, for example at what hours and how many times it should call customers back or in what situations it should connect a client with a consultant. Voicebots are very flexible and adapt to the processes and rules of a given organization and quickly learn how to serve customers.

Customer service using a voicebot – benefits for your team

Voicebots will not replace customer service consultants, but they will support their work when it comes to repetitive and standard matters. This will reduce customer service costs, and consultants will be able to focus on more demanding and creative matters, avoiding frustration and fatigue. This, in turn, will translate into less turnover in the customer service team.

If you are interested in the principles of good customer service, check how a voicebot can help optimize serving customers in your company.