On a sunny day at the office, I was talking with Misses Smith (not her real name). She was a talented student and she was doing an internship in the field of chatbots in the company. I was the technical reference person for her internship and I was glad of the progress she made. Now she was perfectly able to create a chatbot and to publish it to any channel (webchat, Facebook Messenger, Google Assistant, …) . She came to me for a difficult question nobody could answer …
She created a chatbot for her brother on the subject of MineCraft. She told me her brother was maintaining a community of MineCraft gamers through a blog website. She successfully created, trained and deployed the chatbot on the website but then … nothing happened. The chatbot had many useful responses to common questions, could explain step-by-step procedures to help you out of many situations. After a period of “marketing”, trying to explain to the community the benefits of a chatbot on several places of the website, the few early adopters stopped using it and new joiners did often not even try to.
The chatbot seems perfect but is not used. What could be wrong ? We then started looking at the complete “gamer journey” and we started asking the right questions :
who are the potential users of the chatbot ?
“The gamers are 10-20 years old and are mainly students. Many gamers know each other as they play regularly with the same groups on the server.”
This simple fact tells us already a lot about the fact that we have connected users (not isolated). This “community effect” is of importance.
what is their journey ? when do they come to the website/chatbot ?
“Well, they come to subscribe to the website and create their account. After that they connect to the MineCraft server with their account to play. They can come to the website to read/comment articles with some news about the game or about some contests.”
So you notice that they do not come simultaneously on the website and on the gaming server. Both activities are somehow separated.
how did the questions get answered then (what is the substitution channel) ?
“My brother is always connected on both the server and the website. He has installed a voice plugin to allow the gamers to talk with each other. He is really reactive in helping people for any question.”
OK I suppose you see the point now : why should you leave your game interface and go to the website to have some automated support by a chatbot if you can have the answer right now, right here by just asking on your microphone ? The server administrator is almost always there and if he is not, you are connected to many other players who are likely to know the answer to your question. Both channels (direct support and support by the community) are superior to the chatbot in terms of Customer Effort Score.
We can make two conclusions from this story : First, the chatbot is not the only way to leverage self-service. The support provided by the community is also valuable and should be stimulated to solve a maximum of questions. For the remaining questions, a chatbot is a good way to introduce self-service. To make sure to maximize its impact, first make sure that the different contact possibilities follow a well defined Customer Effort Score strategy. At ClientGenix, we see two ways to achieve this strategy :
Solution number one : decrease the convenience of other channels. While not very popular, some solutions exist to push your customers to use your chatbot by restricting access to the other channels. Just to list a few:
- Use a paid phone number (if the law allows you to do it)
- Hide your phone number on the website
- Request the customers to try the chatbot/the FAQ before to show them your phone number/email adress
- Restrict the opening hours of your customer service
- And the worse solution of all (but applied by some companies) : lower the number of call agents to make sure to have long waiting queues.
Even if those solutions are not popular and cause a degradation of the customer experience, it might be needed to use some of them to free some budget for other more positive initiatives.
Solution number two : increase the convenience of the self-service channels. Here are some ways to start :
- “Always provide a solution”. Do never ask to a customer to change channel himself (“this chatbot cannot help you, please call xxx”)to obtain the solution. If you do so, the customer will be frustrated and he will use the other channel directly next time. The right way to do this is to foresee a human handover inside of the self-service process. It does not have to be complex or expensive. The best solution is to have a human chat operator if the chatbot doesn’t have the answer, but a forward of the question to the Customer Service mailbox can be an acceptable solution, especially out of the office hours. Just make sure to answer them with priority on the next morning.
- Make it a good customer experience from start. You get one chance to make a first impression. Experience shows that dissapointed customers don’t come back to self-service solutions. If you have a limited budget, restrict the number of questions you can answer with a perfect quality and be transparent about it.
- Don’t let technical details damage your customer experience. The disadvantage of the automated customer contact solutions is that there is nobody to see if things went wrong. Be sure you monitor closely what’s happening on your self-service channels, including technical KPI’s like response time, API failure rate, ….
- Bring the self-service capability to the preferred channel of the customer. If some customers prefer to use the phone, just make sure that your chatbot knowledge can be used in a smart IVR system (Interactive Voice Response). Smart IVR’s replace old phone menus (“for technical questions, press one”) by a system capable of speech recognition and intent extraction via Artificial Intelligence. In that way, the speech of the customer is used as an input for a voice version of a chatbot (called voicebot) that can directly provide simple answers, and route the remaining calls appropriately.
