Why digital assistants are so valuable in customer dialogues

It fits perfectly into the infrastructure expansion in the area of fibre optics and 5G. It not only changes the customer experience, but also makes every day work easier as a practical application: The digital assistant. An expression of the advancing digitalization.

Especially in challenging times such as the current Corona pandemic (COVID-19), it would be crucial to ensure business processes even with reduced capacities. For this problem we would like to present you our solution approach: Our Valentina, which, similar to Siri, Alexa & co, supports the sales department in handling time-consuming administrative tasks.

In addition, there are further possible applications for a digital assistants: Beginning with customer support, through e-commerce to the use in sales. Because it is not only in the current situation that an automated peak load management is important in order to serve internal and external customers satisfactorily or inform them. The digital assistant can help to answer frequently asked enquiries efficiently and thus creates freedom, which in turn provides your employees more time for additional valuable topics.

For instance, call centre would serve a central contact point for the customer. Nevertheless, customer services are faced with three further challenges in solving customer’s issues: Ensuring accessibility, keeping waiting times to a minimum and imparting knowledge.

Customer service should be as easy and as long as possible to reach. However, ensuring this availability, keeping waiting times short and absorbing peak loads is complex and expensive from an organizational and personnel point of view.

For offering customers a suitable solution, customer service must ensure a certain knowledge span. Call centres usually cover a wide range of topics. However, this knowledge is usually not available in depth, so that the customer has to be referred to a contact person from 2nd or 3rd level support. As a rule, he will then have to explain himself again. In the worst case his problem remains unsolved.

These everyday challenges in customer service are a good way to show where conversational AI can be put to good use. In this case, conversational AI in the form of a chat or voice bot, which acts as a supplement to 1st level support. The digital assistant such a bot represents the customer’s first point of contact in the support process and is connected to all relevant systems.

Advantages of chat bots

Mostly it is recurring inquiries (FAQs) that take the time away from the service staff to deal with more complex questions. As the first point of contact for the customer and through the integration of all relevant systems, the bot is able to intercept repetitive requests and answer them satisfactorily, so that they do not have to be processed by the human agent. As a result, service staff have more time and energy to deal with more complex customer dialogues. At the same time, the customer is helped faster.

If the bot cannot answer a customer inquiry, it forwards the customer to a service employee. Since the bot and the service employee access the same system, the bot automatically provides the agent with all the important information that the customer has already described about his problem.

Increase self-service rate with bots

Where “Net Promoter Score” and “Call Deflection Rate” were the gold standard for evaluating good customer service some time ago, in recent years the self-service rate has become a quality criterion for individual freedom in the customer service of telecommunications providers. FAQ sections are not new and still have a right to exist. But with conversational AI, the dynamic of self-determined problem-solving approach increases. A chatbot, for example, which is connected to all systems relevant to its area of responsibility, can be used much more flexibly. Where with the classical FAQ the unfolding of the answer was the maximum of interaction, with the chatbot real joy arises in this point. In addition, it can not only answer more questions in breadth, but can also provide this information with greater depth.