Conversational AI, Chatbots and Visual IVR: What Retailers Should Know Before Implementation
Customer support technology has revolutionized the way we support our customers. It allows us to automate communication with shoppers by handing off FAQs to chatbots and self-serve portals. And often, the solutions elevate the customer experience too.
But customer care technology can only deliver these results when it’s implemented correctly.
Let’s look at three rising customer care solutions in the retail and eCommerce space and highlight several roadblocks that businesses face as they get it up and running.
Conversational AI
Conversational AI is a powerful tool that enables bots and voice assistants to respond to customers in a normal and natural way. These algorithms rely on natural language processing, speech recognition, and data analytics and are designed to provide a personalized experience for customers.
Since they can follow the flow of conversation and respond to intent (rather than just keyword queries), conversational AI ensures that customers feel more at home on your site.
Chatbot Technology
Chatbots can answer customer questions, provide resources, and route shoppers to the right customer support representative. As a customer service agent’s best friend, they’re designed to take FAQs and other redundant tasks off your team’s plate, so they can focus on more difficult customer questions and problems.
For retail and eCommerce businesses, this can be a game-changer, as customers are able to get the information they need quickly and agents can respond to live customers faster.
Visual IVR technology is an easy and enjoyable way to help customers find answers to account and order status questions. By tapping into visuals and voice guidance, shoppers can easily navigate around an IVR menu and find the information they need in a few short minutes. And if they make a mistake, they can simply hit the back button to navigate back a step or return to the main menu.
With the right solution, you can also create a branded experience, offer multi-lingual options, and forward calls to your agents (when more challenging issues arise).
Implementation Headaches
While these solutions offer immense value to the customer experience – there are quite a few problems you can run into when getting them implemented, including:
- Limited compatibility with legacy systems (i.e. tools that don’t play nicely)
- Messy migration processes (where data isn’t transferred correctly)
- Slow implementation processes
- Balancing existing software licenses and technology with new ones
- Low user adoption (due to lack of alignment or value)
Unfortunately, these issues don’t typically resolve themselves quickly. In fact, they can lead to massive problems, as data issues render the system unable to support customers effectively, and unpopular solutions can decrease team productivity and maintain low solution adoption.
However, if you want to add conversational AI, chatbots, or visual IVR technology to your customer support suite, there are solutions providers out there that can help. At Radial, we take a hybrid approach to implementation, which means we understand it can be difficult to switch technology.
Whether you want to keep your existing chatbot or switch out all of your customer service software for Radial’s solutions, we can make it happen for you. We’ll also manage your licenses and technology for you, so you can focus on the people that matter most to your company: your customers. Contact us to learn more.
