Chatbot Lessons for Retailers: Maintaining Excellent CX Year-Round

It happens every year. In November and December, consumers who are overjoyed with the holidays spend more than they had planned. In fact, on Black Friday 2022, consumers spent a record $9.12 billion online. This excitement continues into January, as gift cards get spent and returns are made. Then, reality strikes as the post-holiday spending slump begins and retailers struggle to get rid of excess inventory.

Therefore, it's crucial to make sure that even during the busiest days of the year, nothing compromises the simplicity, security and ease of buying on your e-commerce site; otherwise, your customers will go to a competitor. More and more organizations are deploying chatbots to help improve customer engagement and have proactive customer interactions. A recent survey shows that 53 percent of organizations were expected to deploy chatbots in 2022 alone. But can chatbots save the day?

The answer is yes — but only if bots are helpful and operating as intended. Otherwise, chatbots can have the opposite effect. In fact, 35 percent of customers would avoid chatbots altogether after one negative experience. Chatbots can be plagued with problems if they aren’t properly tested and deployed. They can make things worse by misinterpreting the customer’s intent, delaying or interfering with handoffs to live agents, or presenting undetected security vulnerabilities, which will negatively impact the customer experience (CX) and your brand. Below are two ways retailers can assure customers have positive chatbot experiences.

Chatbots Must Understand Customer Intent to Be Most Helpful

Chatbots should be programmed to recognize the desired action based on what each customer is asking it. Otherwise, your chatbots will only increase customer frustration rather than reduce it. For that reason, chatbots require training that provides data on how to interpret consumer intent. Due to the variety of ways that people express their intent, it takes a lot of data to reflect the wide range of inputs that chatbots must be able to understand. For example, a chatbot might misinterpret a customer's insurance policy number and provide false information if they state it in groups or permutations.

However, by emphasizing particular use cases through training data, chatbots are more likely to recognize and manage each use case. Training data is collected from chat logs of users interacting with agents, website requests, SMS, email, and any other records of how customers enter requests.

Prevent Glitches From Escalating Into Customer–Facing Incidents by Testing

Brands must ensure that the company’s CX technology operates correctly, effectively and resolves customer issues. For instance, if businesses consistently drop calls when chatbots attempt to transfer a customer to an agent, that can be a major source of annoyance and can result in customer churn.

Therefore, chatbots need to be tested. Regression testing, Natural Language Processing (NLP) testing, end-to-end testing, security testing, data privacy testing, performance testing, and production monitoring are the seven types of testing that must be conducted. Each of them has a particular goal, such as testing every potential conversation flow, ensuring a seamless experience across all platforms, or monitoring how effectively bots respond to high-stress situations.

The only way to prevent issues from being overlooked is to continuously run automated tests during the whole development process as well as in live CX environments. Automation is the key element because it enables businesses to perform all necessary testing, reduces the number of hours spent on manual testing, and is the enabler for faster innovation in a project.

Build Customer Loyalty Year-Round

Thirty percent of customers are likely to switch brands after just one negative chatbot experience. This underscores how critical it is for retailers to ensure that their chatbots are alleviating customers’ pain points — rather than adding frustration — to make shopping a better experience well beyond the holiday season.

Christoph Börner is senior director of digital at Cyara, an automated CX assurance platform provider.