Retailers Turn to Text Messaging, Chatbots for Customer Service
It's common knowledge that brands are successful because of their beneficial connections with their customers. With new technologies constantly emerging, so are the needs of customer service. Creating a positive customer service experience creates a positive brand image. With the many platforms customers use to interact with their favorite brands, messaging is becoming the preferred vehicle for interactions. Thus, the use of chatbots has become more favorable than ever.
Type of Conversational Commerce
Controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, or "bots," give customers the intelligent interactions they want. Disregarding the way chatbots are viewed as robots that simply release pre-embedded data, they were created to compile necessary information for consumers by using the data they're given during the interaction. Customized messages and collaborations with consumers have shaped how conversational commerce is performed.
Conversational commerce is the collaboration between brands and customers via messaging platforms that consist of audio, video or both. This progression in customer engagement is why chatbots are becoming a favored digital tool. They can potentially progress toward becoming more customized and produce surprising individualized customer sessions.
Why Chatbots Stand Out From the Rest
In keeping up with the quick pace of consumers and technology today, it makes sense why chatbots are being incorporated into customer service strategies. Looking at Google I/O and Facebook's bots for commercial messaging — they cater to their customers in delivering personalized information.
An authentic customer service experience, even through a chatbot, will create happy customers, and that means increased business potential for retailers.
What Makes Chatbots an Asset
Making a modified chatbot for consumers enhances the experience. If a consumer visits a site on the hottest vacation spots of the year, they'll be connected with a bot that's adventurous and ready to give them travel tips and ideas. However, chatbots can be ineffective if a retailer hasn't legitimately constructed them to provide users with positive and accurate information.
Text messaging has become a preferred communication tool for millennials and other consumers. Retailers have capitalized on this trend by promoting their latest sales or products. However, it's how brands manage a messaging chatbot that creates a happy or irritated consumer.
Consumers have the choice of receiving communications, as well as stopping any from additionally coming in as indicated by the TCPA, or Telephone Consumer Protection Act. On the off chance that a brand’s chatbot gives out messages without them being authorized first by the consumer, this can make the brand seem pushy, which overwhelms the shopper.
Building a chatbot to be successful in what it does and in the way consumers want it to behave is what will add fuel to the fire of incorporating them into a retailer’s customer service strategy.
How We See Commerce Today
Bot-driven services are demonstrating how easy it is for consumers to interact with brands’ customer service without having to be placed on hold from a call center. Bots also can store information about customers so repeat customers who visit a brand’s site don’t have to log in again or provide already known information.
Brian Heikes is vice president of product at 3Cinteractive, a mobile marketing company.
