What is already possible and what will be possible in the future?
Chatbots are used at many points along the customer journey. In the following article, I will bring some order to the different areas of application of chatbots by sorting them along the customer experience chain.
I use the customer decision chain from my CRM professor Nils Haffner as a guide.
The need
The relationship between customer and company usually begins with a need on the part of the customer. Or even one step earlier, namely when the company first has to make the customer aware of their needs.
This is where classic marketing and storytelling chatbots come into play.
Bot, for example in Facebook Messenger, packaged in a fun marketing campaign make the potential customer aware of the company and its offers for the first time.
This type of chatbot is usually developed for a very limited use case and is usually part of a larger communication campaign. Simple chatbots are usually sufficient.
The selection process
As soon as the customer now knows that he has a need and already knows which companies or providers are involved in his selection process, he starts to find out more about the product, the services and the company.
He reads forum posts, product reviews and studies the website in detail. He will certainly be asked a few questions and then a chatbot or digital assistant will come into play again. If you as a company are able to provide customers with comprehensive and satisfactory advice, they will probably choose you as their provider. Chatbots on the website or in messenger systems support your customer service team here and can answer the user’s initial questions.
This type of chatbot is somewhat more extensive than the first category of bots mentioned. The aim here is to understand the user’s question or problem and provide a suitable answer. The bot needs an extensive database with all the answers and must also be able to understand the user’s question. Intent recognition via NLP is suitable for this.
It makes sense to think about the possible course of the conversation in advance and train the bot accordingly or even try to skillfully direct the communication processes.
I wrote this article as a guest author for More Than Digital.
You can read the entire article here at Morethandigital.info.
