August 2018 Live chat and chatbots overview Neil

August 2018 Live chat and chatbots overview Neil Sheppard 1

Why chat…? Imagine you’re making the final tweaks to an important presentation and suddenly find your email is locked out To call someone to get it fixed, you will have to stop what you’re doing, find a quiet place and concentrate on the conversation You could raise a ticket, but that will take time to write and time to get a response. Said response might be a request for more information instead of a solution. An instant message, on the other hand, can be composed in seconds and get an immediate answer You can then send more information from your phone while you catch the train to your presentation Quite simply, live chat messaging allows you to multi 2 -task while giving you faster results

What’s in it for us? The exact same thing is true for our service desk Live chat lets us multi-task: – One agent can conduct several live chats at the same time Live chat gives us faster results: – No queueing, no hold time Less time on calls and more calls answered means more resource to cover more of the company and provide a consistent service across the business 3

The data shows live chat is the way forward A Gallup survey found that text messaging was more popular than either phone calls or email for Americans under 50. This was five years ago. All the way back in 2012, Bold. Chat discovered that 77% of consumers would prefer not to have to talk to vendors on the phone In 2014, the Coca Cola company offered to delete the voice mail boxes of any employee who didn’t use theirs. 94% chose to do without. In 2016, Career. Builder asked a survey group what the biggest waste of their time was at work. Over 25% said email. e. Digital surveyed 2, 000 consumers recently and found that 73% thought live chat offered good customer service. Email scored 61% and phone just 44% - less than half of customers were happy with it. Technology offers us a wealth of options for talking over distance, but we would still prefer to write than call; and rather chat than email. 4

Going further with automation Live chat is a more pragmatic way of communicating with customers and it can be made even more economical with chatbots Chatbots are not artificial intelligence. They’re no smarter than a Google search and definitely not a replacement for human beings. What they can do, however, is automate simple tasks, saving our service desk agents time The whole conversation on the left can be conducted by a chatbot, solving simple problems If the issue actually needs immediate human intervention, the chatbot can seamlessly transfer the customer to an agent without them even knowing 5

Implementation Service. Now’s latest update already contains both live chat and chatbot functionality that we can implement immediately All we are missing is: – Chatbot responses to be designed – Service desk agents ready to answer chats – A portal for users to initiate chats We will need to ensure there is a minimum standard of grammar and spelling among the agents answering live chat and that they are adequately trained in appropriate communication, but these should all be transferable skills from their existing roles Our biggest concern is that chatbots need to get it right first time. Unlike search results, they can only offer one suggestion to any query, so it needs to be the right answer if the chatbot is to be useful. 6

Thank you 7