Research by Oracle suggests that 82% of customers would switch a brand if unsatisfied with the customer service department. While relationship building is still best left to humans, transactional interactions can be fully covered by automated customer service.

Meaningful interaction improves customer loyalty advocacy, leading to improved revenue. One aspect of enhancing conversations involves using conversational AI.

What is conversational AI?

Conversational AI includes chatbot’s and voice assistants that converse with consumers. Chatbot’s use multiple technologies like big data, machine learning, Natural Language processing to mimic human interactions.


Conversational AI can respond to a human question in multiple steps:
  1. Converts a user's voice into text using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR).
  2. Interprets the text leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Natural Language Understanding (NLU).
  3. Searches for the most relevant response given the current conditions by executing a big data query.
  4. Responds using Text-to-Speech (TTS) with voice synthesis or simply a query string run from the big data.

We shall see how this technology can be used to boost business and customer engagement.

In the ecommerce and customer service, business process automation (BPA) saves time and money and makes life easier for clients - especially when combined with live agent support.


The key to a great customer experience when automating business services is by:
  1. Carefully considering the customer’s journey so that you apply automated customer service tools where customers will appreciate having them most.
  2. Be transparent about when your customers are interacting with a chatbot.
  3. Make it easy for the customers to switch to a live agent if they need to and ensure customer satisfaction.

What are the advantages of automating business processes?

By delegating repeat or mundane tasks to a chatbot, customers get instant assistance, as the bot can take part in multiple concurrent customer service interactions, so there is no waiting.

When the simple tasks are taken over by a chatbot, they staff are left with more challenging cases. This means that these cases will be resolved quicker, because your agent can actually focus on them. The user experience will be better because the agent will actually have time to connect with the customer. This in turn creates customer loyalty.

Data analysis shows that, if the number of chats has increased and the response time lengthened, you might benefit from connecting conversation bot to your live chat solution.

Live Chat offers robust reporting and integrates with Chatbot seamlessly. You can also ask your service agents or check in the archives of your customer service software, if your team often deals with similar customer queries.

Chatbot’s can be integrated with Live Chat and other customer support tools.

With targeted messages, you can react to the customer’s behavior, without waiting for them to take the initiative and start a chat.

For example, in ecommerce you can offer free shipping to a client hesitating to complete a purchase, or offer a discount for a customer who has returned to a product page. Once they’re set up, they fire automatically whenever their conditions are met.


5 smart ways to improve your customer engagement with conversational AI
1. Leverage hyper-personalization

A Sales force report suggests that 52% of customers want more personalized interactions. This makes for a valuable customer asset to drive personalization.

Conversational AI taps into personalization by integrating Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Inventory Management System (IMS).

Having conversational AI allows for quickly looking into these parameters to adopt a tailored approach. You can also hold two-way dialogues with your customers and learn more about their needs, wants, and even the flaws in your business offerings.


2. Showcase 24/7 availability

Adopting conversational solutions using a chatbot builder can help shorten customer service expenses by 30% while maintaining consistent customer engagement.

Conversational AI can address common queries, freeing human agents to focus on customized support using customer support tools, which offers cross-functional collaboration to resolve complex customer queries. 24/7 conversational AI can navigate the existing database to provide answers to FAQs and ensure easy self-help by providing links to knowledge base articles.


3. Adopt a proactive approach to customer support

Solving customer issues before they arise is a powerful strategy to drive customer engagement.

Using conversational AI for proactive customer support involves solving issues in the planning phase.

For instance, if your product has a well-known bug and there is a quicker turnaround through self-help, AI bots can route customers there before they face such an issue. This relieves the support staff from doing redundant jobs, enabling them to participate in meaningful dialogue to lessen the impact of such issues.


4. Faster assistance with conversational AI

Engage customers in the live chat with prompt responses.

Leverage customer interaction to strengthen ties with them, minimizing their resolution time. AI-powered Business Intelligence can analyze consumer behavior and ticket trends, helping you to track common challenges and make data-driven business decisions, such as how to satisfy demand.


5. Understand your customers and improve their experience

HubSpot suggests that 33% of customers don't want to repeat information. Therefore, it's best to filter out information that is already provided by looking into various aspects of customer data, including:

  1. Age demographics
  2. Shopping habits
  3. Geographic locations
  4. Specific interests
  5. Spending patterns

Such data helps access your customer's profiles without asking them for the same information. This helps in uncovering opportunities to increase customer engagement.

For example, past purchases can reveal if a client spends more when offered a discount. In this case, integrated chatbot’s can trigger a discount pop-up message to provide a promotional code. This data can be used to tailor future offerings to match customer preferences.


6. Use the chatbot’s data to drive loyalty while improving customer engagement.

Chatbot’s can analyze customers’ previous orders and acknowledge loyalty by sending discount coupons, special offers, and freebies via email and social media. Chatbot’s can be used to enroll customers into a loyalty program.

Moreover, the collected information allows you to anticipate customers' demands, learn which features they like, and tailor your offerings accordingly. They can accurately represent your business’ values and offerings.


The conclusion:

Business automation can improve customer service, and chatbot’s that work on AI algorithms can drive engagement. Blending both allows you to tackle more complex issues cost-effectively and efficiently. These sophisticated bots have the potential to streamline search processes by answering common user queries and offering solutions faster and precisely.

Conversation AI reduces the need for a human agent for basic, monotonous tasks and helps pivot their expertise to solve sophisticated customer issues allowing a more personalized experience and a boost In engagement and business altogether.