What Retail Chatbots for Customer Service Need to Be Successful
The idea of specific customer service chatbots for retail is not new. Ecommerce sites have been using them for long enough that most customers have seen and probably interfaced with a retail chatbot at one point or another. In a recent poll by marketing expert Jay Baer, 60 percent of participants said they’d used a […]
Call Centers vs. Contact Centers: The Role of Automation and Messaging in Elevating Support
Listening to elevator music while waiting endlessly for a customer service agent to come on the line is becoming a relic experience for consumers. Today, what used to be called “call centers” are now “contact centers” — and they are ripe for automation. These centers still handle incoming and outgoing voice calls, but they also […]
Why IoT Will Enable a New, Data-Driven Era of Customer Service
IoT devices and sensors produce five quintillion bytes of data every day, and a recent Gartner report estimates that by 2020 there will be more than 20 billion IoT devices in use. The implications for this level of data production are widespread — it has sparked development of new computing technologies (edge and fog); placed […]
IVR Automation: The Right Idea but the Wrong Application
Routing customers to the right agent is important for both the brand and the customer: it ensures that customers don’t have to be transferred from agent to agent, which in turn equates to a better CSAT and overall brand experience. The routing process itself is also a great candidate for automation, and brands have increasingly […]
Chatbots for Customer Assistance: Why You Need to Rethink Your Strategy
In 2016, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared that “bots are the new apps” during a company developer conference in San Francisco. He wasn’t the only one who shared this enthusiasm about chatbots, though. The enterprise communication giant, Slack, even created an $80M investment fund for bot startups, and brands like Staples and Macy’s rolled out […]
Top Considerations in B2B Versus B2C Customer Service
Today, brands have the luxury of being able to pick and choose the software tools that best suit their specific organizational needs. For example, there are different marketing and sales platforms for B2B versus B2C brands, because B2C and B2B brands have different requirements within these departments. Customer service is no different. The Stark Differences […]