Why Voice is Essential for Customer Support
Customer service is broken. As customers, many of us dread making the cold call to a business when a problem comes up. As business owners, meeting the customer need can be difficult if not impossible. But there’s a rising technology that’s sure to fix customer support woes once and for all: customer support voice bots.
The role that customer service plays in customer loyalty and satisfaction can’t be overstated. In fact, customer service is set to become the key brand differentiator in 2020, even more important than product or price differences. This means brands hoping to remain competitive in the near future will have to provide stellar service. Still not convinced? 70% of purchases are made based on how customers feel they’re treated by brands, and 89% of brands will mainly compete through customer service. That’s right—customer service is a big deal.
That said, many businesses struggle to provide the service experience that customers demand. If customer service is tough enough to get right now, how much more difficult will it be in our service-centric future? Before we dive into one of the top solutions for simple and effective customer service — voice bots – let’s go over some common customer service issues.
Common Customer Support Challenges
Social media has made everything faster—thanks to the ease and speed of communication, 42% of consumers expect a response from companies in one hour. Customers airing their grievances on social media that go unanswered not only frustrates customers but can also harm your reputation. And why do customers flock to digital communication in the first place?
Because phone customer service is broken. When customers call a support hotline, they typically must wait extended periods of time on hold. From there, they’ll have to repeat their issue every time they talk to a different agent. Businesses have trouble employing and training more agents to keep hold times down, and customers grow more frustrated the longer they wait for a problem to be solved.
A Better Solution: Voice Bots
Voice activated chatbots are primed to fix business and consumers’ complaints about customer support. Chatbots for customer support (whether via voice or text) are essential for solving simple tasks and problems without the need for a human agent—which means no frustrating wait times or need to employ more agents than your budget allows.
Customers are already becoming accustomed to using chatbot service and voice bots thanks to the popularity of virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri. A voice activated chatbot has all the benefits of a text-based one but has the added perk of being hands-free. Why does this matter in terms of customer support voice bots? Because the ease of voice bots will drive 50% of searches to be performed via voice in 2020, which means your answers should be found on the platform.
With voice chatbot service, you’re able to provide fast, immediate service through an intuitive, humanlike conversation. A voice activated chatbot should be able to handle the majority of your customer issues, while your human agents are reserved for more complicated tasks.
Delving into Voice Activated Chatbot Analytics
An overlooked aspect of customer service is solving problems before your customers complain about them. Using voice bots for customer support can provide you with essential voice chatbot analytics. With voice activated chatbot analytics, you can dive deep into data to discover the most-talked about problems or queries your customers have. From there, you can provide that information to relevant parties to fix before more customers encounter the issue. You can also check information like:
- Which issues are more likely to require a human agent.
- When users are most likely to reach out.
This data from voice bots will help you provide better customer service that helps your business remain competitive.
So, Are Voice Chatbots for Customer Support Essential?
Do brands need to develop support voice bots? They should if they don’t want to get left behind. Customers are increasingly interested in self-service: 70% want self-service applications to be made available from a business, and 85% of interactions between a customer and enterprise won’t involve a human.
Using customer support voice bots is a great way to meet this need and provide a great customer service experience. Chatbots for customer support then translate to better sales and greater brand equity.