The festive season is a time for giving, and that means people worldwide scurry around looking for the perfect gifts for their loved ones. Since ecommerce provides a fast, effective, and hassle-free shopping experience, it has become the most preferred shopping option for many.
That’s good news for ecommerce business owners, but not so much for the customer support teams. To them, the holiday season means an onslaught of customer queries both day and night, each requiring personalized attention to ensure successful conversion.
So how can your ecommerce support team get ready for this and while still spending some special time with their families?
The answer is simple: by using a conversational chatbot.
Here are some of the roles your chatbot can take on to improve this holiday season.
A support agent that never tires
The majority of customer support questions—order status updates, tracking information, and delivery schedules—can all be handled by a chatbot, allowing your team to operate at more manageable levels and take time off.
We’ve taken it one step further with Answer Bot. Our near-human AI chatbot understands customer queries no matter the words used, responds using your built-in knowledge base, and engages in casual talk. It even records questions for which your knowledge base doesn’t have an answer, so you can keep it updated.
A gatekeeper for incoming chats
Chatbots, though near-human, aren’t a complete replacement for real human interactions. However, they can filter incoming chats by proactively asking questions, gauging the urgency of the issue, and assigning them to human agents based on priority. This way, your team can prioritize the most critical queries.
Besides saving your team precious time, this also reduces rerouting. In case of any inevitable reassigning, this ensures your customers won’t have to repeat themselves when they talk to another representative.
Your first line of defense against angry customers
It’s quite common for shoppers to pass the stress of holiday shopping on to customer service teams. Fortunately, a chatbot is immune to such encounters and can be a helpful line of defense to protect the team against negativity and help keep them motivated.
All you need to do is compile a list of inappropriate words. Any time your bot encounters any of these terms, the chat is automatically closed. The offender’s IP address can also be blocked.
Your virtual assistant in every sense
If your team has to take over and complete follow-up tasks after every conversation the bot has, it defeats the whole purpose of having a virtual assistant. Integrate your bot with your stack of apps and databases, so it can schedule and perform actions for your team. These actions include pushing a visitor’s details and purchase history to your CRM account, assigning complex issues as support tickets, and more.
Wondering how to set up a bot that does all this? Don’t fret!
With Zoho SalesIQ’s enterprise-ready codeless bot builder, you can create a fully-functional custom chatbot in less than five minutes without any coding. All it takes is, creating a bot flow using the drag-and-drop interface and pre-built blocks, and add your bot responses.
You can set up complex workflows, like scheduling returns and refunds, based on the data in your favorite applications, including customer data, stock numbers, and more, by using Plugs.
And if you do happen to be a coding guru, there’s no limit to the automation you can do with our programmable bot interface, Zobot. Here’s a sample use case you can achieve with Zobot:
A data-driven gift adviser for your customers
Coming up with gift ideas is the most stressful part of holiday shopping. A chatbot can guide your customers through this stage. Once a customer lands on your website, your chatbot can ask questions like “Who is this gift for?,” “How old are they?,” “What’s your budget for the gift?,” and more.
It can then provide product recommendations based on the website footprint and purchase history of previous customers, along with links to the respective product pages. This added convenience encourages customers to come back to your site for future purchases. Here’s a sample script for an ecommerce use case that you can tweak to your needs.
Zobot comes with 15+ other pre-built bot templates that cover the most common business use cases. All you need to do is tweak the code, language, and tone of your bot.
Here are some key highlights of Zobot:
- Deeply programmable
- Secure integration with a wide range of cloud-based applications
- Works in tandem with major AI assistants like Zia, Dialogflow, IBM Watson, and more
- Supports a wide range of input formats
- Easy to switch to and from human operators
This holiday season, let your team sit back and relax while your chatbot does the heavy lifting!
If there are any other creative use cases you’ve achieved with our chatbot platforms, please share them in the comments section.
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