Chatbots – New Wave for Customer Care Service?
In the last few years, we have seen a surge in the use of chatbots. Chatbots are computer programs that simulate human conversations. They’re designed to help businesses automate customer service tasks, like answering FAQs or providing support. Many businesses have started using chatbots to provide 24/7 customer service. But are chatbots the new wave of customer care? In this article, we’ll explore the evolution of Chatbots from letters, telephones, e-mails, self-service, and the chatbot stage with relevance to their pros and cons and also help you identify whether the chatbot is the new wave for customer care service or not.
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The evolution of customer service
Before we dump into the stages of the evolution of customer services, we’ve to know and understand what customer care service means from the business, brands, and companies’ perspectives.
Customer Care Service is the skill of taking control and handling all requests and needs of those who need help or who have requested help and services through a customer care unit/personnel found in a company. Neurotech Africa is revolutionizing the way customer care services are delivered by companies to customers.
Customer care service passes through Requesting, Processing, and Delivering stages, this means a customer requests for services or asks questions concerning anything that relates to the company. After the customer has asked the questions, the customer care agents will go on the process of dealing with the requests and answering questions, and providing the answer to the customer. Then, the last stage is that the customer receives the service requested and gets the answer(s) to the question(s) posed. Thus, this is the actual process of what customer care service happens.
But the question is, what are the channels of communication used to perform all these processes?
The channels used to deliver services vary from year to year and that denotes the evolutions of customer care service as Letters, Telephones, Emails, Self-service, and now Chatbots.
Customer care service through letters
In the past decades, letters dominated most African countries as a means of communication and service delivery way. Businesses at se years used letters for recruitment of workers, and customers used letters to ask for services and even to ask for their FAQs, In the same way, the customer care units/pell-mell provided answers and services to their customers. A customer had to write a letter to a company requesting for something or just asking questions (FAQs), then when the letter is received the customer care personnel had to write a reply letter to the customer. You just have to trust us that letters were the most not only fashionable way to provide services to customers but also the modern effective means. This mode of communication had lots of downs one of them being that it even took a week for a customer to receive a service or answer the questions posed through the letter. So, this is how it was those days, it is how customer care services were provided.
Customer care service through telephone.
After the letters here comes telephones, telephones came to make easy and at least simplify the difficulties that were found with letters. Here we talk on desk phones, land phones, and not these smartphones like the one you are using to read this article. In the past many decades, it is said that people used to lend telephones so that they can communicate. Just a few businesses owned telephones and used them rarely to communicate with their customers. It rarely because it was expensive for a customer to make a call to a company/business. So, customers used to call companies to request services and ask for FAQs. During this era, a company could have at least three telephones. This channel of communication is still being used by some companies and most telecommunication companies here in Africa use it but in a modern way. This channel of communication has some drawbacks as the customers termed it as an expensive and time-consuming means of communication and some customers could not get the exact answers and the help that they expected to get.
Customer care service through email.
Emails were raised as a new channel of communication between customers and the service providers and, emails were used as an alternative channel to telephones and letters. A customer has to write a letter to a company requesting a particular service or asking a question on something that concerns that company. But this mode of customer care provision also has lots of drawbacks one of them being not real-time and hence leading customers to not get the exact help at the right time. This means of customer care is very suitable for marketing purposes, but stillness not perfect for marketing as there as chatbots made from us Neurotech Africa that are very intelligent and trained to handle all marketing activities more than usual and hence leading a business to acquire the targeted numbers of clients and businesses.
Customer care service through self-service.
This marks the advancement of great technology in Africa and the rest of the world customers of a certain product or service can have themselves whatever they want anytime and anywhere.
How do customers have self-service? - Here comes the Virtual Assistants Siri, Alexa, and Google Voice being an example of it whereby through mouth commands a service is provided to a customer. While considering the financial sector, bank users can send and receive money through their phones and withdraw money and deposit it through a bank ATM by themselves. Customer service through self-service is also possible through live chat, this means a person can ask for something and get services from a company through WhatsApp or even Messenger. But this stage of customer service still isn’t the best and yet there is the best stage which is even better than self-service customer care. Self-service customer care will still not be able to get the solutions to the problems and lead customers back to the call server.
Customer care service through AI Chatbot
An AI Chatbot is a computer program that is used to simulate and make easy conversations through texts within any communication channel in a business.
Are Chatbots the new wave for customer care service? – Definitely YES, because they are the cheapest, easiest, and most fashionable way to interact with customers 24/7 anywhere besides any other means used to deliver customer care service. Through lots of pieces of literature, chatbots have been proven to be the actual way to make businesses thrive like never before as they save operational costs and create a high level of customer satisfaction. Chatbots are very welcoming and they are very friendly, they can be implemented in businesses or companies of any industry. Another exciting feature of a chatbot is that it supports more than 40 languages, so your customers can have a self-service using the language of his/her choice. Below is an example of a chatbot from us NEUROTECH AFRICA that understands a Swahili Customer:
Swahili Chatbot 1: A Swahili customer getting services in Swahili
You can chat with “Me Money” in any language of your choice visit our Chatbots Playground
The top leading companies are using chatbots to operate their daily activities, especially in the customer care service section. While many organizations are still in development or early production with chatbots, a wide majority of organizations plan to increase their investment in chatbots.
As now you are aware of the evolutions of customer care service channels and you probably got the right way to deliver customer care services to your customers. Using chatbots from us Neurotech Africa is the only way your business will deliver the right and the best customer care service, and make your customer happy ever.
Be free to book a demo bot from us. Write us an E-mail at info@neurotech.africa, or visit our website at www.neurotech.africa.