The pandemic amplified the need for speed in customer service. According to Kustomer’s research, 85% of consumers expect customer service to be faster, and 90% expect it to be easier. According to Forrester, 69% of consumers say they shop more with businesses whose online and offline customer service is consistent. This means that brands must find fast, efficient, and scalable ways to deliver personalized support that mirrors in-store support experiences, while minimizing costs associated with overhead.
This is where chatbots come into play. Customer-centric brands use chatbots to deliver instant resolution to frequently asked questions, eliminating wait times and boosting customer satisfaction. Chatbots can gather useful information upfront before connecting the customer with an agent, freeing up agents’ time to focus their energy on building customer relationships, not searching for information.
Introducing New Features for Conversational Assistant
At Kustomer, we help brands offer intuitive, conversational chatbot experiences that transform customer service from a cost-center into a revenue generator. We’re excited to share the new features we’ve built to to help you leverage Conversational Assistant, Kustomer’s CRM-powered chatbots, to maximize efficiency and automation:
- A new Standard Report for Conversational Assistant
- Ability to use Conversational Assistant across WhatsApp and SMS channels
- A brand new Rules engine that triggers the most relevant Assistant for a conversation based on customer attributes and session data
- Ability to engage website visitors by proactively popping up the Conversational Assistant’s initial message
These features enable a more tailored experience for the customer starting a conversation, by triggering the most relevant Conversational Assistant based on what we know about that customer. We are combining the ability to launch specific Assistants with specific dialogs — main building blocks of Assistants — within those Assistants and proactively engage users in a very simple, no-code required experience.
At the same time, the new Assistant Standard Report will help businesses monitor how the new features help improve and shape their processes, by offering a comprehensive overview of the Assistants’ performance and allowing brands to drill down on each metric for more details.
SMS & WhatsApp Assistant
We now support two new key channels for Conversational Assistant, SMS and WhatsApp, enabling businesses to automate even more inquiries and create a more seamless routing and agent handover experience.
Steps for building SMS and WhatsApp Assistants are exactly the same as those for Kustomer Chat: 1) Create a draft 2) Add a dialog 3) Add interactions.
However, we are limiting the interactions that don’t have the proper visual elements on WhatsApp or SMS, such as Buttons, sliders, or images, that will not render in that channel.
Knowing this, it’s important to create experiences that work for each channel and keep in mind how the interactions and experience will be perceived by end users in each channel.
Just like with Kustomer Chat, brands can leverage SMS and WhatsApp Assistants to automate end-to-end service interactions by connecting to and triggering actions in third party systems. SMS and WhatsApp Assistants can also deliver quick resolution by delegating time-consuming workflows to chatbots and seamlessly escalating high-touch conversations to agents.
Assistant Rules & Proactive Chat
In order to provide a more tailored experience for the customer, we introduced a Rules engine, similar to Business Rules, where admins can create and stack rank rules that determine which Assistant and starting dialog should be used in a conversation based on the audience specified in the Rule.
For example, you can create Rules to start an Assistant with a different starting dialog, based on whether the customer is logged in or anonymously browsing your site.
For chat conversations, we are also introducing the ability to proactively pop-up the starting dialog of an Assistant. This would trigger via the audience criteria defined in the Assistant Rule. ‘Page URL’ and ‘time on page’ are examples of audience criteria that can be used to trigger a proactive pop-up.
As for the pop-ups themselves, we have provided the ability for the customer to respond to the pop-up either via free text or button click without having to first open the chat widget. If the customer chooses not to engage with the pop-up, they can simply dismiss it by hovering over it and clicking the ‘X’.
Assistant Report
Once you’ve configured all of your Assistants, we want to make sure you can continuously measure their performance. We’ve added a new Standard Report which, out of the box, will help you analyze your Assistants to understand how users engage with them, how often Assistants solve your customers’ problems without agent participation, and how often agents are hopping in to interrupt an automated session.
This report allows brands to get a great overview of all the Assistants running in their product, dive into the success and failure of each, and focus on any gaps or improvements to boost their success rate.
What’s Next?
Our goal is to keep enabling companies to build the best self-service experiences, as tailored to their users’ needs as possible. We will keep evolving our products to make them more powerful and customizable, while also making them as easy to build as possible.
We want to see how companies automate their most important and repetitive processes using the self service tools we are building. We want to make sure that the handover to agents is seamless. We want agents to have all the information they need to be able to solve complex problems without any back and forth. And, of course, we want to provide a clear view of what is happening in all those interactions between end users and support teams, clearly highlighting which interactions are working great, which need to be refined, and where new opportunities exist. .
