Next-Level Automated Customer Service with Khoros

Direct messaging with brands has become one of consumers’ go-to ways to get in touch with companies, and the number of these channels — and, as a result, the number of inbound messages — is growing at a swift rate. According to a Forrester study commissioned by Khoros, 73% of enterprise brands expect the number of inbound channels consumers engage with them on to increase within the next 12 to 24 months. In this post, we'll look at how automation can help your brand not only keep up with growing customer service demands, but also exceed them.

Consumers can reach brands by direct messaging across many different types of channels, including social media, smart speakers, brand-owned chat, and messaging channels such as WhatsApp. Managing scores of one-to-one messages can be difficult, but it must be done to become a leading brand, as 75% of customers say their favorite brands are those that provide personalized and helpful answers in a timely manner. Plainly put, customers care about getting help anywhere, anytime — not the difficulty of enabling that. Automated customer service is your best friend to help you meet their demands.

There will always be support conversations that require a human agent, and those that don’t. Automation is best used as a way to support agents; for example, by answering the simple one-off questions that might not be the best use of their time.

A well-placed bot can help brands manage all types of challenges and ensure customers continue to get a great experience. Other ways that bots can improve the customer experience include: prioritizing and routing incoming support requests, searching online communities or FAQs to supply agents with information they need, or providing direct support during hours that agents are unavailable, improving support times, brand affinity, customer engagement, and more.

Khoros believes each business has unique needs, and so we help businesses determine and implement automated customer service in ways that will work for them. Implementing a bot effectively starts with thinking about and understanding the intent of your customer — what do they want when they’re contacting you on your website, mobile, and apps? This can include intentions like return my product, reset my password, upgrade my service, or pay my bill. After identifying the intent, you can set up your virtual agent bot to respond with scripts to solve customers’ problems or gather more data to handoff to a live customer support agent. Either way, the bot will help solve the problem more efficiently.

Implementing a bot effectively starts with thinking about and understanding the intent of your customer.

Since bots can be available 24 hours a day and can often answer basic questions immediately, they can save money and improve your customers’ experience and satisfaction. In higher scale verticals like retail, telecom, travel, financial services, automotive, or events, chatbots can prove extremely effective.

How does Khoros fit in? Well, Khoros offers a care solution to serve customers on their digital channel of choice and this solution has an agnostic automation framework to organize bot(s) across channels. We also have best-in-class partners and chatbot vendors, like Reply.AI that can supply the chatbot you need. Combined with our knowledgeable Strategic Services team, we’ll help you to deploy the most optimal bot strategy and technology for your industry, business model, and customers.

Concerned about lagging behind the competition on automated customer service? Worried about how a shift to direct messaging will impact your business? Consider the following:

• Our Automation Framework enables companies to integrate any bot into their Khoros Care workflow.

• Khoros has industry chatbot software partners like Reply.ai and Pandorabots who are ready to help if you are looking for a chatbot to use.

Whether you’re just jumping into the world of bots or you’re ready to create a full customer-facing, conversational AI strategy, Khoros is your partner. Learn more about improving the customer experience through automated customer service in our recorded webinar, The Bots Balancing Act.