What is post-sales support?

Post-sales support or after-sales service is a service that you offer after a customer has purchased a product. Anyone who sells a product can offer after-sales support — be a retailer, manufacturer, or service provider. Usually, after-sales service includes support regarding product warranty, usage, repair, or upgrades. Post-sales support is as important as the product itself and can make or break your business. For some customers, after-sales service can be a crucial factor influencing their buying decision.

Benefits of post-sales support:

Assisting organizations in maintaining high customer retention rates is the fundamental motivation behind after-sales service. It ensures customers get as much value as possible from their purchases. A great after-sales support program can help you build brand loyalty. And when your customers become happy, they become your repeat customers! Not just that, they become the biggest brand ambassadors recommending your product through word of mouth, bringing you more sales.

Challenges of post-sales service:

Serving multiple customers simultaneously: Managing various customers simultaneously (during peak hours) is a crucial challenge. Companies must keep a buffer and pay overtime to their resources to manage the extra workload.

Slow response time: Hold time can be due to numerous reasons, be it new hires, complex processes, or frequent process updates, but no one likes the hold time; we all know that.

Limited support window: Due to budget limitations, many small or medium size businesses offer after-sales support in specific time windows. Customers who need help beyond that time window may feel frustrated, especially when they have an urgent requirement.

Inexperienced customer service: Because of high attrition, there are constantly fewer experienced resources in the team. New hires lack in-depth process knowledge, so the First Call Resolution (FCR) rate is low, and the hold time is high.

Call transfers: Every time a call is transferred to another agent or supervisor, the customer has to repeat the issue/requirement. When a customer has urgency, it makes the situation worse.

Role of BOTS in streamlining post-sales support:

24×7 support: An order tracking bot provides all order delivery details to the customers at once. The chat widget prompts the customer to ask, “where is my order?” Or “I want to know my order status?” This bot works 24/7 and automatically responds to the most frequently asked customer queries about order delivery with high accuracy.  

Warranty Support: This is possibly the most common after-sales service companies provide for almost every product. Warranty services include repairing and replacing the products the customers bought for a selected period. For example, BestBuy in the USA offers multiple warranties and tech support membership offers along with the products. Customers may have different queries related to its coverage, option of extending the warranty, warranty term, etc. A bot can respond to customer queries related to the warranty of the products sold by the retailer easily.

Installation Support: Though most products come with an installation manual, customers may still have installation queries and need support. A bot can easily handle simple questions, while complex queries can be transferred to human agents during the conversation.

Product Features / FAQs: A bot comes in handy to answer any product feature-related queries. It can also integrate with OEM applications to pull updated details. For example, a customer may ask how many Android updates the mobile phone is eligible for that they have purchased.

Technical Support: Most retailers dealing in software-based/IoT devices (think CCTV cameras) have to keep a team that provides technical support for the products sold by the company. Customers connect with the technical support team for any product issue, which understands the problem, opens the tickets, and directs it to the relevant department. A bot can do this job without any breaks. It asks the appropriate queries to the customer and, based on the response, decides the issue type and offers a further course of action. Accordingly, it registers the customer’s request and forwards it to the right team. The customer receives information such as the time to resolve the issue, the following steps, etc. The customer always has the option to ask further queries, or talk to an agent anytime during the conversation with the bot.

Product Return / Replacement: Though retailers provide streamlined solutions for any return or replacement, there can still be exceptions, and due to that, customers have to do follow-ups, raise complaints, or have simple queries. This requires the companies to have support executives to manage such scenarios. A bot can handle this situation independently and efficiently by accessing all the details related to customer data and all possible solutions. Apart from this, there are other areas where the bot can help engage with the customers, such as upgrades, exchanges, offers, etc.

Conclusion:

Today, no one likes to be on lengthy support calls, pressing the IVR keys, waiting for a live chat agent to respond, and waiting endlessly in the ques. The voice bots/chatbots facilitate seamless live communication and provide customer support 24/7. Bots help companies save time and money, offer a smoother customer journey, reduce consumer stress, and help grow your business.

At IGT Solutions, we have implemented multiple chatbot and voice bot solutions to help our customers optimize their costs, improve customer satisfaction, and provide round-the-clock support.

Author:

Manish Arora is Manager Consulting at IGT Solutions’ Intelligent Automation and Conversational Bots Practice. He is an Automation expert with 14+ years of experience across Travel, Telecom, BFSI and Retail domain. With a strong background of Digital Transformation and Hyperautomation, Manish has extensively worked on elevating clients’ experience by helping them at various stages in their Automation journey. He can be reached at manish.arora@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

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Capturing Data to Facilitate Learning

With the ongoing use of Conversational AI, currently, customers have multiple channels of engagement to connect with a brand, thereby ensuring the generation of enormous volumes of unstructured data every moment through a multitude of platforms, including:

• Social Media – Facebook, Messenger, Twitter and other Engagement Channels
• Web & Mobile apps – Web and App for Sales and Service
• Voice Devices – Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Siri etc.
• Contact Centre – Dial in for Contact Centre Support

Leveraging Data to Derive Learning: Transforming this unstructured data into valuable and actionable business insights is a tedious process. This, especially without the right tools and platforms in place, becomes an impossible task. Therefore, the use of various text / speech analytics tools such as LivePerson, Verint, Clarabrigde, Nice, Lexalytics, etc. helps in analyzing the conversations, spot keywords, build rules, identify real-time customer sentiments, categorise conversations into positive or negative type, and analyse customer feedback and surveys. These tools are best leveraged combined with business intelligence experts, thus helping the companies derive actionable insights to improve:

• Customer Satisfaction
• Customer Service
• Operational Efficiencies
• Brand Campaigns
• Provide Personalised Offers, and
• More Insightful Customer Behaviours.

Social Media is a giant where we see comments and trolls; airline companies among many others receive millions of mentions each day. These mentions/comments range from traveler enthusiasts posting photos of clouds outside their windows to angry customers complaining about the service. Social media analytics (text analytics) helps the airline industry to gain real-time insights.

Amongst all comments/mentions around airline companies, the U.S based airlines are the ones that are usually discussed and have many mentions, however, they are mostly are negative. People complain about delayed flights, missing baggage, inflight & overall services. Winning this battle against the top competitors of the brand, while providing the best customer service can be challenging. Social media analytics, therefore makes the job easier.

Real-Time Feedback: Text/Speech analytics helps by alerting the management about all online events/talks. Passengers are online and are constantly talking about their experiences on various platforms. This data helps the team to analyze the information & dive deep into action with an emergency response arrangement. This is exactly how Southwest Airlines is using their social media listening command centre to overcome any crisis situation and deliver excellent customer service

Spotting trends: Like every other industry, the Airline industry also needs a loyal customer base and a strong online reputation. However, managing the business while keeping up with the constant online chatter and trends is tricky. Currently, the airline industry witnesses such patterns and trends.

For instance, looking at the current pandemic scenario and listening to the chatter online, there has been a lot of concern among the passengers with regards to safety measures/arrangements. In response to this trend, Delta Airlines has been announcing about safety protocols quite often over SMS, Emails, Chat & Voice, and Social media platforms.

The use of relevant and trending content is the most attractive tool to improve visibility of a brand. That’s how the giants in airline industry are making a difference and creating their niche

Handling the Crisis or Negative Feedback: Of all the chatter around in the airline industry, a predominant section is filled with negative comments. In the current digital age, one negative comment can cause a ripple effect to the brand’s image, this in-turn can cause considerable damage to the business. Especially with people keep complaining about poor service quality, boarding facilities, baggage queries etc.

Today, passengers also use third-party apps or agencies to book their travel plans & flights. Therefore, it becomes of utmost importance to please the customers through these third-party apps. Speech, text and voice analytics teams analyze the data generated through these channels as well for their business improvement insights.

Conclusion

This digital age has made the world more connected than ever: it has brought customers and companies closer. Every other company across the industries is using digital platforms along with Text Analytics, Speech Analytics, Social Media Analytics to stay relevant, stay connected, and offer maximum value to their customers and build brand image. Customers expect the same from the airline industry. Writing an update on Twitter about a delayed flight or upgraded safety measures goes a long way in building a trustworthy relationship with the customer. Additionally, Conversational Analytics helps the airline industry to stay focused on every important consumer insight in the most effective way possible.

Looking at the immense scope of speech & text analytics in the Airline industry, IGT has partnered with Nice – Nexidia to quantify the business problems and offer apt solutions.  Nexidia is an interaction analytics software that offers a one-stop solution to organize, analyze and transform the unstructured data from various data pools / databases into actionable insights for a brand. IGT is fully equipped with the right tools and business intelligence resources to provide intelligent insights to our clients. Amongst many projects, IGT is currently working with one of the leading American travel companies by providing a quantified and calculated statistical approach to pursue their business goals. Data mining & structuring, customer verbatim analysis, customer sentiment evaluation, root cause analysis of a business problem to improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) & metric driven operational efficiencies and inferential insights are few areas of IGT’s expertise.

Author:

Apurva Sale is a Lead Business Consultant at IGT Solutions’ Intelligent Automation and Conversational Analytics Practice. She is an Analytics expert with 8 years of experience across Travel, Telecom and Retail domain. With a strong background of Business & Data Analytics, Apurva has extensively worked on elevating customer experience with Insights & sentiment analysis, Social Media Analysis & Insights. She can be reached at Apurva.sale@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

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To facilitate more seamless and effective recruitment, to get recruiters their time back, so that they can put more effort in interacting with candidates and acting as strategic thinkers in their roles, many organizations are focusing on technology that supports intelligent automation, especially interview platforms that leverage conversational AI. Beyond bringing upon a cost-friendly and, efficient solution. Many deem AI as an important factor in creating fair, and diverse hiring channels, along with resolving troubles around scheduling interviews, maintaining documents, and storing records.

According to some studies, the proportion of companies using or planning to use conversational AI solutions in the recruitment space jumped from 7% to 47% in just the last 3 years.

Companies today are not restricting conversational AI to just sourcing or applying, are instead allowing it to be a vessel of value throughout the entire talent acquisition journey; even extending core HR tasks.

12% of organizations are now using conversational AI for internal mobility as per these studies, while

19% of organizations are using it for onboarding.

Conversational AI can also impact diversity in a good way. The research found improvements in recruitment-essential factors such as time-to-fill (+33%), conversion rates (+36%), quality-of-hire (+35%), quality of applicant (+33%), and diversity of hires (+27%) within the first year of using it.

Working of conversational AI

Various technologies are used in conversational AI: Natural language processing, Automatic speech recognition, Machine learning, and advanced dialog management are used to understand, react to, and learn from each interaction.

Components:  

Challenges:

• Changing communication: Due to constant change in communication, various factors may influence communication between humans and machines. Factors such as languages, accents, dialects, emojis, slang, etc.
• Security and privacy: Conversational AI applications need to be designed with utmost safety to maintain the security and privacy of sensitive personal information which might get stolen.
• Restrictions: Resistance and mindset of few managers who reply on traditional methods are not flexible with new technologies. Some countries might even place restrictions on technologies.
• Cost: Initial investments are a little high which might become a challenge to even get started with conversational AI.

Conversational AI in recruitment

Conversational AI is the set of technologies behind automated messaging and speech-enabled applications that offer human-like interactions between computers and humans. Conversational AI recruiting bots are so popular because, unlike a human recruiter, they can answer questions 24×7. The plus point for candidates is that the bot’s instant response time eliminates the wait time of hours or days for answers to the simplest of questions. These bots not only help job candidates at the pre-application stage, but they can also schedule any phone or screen-based interviews, gather information, and update candidates on the status of their application. That adds up to a much better candidate experience, results in saving the recruiter’s time, and provides analytical insights that lead to more effective talent acquisition.

AI bots are highly versatile in how they interact with candidates, communicating by email, text message, and even by voice over the phone. Some companies are using AI bots to help users complete a job application entirely using voice responses on their mobiles. Today, with enhancements in natural language processing, or NLP the value of conversational AI is even greater. It helps mine the conversation’s theme or speaker sentiment. These features benefit a recruiter or a hiring manager to deliver impactful interviews.

Conversational AI types

Use cases of conversational AI for recruiting:

• Prescreen candidates: The ideal solution for pre-screen recruiting automation is conversational AI. It drops off candidates less qualified for the position in the hiring process compared to forms, pre-assessment, or chatbots. Covers necessary and basic screening questions of a candidates’ qualifications, skills, and experiences. Various platforms such as text messages, emails, Facebook, or any other messaging applications can be used for pre-screening. With the help of conversational AI, the productivity will increase by 144% and the time required with the traditional method which is approximately 70-80% will be saved.
• Coordination in scheduling interviews: Conversational AI helps set up calls or meetings with the candidates who are qualified, and acts as a point of contact for rescheduling or canceling the interview calls, hence helping lower the tedious administration work and giving the recruiter ample amount of time to have a meaningful conversation with candidates. All that is to be done is just connect Conversational AI with the recruiter’s calendar.
• Refresh the profiles: Conversational AI helps reach out to passive candidates, engages with them, checks where they are currently in their career, their career interests, and other details and updates the information in the candidate’s profile data.
• Job requisition and FAQs: Conversational AI can create a talent pipeline for new job opportunities in lesser time and during this process, it ensures timely and consistent communication with candidates. Provides a human-like conversation compared to a typical chatbot. And will answer basic questions of applicants which saves the recruiters time.
• Valuable and unbiased insights of a candidate: Conversational AI has the ability to sort out and interpret data from a candidate in an unbiased manner and processes the information of a candidate based on their answers to close and open-ended questions. It masks any personal information related to candidates to enable unbiased hiring based only on merit. The results are handed over to HR teams in real-time. It also eliminates information about a candidate that is prone to biases such as language accent, gender, age, etc.
• Analyze and interpret key behavioral traits: Conversational AI has the ability to optimize the discovery of a candidate’s behavioral traits and capabilities. This unique ability will help generate and ask within-context questions based on the candidate’s responses and fulfill the interest by getting to know the candidates better. Additionally, conversational AI stores and archives record for easy access and analytics.

Why Conversational AI? 

Reductions in dependency on agency decreased, 3X-increase in finding the right candidates, reduction in the cost of hiring as well as time to hire which lead to freeing up time for HR professionals, 2.2X more qualified candidates, scalability, improving efficiency, improving the candidate experience, diversity inclusion, etc.

In one survey, (mention source) around 96% of recruiters agreed that conversational AI enhanced the recruiting process, as well as improved the interview process. How at one point the hiring process used to feel like searching for a needle in the haystack, conversational AI has transformed that experience. Finding the right candidate becomes less of a tedious task and more of an intuitive way to build connections. It creates an experience that is healthy, positive, and efficient, for both candidates and recruiters.

IGT has been providing conversational AI solutions across domains such as airline, hospitality, and retail alongside enterprise functions such as procurement, finance, human resources – helping deliver improvements in customer satisfaction scores by 20%, and achieve operational efficiencies by 35%.

Source: Hirevue

Author:

Ramani Giri is the Senior Business Analyst at IGT Solutions’ Intelligent Automation Team. She has an overall experience of 1.75 years in intelligent automation and the hospitality industry. Outside of work, Ramani likes to swim, travel and read.

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Today, influential megatrends are reshaping the industry adoption of Conversational AI, reimagining value delivery in unforeseen ways. It includes the emergence of voice commerce, data-driven chatbot design, customer sentiment analysis, multi-lingual support, M2M conversations, voice assistants, and much more.

With proven benefits, enterprises are increasingly putting Conversational AI into action for enriching customer experience, improving bottom-line performance in the process. As per Deloitte’s Beyond Touch: Voice Commerce 2030 study, voice commerce will increase online sales. The decisive factor here is unimagined convenience for the customer, with the study predicting that over 30% of e-commerce sales will be driven via voice commerce by 2030.

Applications of Conversational AI

Businesses leveraging Conversational AI can become an emphatic organization that is more responsive to the customer’s needs. Chatbots depicts one of the most popular forms of Conversational AI. However, there are diverse applications of this emerging technology across business verticals, some of which include:

Online Customer Support: Conversational AI is being implemented by many companies for providing 24/7 customer service support at an optimized cost and much greater reliability.  E-commerce platforms use virtual assistance for product selection and customer service, which helps the business achieve higher customer satisfaction and service relevance.

HR Processes: Most of the time, employees call HR managers to know the information they can look up themselves. To maximize the HR department’s efficiency, a 24/7 employee service AI chatbot can be implemented to answer all the employees’ FAQs.  The HR chatbot is also helpful in passing any relevant information and real-time updates related to any changes in the company’s policy.

Retail & Ecommerce: According to Statista, worldwide e-commerce retail sales are expected to reach 5.4 trillion USD by 2022. At this growth rate, e-commerce platforms often struggle with manual sales and support systems that have their limits to delivering a seamless customer experience. As a respite, e-commerce and retail platforms are shifting towards Conversational AI to increase engagement, elevate the customer’s purchase journey, and offer personalized communication for the buyers.

Gaming: Gamers are usually engrossed and if there is a challenging level to complete, and they happen to face a technical glitch, they want it resolved immediately so that the momentum is not lost. Nowadays, many gaming companies have set up service centers to assist gamers whenever they feel stuck at a level. To help resolve common issues, an AI chatbot is set up to answer these queries. With this help, there is a high chance that the slump faced by gamers will end, and they are less likely to end the game mid-way.

Travel & Hospitality: The traveling customers expect to have their queries resolved on demand. It is where an AI-based chatbot can come in handy for companies that provide travel & hospitality services. Conversational AI is used to keep track of customers booking details, room preferences, opted traveling packages, travel dates, and many other details.

How Does Conversational AI Add Value to A Business?

Conversational AI is a technology that guarantees optimized ROI for growth-oriented enterprises. It brings value for both the customer and the employees and promises exceptional benefits for businesses, some of which include:

Substantial Cost-Savings: About 15 -70% of cost reduction opportunities are available for businesses with Conversational AI depending on customer channel interactions. The algorithm powering the Conversational AI bot can be trained to answer repetitive questions, allowing valuable human resources to focus on more strategic roles like customer relationship development and grievance redressal.

Increased Sales & Customer Engagement: Conversational AI allows customers to engage more frequently with the brand, creating a sense of trust among the target audience and ultimately increasing revenue.

The personalization feature can keep track of customer activity and recommend products or services depending upon their previous preferences.  

Deep Customer Insights: The customer’s interaction with the Conversational AI-based bot provides companies with data on what problems customers face and which issues need to be targeted and resolved on priority.

How Are Enterprises Implementing Conversational AI?

Let’s take a look at some real-life instances of some world-class organizations using Conversational AI to improve value delivery.

A Leading Airline Company Applies AI Chatbots

Germany’s largest airline company implements Conversational AI to update passengers on canceled or missed connection flights. The AI chatbots can answer all the FAQs that a passenger can have while boarding the plane.  If passengers are not satisfied with the answers of Chatbot, then they also interact with human agents without any waiting period. This way, customer service executives can spend more time answering complex and specific queries.

A Mental Healthcare Chatbot

A mental healthcare company makes use of a conversational AI-powered mental health chatbot that has made mental healthcare services more accessible for patients. It breaks all the barriers of mental therapy and allows people to have real-time interaction with the bot. Researchers developed the AI chatbot in collaboration with Stanford University to deliver behavioral therapy to patients at their convenience. It provides psychoeducation to the users and offers insights to deal with their mental issues by conversing with them.

Implementing Conversational AI:

• Making A Smart Adoption Strategy: While making the adoption strategy, businesses should figure out detailed customer persona, narrow down the scope, and use the data that is already available to set up the scene.
• Conversation Design: A lousy conversation design can lead to a bad customer experience. Conversation design plays a massive role in delivering a superior customer experience. A suitable conversation design must be sought out earlier in the development stage as it is easy to change.
• Choose The Right Channels for Integration: Before jumping into the development of Conversational AI, you should figure out which key channel and existing software you are to integrate with it, for example, company website, social media channels, CRM, emails, etc.

Even though Conversational AI has many applications today, there is still much room left for its development. Chatbots will become more personalized with time. According to a survey carried out by Deloitte, personalization is one of the significant fields of innovation and is responsible for 16 % of patents filed today.

Sources: Deloitte, Statista, Juniperresearch,

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