The major obsession of companies using social media in the past was to make every customer or visitor fall in love with their company or their products. Because of this, companies used to panic whenever they received any negative reviews on their social media pages and did not know how to respond to them. Some of these reviews were genuine, and some were fabricated by their competitors. It is easy to fake a review to malign a company's reputation, thanks to the anonymity provided by the Internet. People these days conveniently post a negative review without hesitation, remorse, and without even thinking how much damage a casual negative review can do to a company's position if a company does not know how to respond to a negative review.

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Chatbots for business is a major requirement today, as they save time, money and are effective for a company. They are automated customer support services, used to carry out simple and repetitive tasks that help to address common customer questions. They have proved to boost productivity, improve customer retention and increase referrals for organizations. 

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What is OmniChannel?

A "channel" in business is simply a medium through which a company can communicate its products to customers. This can be done through websites, advertisement hoardings, social media platforms, or by contacting customers via email, phone calls, or messages.

In the past, marketing was done through one or two channels or mediums such as printing advertisements in a newspaper or running television ads, but now with the availability of smart devices, such as mobiles or tabs, there are a plethora of digital platforms through which a company can market their product to the customers anywhere in the world. This kind of marketing interaction is called Multi-Channel Marketing. In multi-channel, a company can advertise their products and get feedback for their services on different platforms. This helps in getting a wider reach to customers, but the drawback is that all these apps and platforms work separately from one another, and to extract feedback from them is a difficult task and results in longer response time. A multi-channel environment is a great approach to increase the overall visibility of the products but does not provide good customer service or customer experience.

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Have you noticed people seem to be angrier these days? It is more than a coincidence. Polling company, Gallup, surveyed 160,000 people in 116 countries during 2020 and early 2021. The results, shared via Forbes, show that anger, stress, and sadness are at all-time highs. Interestingly enough, it is not solely due to the global pandemic - which has certainly raised tensions. These statistics have been trending in the wrong direction for many years now. Uncertainty seems to be the biggest contributor to people feeling down or upset. As is highlighted in the survey, 4 in 10 adults have experienced some form of stress or worry in recent times. 

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The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic created unique challenges for the economy. In its early days, employers across many sectors could not keep as much staff as they normally would. Financial constraints, combined with an uncertain future, resulted in temporary lay-offs and permanent restructuring. As the economy has bounced back, employers have faced a new problem - worker shortages. Why is this? In data collected by HRReporter, reasons range from available unemployment benefits, a preference to work from home, and demands for higher wages. According to Innoflow, the situation in the United States will go from bad to worse if not tackled soon. They claim that we could see:

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Excellent customer service starts with empathy, patience, and understanding your customers' needs. To deliver this, it is critical for a service representative to understand how consumers think and react to a conversation. One major factor that determines the course and outcome of a conversation is the generational difference when dealing with a customer. This may be the first time in history that customer service representatives are tasked with dealing with customers from five generations. Because of this, it is not possible to have one approach for all customers. Rather, a service representative needs to deploy different strategies and special forms of communication to deliver exceptional customer service across all five generations. For that, a service representative needs to be aware of the differences in the mindset of each generation and must be able to meet the expectations of each group accordingly.

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A customer walks into a business or starts using an online service. At this point, customer service may not even be necessary. However, there are specific points in the customer journey when customer experience knowledge is required versus customer service skills versus customer support expertise.

A customer journey is the sequence of customer events that take place throughout the customer-business relationship, which typically include customer acquisition, purchasing, usage, and renewal. But what are the support stages of the customer journey? When do I need customer support instead of customer service? When should customer service take over from customer support? These are important questions for you to consider before you invest in any of the services.

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Conversational AI definition

We can define Conversational AI as a program built by using artificial intelligence to replace a human-like conversation with a machine so that the program can help a human end-user in resolving queries and perform various functions. Customer service AI has proved convenient, consistent, and available to assist a human in all walks of life.

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Imagine owning a physical store without a salesperson to answer questions or recommend products that are trending or are best for your customers. Your customers are all alone trying to figure out what to buy from a range of products, which all appear good. Confused and frustrated, they end up buying outdated products or leave the store purchasing nothing.

The same is the case with most e-commerce stores today. The store appears "lifeless", with no representative to interact with, no agent to suggest trending products or resolve queries. The customer might open a support ticket but finds out that the wait time is very long. They are bombarded with lists of "product suggestions" or "similar products", which are not relevant to their interest. Not able to find what they were looking for, your potential customer leaves your online store, possibly never to return. This obviously can have a negative impact on business.

To resolve this problem, companies are adopting a new form of online commerce that provides a personalized experience to potential customers, by interacting with them along the various stages of the sales funnel. This concept is called Conversational Commerce.

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