5 reasons why your customer service department should use BOTWISE

5 reasons why your customer service department should use BOTWISE

A properly organized customer service department provides customers with great service but also has its employees in mind. For customer service to run like a well-oiled machine, every aspect of your business needs to be optimized. What are the customer service challenges, weaknesses, and processes that can be improved? Which problems can technology solve?

Before we get into the reasons why your company's customer service department should use BOTWISE, let's briefly explain what this solution is.

BOTWISE is an application that allows to easily manage the distributed knowledge of the organization. This is possible with proprietary algorithms, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and integration.

The benefits of implementing BOTWISE include among others:

  • faster and easier access to the needed information
  • more enjoyable onboarding and employee experience
  • fewer complex systems
  • identification of potential gaps in the knowledge base
  • daily support for employees
  • no need for more and more specialization of teams in the era of a rapidly increasing amount of information
  • access to knowledge 24 hours a day from one smart bot window, and thus a great convenience also in remote work.

If at this point you feel a bit lost - don't worry, everything will be explained later in the text.

Customer service - the work of consultants

It's the easiest for us to point out potential „pain points” and areas for improvement if we imagine a typical customer service day.

Let’s take, for example, Martha, who is a customer service specialist in an insurance company. Daily, Marta talks to clients who are interested in buying life insurance or want to learn more about the company's products.

Pain No. 1 - IVR

To get a connection with Martha (or another person from the same department), the customer should go through a conversation with IVR (interactive voice menu) and select 3 - „buy insurance or check the offer of banking products”, and then go to the next automated menu and select 2 - „buy life insurance.” In theory, everything sounds good, but anyone who has encountered IVR at least once knows that it is not so rosy.

  1. Customers do not always know what topic of conversation to choose and are often connected to the wrong department - according to the system adopted in the company.
  2. These types of systems often irritate customers (because, for example, they are too long, too fast, the number of messages or options to choose is too large) and can contribute to increasing the dropped call rate - but this is a topic for a completely different article :)
  3. Clients may want to settle several different matters during the conversation with the consultant.

Let's assume that the customer who called Martha is Paul, who is interested in purchasing life insurance, but is just considering various options. Paul is already a client of the company where Martha works because he had previously purchased third-party liability and motor insurance. He would also like to find out what are the insurance conditions that he has already purchased some time ago because he is going abroad by his car and wants to make sure that he and his family will be adequately protected.

Paul previously tried to find an answer to his second question on the website, but it took an effort - even if the answer was there, it was hard to find for him, so he figured that if he would still contact the hotline to buy life insurance, he will be able to easily find out information about his other matters at the same time.

And here we come across the first reason why the customer service department in the company where Martha works should use BOTWISE.

1. The team can easily cope with a wider range of topics

Probably, dear reader, you can spot a potential problem with this phone - if Martha is responsible for selling the insurance products, she will of course be able to provide information on the terms and conditions of life insurance. In the case of Paul's second question, which does not fall within the scope of her department, not quite.

Pain No. 2 - switching to another department

Most often, in this case, Martha will have to switch Paul to the next department, which is associated with the waiting on the client's side (who had already waited for the call to the hotline before), as well as the entire procedure of switching and involving another person. If Martha were able to provide information to Paul’s question that is not related to her department, she would probably do so - unless of course the company's policy states otherwise. However, the most common reason for the necessity to introduce team specialization is the huge amount of information that must be handled by specialists from the customer service office in an insurance company.

It is enough to imagine the last contract with which we recently closed - e.g. in the case of buying third party liability or motor insurance. One contract itself - and yet this is only one variant of this insurance! - probably has a dozen or even several dozen pages. It is hard to imagine that a customer service consultant not only knows the insurance conditions for each variant of third party liability or motor insurance in his company but also dozens or even hundreds of other products being offered by an insurance company.

Pain No. 3 - documents

One person simply cannot remember this amount of data. Of course, consultants use systems or documents daily and if they do not know the answer to the customer's inquiry immediately, they can check it during the conversation or contact them again when they have the answer. And here we face another problem - or area for improvement if you prefer - in the customer service department.

Most often company files, documents, incl. about insurance options, the company's policy towards customers, or even the company's policies themselves, and other questions that employees or customers may have are located in different places. This is what is called dispersed knowledge of the organization.

2. Easy access to information

This information can be found, among others, on shared drives, on e-mail, Sharepoint, in the company's internal system, or at other suppliers ... Therefore, in her daily work, Martha not only has to find an answer and an appropriate document to be able to answer the client's question, but also remember where the information is, and how to access a given system. The BOTWISE Customer Care: Trends and Challenges report, in which we examined the reality of the Polish customer service departments, shows that customer service employees use, on average, more than four different sources of knowledge during their work.

Of course, a lot of time is being wasted also at this point, because assuming that:

  • Martha knows where the information is located,
  • what keywords to use to find it,
  • as well as how to log into a specific system and when

she will still have to follow all these steps to answer the question.

Pain No. 4 - systems

Unfortunately, the BOTWISE study also revealed that such systems are often slow, complicated and it is difficult to figure out what to do and where. At the same time, the cost of their replacement is so high and risky that it is practically impossible to abandon them soon.

If Martha used BOTWISE, it would be enough that during the conversation with the client she would ask a question in a natural language (as if she normally asked it, without the need for special formulation) in one intuitive bot window, and the system would instantly return her the necessary information along with the possibility of viewing the entire document from which this information comes.

Martha could search the entire knowledge base that would be shared with her, so she would also be able to e.g. find out about insurance that her department does not normally deal with. It is not difficult to see the benefits here - Paul will receive the necessary information immediately, the connection to the hotline will be shorter, he will not have to wait for switching to another department. Moreover, it is more likely that the answer will be correct and in line with the latest information in the knowledge base - which is especially important in times of a pandemic, as restrictions and regulations change constantly and dynamically, and with them often the functioning of the company.

3. The KPIs will eventually match

Here we come to another benefit of implementing BOTWISE. By automating the management of dispersed knowledge, companies can achieve better KPI results, including:

  • First Contact Resolution (FCR)
  • Customer Effort Score (CES)
  • Average Handle Time (AHT)

You can read more about KPIs in our article Overview of KPIs in customer service.

4. Easier onboarding

The benefits of implementing BOTWISE also extend to HR issues, including onboarding.

We have found that training new customer service consultants often lasts only 1-2 weeks. More than half of customer service employees rated onboarding in their organizations as 3 (on a scale of 1-5) or worse, and only 6.9% claimed it was very well organized.

Onboarding with BOTWISE can be much faster as well as more friendly and less stressful for the new employee. Thanks to the BOTWISE application, the consultant will have access to the necessary knowledge 24 hours a day, so he will be able to check the necessary information at any time. And it is not only about information that is needed to contact clients, but also information that is part of the work in the company itself and relates to matters related to HR or the use of company systems.

Thanks to this, such an employee will not have to worry that he may have forgotten something again and must ask his supervisor, a colleague from the adjoining desk, or HR. All he has to do is comfortably ask about it the integrated BOTWISE chatbot. Without stress for the employee who has to remember everything and without involving additional time of other people.

It is also a benefit for the people responsible for introducing new employees, trainers. It will be easier for them to carry out training on one tool first than with, for example, seven, and consultants will be able to find information on the use of other tools on their own, if necessary. In addition, with BOTWISE, we have data on what consultants often ask, so induction training can be better tailored.

We also recall the Gallup study, which shows that employees who have constant access to the necessary information are 70% less likely to burn out (State of the American Workplace, 2017).

It is worth bearing in mind that hiring new employees is associated with additional costs, and the rotation in customer service departments can be significant.

5. Analytics

The BOTWISE application is structured in such a way that all the necessary knowledge resources of the organization, e.g. in Xls, Docx, Pdf, Html, SVG, txt, ppt, pptx, ods, jpg, png, useful web addresses are placed in one place and immediately we can search them using the above-mentioned chatbot window.

If the information we are looking for is in the knowledge base, we gain immediate and convenient access to it. However, you may find that the answer you are looking for is not in the knowledge base. In this case, the chatbot returns the appropriate information. Why is it important? Because such information is obtained immediately, and not after an hour of searching various resources of knowledge of the organization in various systems - to finally find out that this information simply is not there. This situation can lead to various problems, as the person who was looking for this information may not admit it, believing that the information exists somewhere, and the employee simply cannot find it and does not want to be perceived as incompetent.

In the case of BOTWISE, we have different functions of system users - above we described the functions of a user-consultant, i.e. a person who can freely search all knowledge resources made available to him. There are also teacher and manager functions. Such people may have access to the system's operation and receive information on what questions are most often directed to the knowledge base (this is valuable information, among others, for trainers), as well as a list of questions that were not answered. This allows supplementing the knowledge resources that are needed by employees, as well as provides information on what topics are most often discussed in the daily work of the team. Adding new data is so convenient – it is possible to supplement the missing knowledge from an external file, but also to use the conveniently integrated text editor and add the necessary information in no time.

BOTWISE uses machine learning and natural language processing to provide information on user questions - this happens automatically, without the need to design special interaction scenarios. This is one of the reasons why using BOTWISE is so simple and convenient.

However, if we want to somehow direct users to a specific answer, the teacher can create a predefined answer to the question, including the selection buttons we know from traditional chatbots. For example, after asking the question "How to install a printer?" or "How to use a printer?", the bot can answer as follows: "We have two printers in the company, brands X and Y - which one your question is about?". Then the bot will interact with the user depending on the chosen variant response.

The possibilities of BOTWISE do not end there. Our solution can also be integrated with existing systems in your company, such as Sharepoint, Nextcolud, or others.

Book a free live demo and check out how BOTWISE can help your business grow, as well as what the interface looks like live. We will also show you the functionalities and answer all bothering questions. So, are you ready to use the potential of artificial intelligence in your company?