Tips For Making The Most Of Chatbots In Your Customer Experience

So content to “keep up with the Joneses” when it comes to incorporating bots into their customer experiences, many organizations are recklessly pursuing the wrong paths.  They are selecting the wrong technology.  They are following the wrong implementation roadmap.  They are using unsuitable metrics.

Betsson Group is not one of those companies.  With a taut strategy and a powerful technology partner in Ada, Betsson is leveraging bots to add meaning value to its customer experience.  Operations Manager Aleksej Ander recently shared some tips in an interview with CCW Digital.

On why bots matter

When looking at the landscape of Customer Service, I believe we see a general trend towards increased availability and faster service. We are also seeing trends where customers prefer efficient self-help services over traditional channels. We are a company that offers services online and that creates the need for interaction with our users almost exclusively via the web. In this environment, investing in improved self-service and in this case a chatbot technology made sense as a way to further increase the customer experience.

Obviously we considered the needs of our customer base and the type of questions we usually get. We wanted a bot that can answer easily and accurately our frequently asked questions while at the same time allowing our Customer Service team to focus on other aspects of our support services.

On how bots can enhance the CX

The ultimate goal is to make it more convenient and easy for our customers to find answers to their questions. With this platform we can offer self-help services that have the ability to adapt to different scenarios and display information relevant for the customer beyond what a regular FAQ can ever do.

It also offers an excellent way of communicating information to unlimited numbers of users without the need for any queues or waiting times.  And this is the reason why we have incorporated the bots and a dynamic set of FAQs to our customer base. In a similar way, Betsson was one of the first gaming companies to offer mobile chat support – we’re always striving to listen and address our customers’ needs. In this case, they want quick and seamless access to the information they require.

On how bots can augment agents

There are a number of factors that goes into this and it is also where we believe there is a huge advantage of having our Customer Service teams directly involved in the daily creation and maintenance of the system. It allows us to use the chatbot to cover questions that do not need the involvement of a human agent and, hence, freeing up more time for our agents to deal with more complex scenarios. Another, and maybe even more important aspect, is the ability to have the chatbot work together with our agents by asking preliminary questions needed to investigate a particular topic. This way by the time the customer gets connected to an agent they can more quickly go into the heart of the reason for contact, leading to lower overall resolution times.

On a common mistake to avoid

I think it is important to understand that a chatbot is not just a magic black box that solves all problems you throw at it autonomously. You need to carefully plan, train and maintain the system just as you would train and maintain the knowledge of a customer service agent. We understood early on the need to have full time people dedicated towards maintaining this system. Luckily we already had a dedicated training and quality assurance team in our department that is able to provide help and support to this new unit because the chatbot doesn't require them to be IT experts, as we discussed earlier.

On selecting Ada

Betsson Group operates approx. 20 different brands and we currently offer customer service in multiple languages. We also operate in a dynamic industry so we required a platform that is flexible enough to integrate with our complex infrastructure but that would also allow quick turnaround when we need to implement changes.

So for us the ability to handle multibrand as well as multilingual service is a must for any CRM or other tool.

Another important aspect that we found compelling about the Ada platform is that it is built primarily to be used and maintained by Customer Service experts who might have limited or no experience as developers. For me this was key, as these are the people who best understand the expectations and needs of our customers without having to add the extra costs of technical system admins, etc. At the same time, our Service team is able to immediately adapt to customer queries and ensure that the bot is updated with new scripts and scenarios to cater for “on the fly” demands.