The motivation for the adoption of a chatbot solution is providing customers with a valid after-sales support able to answer common technical questions, reducing the overall inbound generated by the channels of traditional assistance.

The solution adopted: a virtual assistant to support customer service

Pat’s chatbot, Engagent, offers the new 24/7/365 support channel providing real-time answers to Zucchetti INFINITY HR solutions.

Engagent is an intelligent assistant who has the ability to learn from the questions submitted by customers and to manage new topics in a flexible way. After about two years from the adoption of the platform, its database of recognized topics has grown significantly:: about 30% of the contents have been created on the basis of customer questions, thus improving accuracy of reply.

Today the chatbot is able to respond independently to 60% of the questions asked by Zucchetti customers and manages about 1000 monthly interactions.

The great value of the project, called “HR Virtual Assistant“, is being able to offer a high-performance after-sales service, easy to use and simple to access by customers. When providing an answer, The chatbot may suggest to also display video tutorials or a specific resource in the document area.

Furthermore, the chatbot proves to be a valid support in request peaks, such as the release of a major release or during legislative changes.

The head of post-sales services HR Zucchetti, Bruna Piceni, declares:

While deploying the “HR Virtual Assistant” project, based on the Engagent chatbot, we were confident to be able to provide our customers with an innovative user experience that would meet their expectations.

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Arval, company owned by BNP Paribas and leader in Italian long-term rental sector, has been present in Italy since 1995 and manages over 200.000 vehicles at national level and more than 40.000 customers.

Arval Italia’s mission is providing long-term rental solutions to its customers, through consultancy and dedicated, innovative and dynamic services, able to meet their digital expectations.
To achieve this goal and provide more and more Customer Centric online services, Arval Italia chose introducing Engagent, Pat’s Chatbot, which supports the company in this new Customer Experience digital and optimisation strategy.

What is the support that a Chatbot could provide to car rental services?

Engagent manages interactions with customers in an instantaneous and completely automatic way, dealing with a variety of topics such as: personalised estimate, customer assistance, booking a car inspection service in the workshop.

Engagent, applied on company’s institutional website, enhances relational dynamics with online customers, channels customers’ needs, simplifies their navigation and information research.

Marco Cerrato, Web Marketing & Acquisition Manager, says:

We wanted a complete and scalable solution, able to meet the needs of our Business. A solution that could strengthen the engagement of users on the web, improving the relationship and better qualifying them.

Engagent, Pat’s Chatbot, has become the first touch point for web users and the main vehicle for relationship and knowledge with the company. This dialogue tool captures leads’ attention, who would otherwise be lost, qualifies the customers, their needs and future requirements. This is a full-fledged virtual assistant, dedicated to the improvement of Customer Experience for Arval Italia’s customers.

Discover  the case study Arval Italia and the advantages achieved by using this technology.

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Il Pat Group has been one of the protagonist in this event, that has included several speeches by the main players in the customer experience market that were classified in 4 different areas:

• Customer Experience and digital future,
• Cloud and Customer Service,
• CRM and relational marketing,
• BOT and artificial intelligence

The event will also speak about the predictions about the relation between company and customer.

For these reasons, Pat Group decided to participate as Gold Sponsor, to explain his strategies and technologies that have an impact on the Customer Experience.
Pat also has prepared a speech called “The proactive and multichannel Customer Support: the efficiency of the interaction with a BOT and the self-care” bringing our strategic and technologic experience.

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“81% of the customers expects to receive the same service’s quality when it’s in contact with the company through different channels, from the purchase until the Customer Service”, writes Vala Afshar in his research “State of the Connected Customer”.
Right now, in this digital background that surrounds us, there’s no time and space for waiting an answer to receive a service, which sometimes needs to be solicited by the customers.

Also Donald Porter, the British Airways Vice President, underlines that “the customers don’t expect the perfection. They just want that you solve the problems when occurred”.
In this phrase we can notice that the “time” factor has a fundamental importance and that the solution to the problem reported by the client should be found as soon as possible.

The relationship with the customer is put to the test everytime he has to hold the line or has to repeat the same information several times, since those factors influence his patience, the satisfaction and expectations.

How can we change this situation? Through the proactiveness.
Customers expects that the companies operate in a proactive manner to resolve some issues before those become a real problem. For example some communications that anticipate the needs (such as a date’s reminder, a notice for a collection or order, some updates about a purchase or a promotion), are considered by the customers useful and positive.

Companies, to anticipate the customer’s necessities, have to rely to data that can become the bedrock to build a precious and important experience, obviously only if well analyzed.
Acting in a proactive manner avoids the unsatisfied customer’s costs, who will raise his voice generating a negative feedback, also in the web platforms. We should remind that “91% of unsatisfied customers decide to change the supplier and won’t come back anymore!” – 1st Financial Training Services.

To anticipate the customer’s needs it’s important to know him, here some tips:

• examine the customer’s progress and history:
• keep track about all the contacts and interactions held with him;
• understand how the customer prefers to be contacted (phone, e-mail, self-service);
• record the preferences pointed out during the service;
• constantly monitor the results.

Those information can be collected through a deep data analysis, that can be the basis to design a real and detailed customer journey.
The first step to approach a proactive contact strategy that anticipates the customer’s needs is the integration of the corporate systems, namely an internal CRM and a contact’s infrastructure.
Furthermore, is strategic to consider the emerging technologies based on an artificial and predictive intelligence. Thanks to them the Costumer Service team is in position not only to satisfy the client’s needs before they are expressed but also to customize the times that the customer has chosen to contact the company.

In this context filled by expectations, intelligent technology and different channels, the chatbots are the right tool for direct contact, often used for easy problems to solve and useful for demanding customers.
Those tools, for example the PAT ones, Engagent, are the happy medium for the management of the first contact, the customer service and contents and purchase employment. In a proactive way this service can recognize the user/client analyzing how he got into the site and introducing a new service looking the past online access.

The integration with the customer’s management system InfiniteCRM, guarantees that each information is stored in the client’s profile.
This customer-oriented strategy allows to truly know the contacts and to exploit predictive plans of action, helping them to solve the problems! Giving relevant experiences on different channels, increases the satisfaction and the loyalty.

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Time is one of the most important value through which the customers can judge the service provided and its quality. For this reason, the company should make every effort to guarantee the Customer Service‘s promptness and simplicity that can contextualize the needs and expectations that surface. Therefore the brand should be ready to address in the best way from the first contact to the main speaker, the customer. From that moment and from this interaction, the company put its reputation, confidence and reliability at stake. For the brand this occasion is a real opportunity.

In this period the Customer Service knows that it’s necessary to face the impatience, the digital frenzy and social dynamism of the clients and so it should manage all the occasions where it’s easy to disappoint the customer’s expectations because of a bad or delayed service.
The companies can’t drop their guard in this background which can be seen and judged from everybody, especially from the clients who want to share their opinions, considerations and experiences on the social and digital platforms.
Jeff Bezos quotes “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends”. That’s why the companies should adapt and plan each relationship with the customers and the entire customer service, adopting new strategies and technologies that will meet the expectations of the customers.

If the client at the first interaction with the Brand doesn’t meet an answer that reflects his expectations, or doesn’t receive a quick feedback, he will start looking for other solutions (the competitors). The result is that the company will miss some chances and opportunities, that’s a negative consequence.

If we read the results published by the research Accenture Global Consumer Pulse, 91% of the interviewees says that they need to contact the company several times for the same reason; 90% have to hold the line for a long time before receiving an answer from the Customer Service; 89% can’t obtain a resolution to the problem.

This report shows a daily panorama which is unfortunately diffused and that leads to an high dissatisfaction.

The analyst Forrester Kate Leggett in her article “It’s All About Differentiated (Digital) Experiences” explains how the customers would like to get in touch and interact with the brand in the easiest way possible, buying and receiving an appropriate service without difficulties. 72% of the clients thinks that the most important thing of the customer care is the time enhancement that the companies dedicate to the interaction with the clients. That’s a precious value which is reinforced by the customer’s trust and loyalty.

The companies should try to reduce the difficulties and the problems that the customers can meet when there’s a contact with the brand. The resolution is the introduction of channels or applications that can help an efficient and quick interaction and that can give the right answer expected by the client. Those applications called Chat Bot respond to the client’s needs in the customer service’s context: the interaction from the first contact and of the optimization of the dialogue.

PAT offers the innovative Chat Bot Engagent, which allows the companies to increase the quality of the Customer Experience and Customer Service processes. Engagent, based on NLP (Natural Language Processing) Engine and on machine learning procedures, chats in real-time with the users who surf the web, the mobile app or the social page and that need support or information about the services offered by the brand.
Engagent can offer a quick, complete and self-service support, due to the Bot which manage the engagement and proactiveness rules (in the form of different widgets). Engagent can offer support for the most frequent requests, while the complicated problems that need an human intervention are managed by the human operators who can be involved in the discussions with customers.
An application which allows the companies to build positive experiences at each interaction and also to create important opportunities with the customers.

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Consumer will dictate how the customer service will evolve: their behaviors, such as preferred contact method and expected customer experience. Customer service will need to adapt to the customer preferences and their new digital habits: listening to customer needs, communicate through their preferred contact channel, providing real time personalized, coordinated and consistent services to enhance their experience.

Plenty of data and statistics prove that Customer Service plays a fundamental role in customer’s choices and their loyalty. Such data shows that in any area of application, good service improves customer loyalty. It is estimated that companies loose a total of more than 62 billion dollars, due to below expectations customer service.

As explained by CEO Jeff Bezos of Amazon: “In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts“.

Customer Service’s value is critical to the success of companies: consumers no longer have the time and desire to remain loyal to a brand that does not satisfy them. If their expectations are not met, customers can easily search for a better alternative, additionally can negatively score the service received and the obvious consequence is that that company loses out.

The main reasons for a customer brand neglect related to Customer servicing are: excessive waiting time, which is significant to more than 20% of the customers, and receiving inadequate responses. In addition, generic and not personalized responses will drive 50% of customers to search for new products and services. In general, then, after a bad experience with customer service, as many as 91% of customers will perform a negative action, accounting for as much as 50% related to company loyalty. This proves that customers appreciate quality service as much as other levers such as product price.
According an American Express study, Americans are willing to spend 9% more with companies that provide excellent customer service.

What you must therefore expect as a trend that will add value to customer service for 2017 ?
In order to answer we need to start from consumer expectations and their changing attitudes. Customers expect firstly to be able to search answers by themselves or in second instance, to rapidly connect through an intuitive and mobile channel the customer service department. Waiting times are no longer welcome.

Based on the above these are our offered guidelines for Customer Service:

Introduce Self-Servicing Support. People, or new consumers, are accustomed to perform continuous online searches and expect the support service to be available 24/7. Not all customers have the time, or desire reach out for support possibly to find simple answers. The best solution is to provide a self-service tool, a portal that makes frequent asked questions available through intuitive search systems.
A Forrester provided survey about most used channels for customer service tell us that self-service through FAQs use has increased by over 10% reaching as much as 76%.
Self-Service Support managed through a dedicated portal, as one offered by PAT is a real and measurable advantage and now expected by 90% of customers.

Introduce instant messaging support. Last year we have witnessed exponential growth in the use of messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and so on. Exploiting these channels for better customer service is a growing trend. Innovative companies like KLM have started to use messaging platforms for reservations, travel and related support services.
The main advantage of messaging support is its convenience to the user, which is already accustomed to that particular app for instant communications.
Companies, however, also can also benefit, by keeping the conversation with the customer within context (the entire conversation is always visible and allows greater fluidity in exchanges between operator and user) with a permanent and direct connection.
But in order for these conversations are not lost is critical integration with back-end systems, such as a CRM or ticketing platform. Pat, by BrainInteractive solution, coordinates and controls contact channels delivering true value to Customer Servicing.

Introduce a support Chabot. Live chat support channel has become very important and will continue to be a major trend in the coming years. It provides a one-to-one direct support, often managed through a Bot. The Chabot is able to not only autonomously respond to questions from users, but also understand the context and offer the customer a human like dialogue. Engagent – PAT Chabot – for example, based on the online customer browsing behaviors can proactively offer promotions by anticipating needs and questions. Conversely, in the case where Engagent is not able to answer, the system would redirect the dialogue to a human agent.

Deliver a personalized service. Personalization has already become one of the key Customer Service trends and will continue to be so since new technologies allow collecting increasing user’s data about their preferences. Organizations that will collect, analyze and use such data will be in a position to offer a better and more appropriate online experience, gaining a significant competitive advantage.

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Based on this trend, chats will technology will also increasingly adopted in business for internal corporate use to support operations and for Customer Care and Support services.
Within corporate organization, chats, in particular those of group ones, are taking off. These group Chats use as a working communication tool within business teams is increasing significantly. Chats are especially popular because they can be used as a synchronous channel of interaction like a meeting or a phone call or asynchronously, as an email. Chat communications that are streamlining business communication are called “ChatOps” – messaging platforms focused to support the coordination and business operations management. Such ChatOps will surely represent a real trend for 2017.

We expect an increase of interactions managed through Chats in the area of Customer Service and Support. “Chatbots” defined as messaging services supported by artificial intelligence, or machine learning, therefore not managed by humans will be increasingly installed and configured to provide self-servicing support since able to understand questions and provide the appropriate answer. Chatbot are used to provide a personalized Customer Experience and offer an easily accessible direct channel of communication with the Brand. The online user also called digital customer, can get answers to questions, find out what is for sale, review specific promotions, and solve problems without having to call or send emails. Chatbot’s are more than just programmed applications that interact with users, but represent real virtual assistants, call center agents and sales assistants, able to support a human natural language dialogue.

Pat Engagent platform is the innovative Chabot that allows real-time users communication, in one-to-one or using cross communication channels; improved operational results that can be delivered by combining virtual support to operational support teams. A Hybrid system able to take full advantage of the virtual assistance to easily self-solve users most frequently asked questions, while utilizing human agents only when really needed.

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The chat and online purchases are strongly connected: over 60% of customers that use a live chat says it would buy again from a site that offered this service and this shows that the sense of support offered by this tool has a positive effect (almost 40%) on the purchase phase.
Indeed the most “delicate” moment for a customer who is buying is exactly the time of the finalization of purchase: the live chat this way helps to mitigate the sense of danger that can feel every time he buys online.

The chatbots compared to live chat, definitely have much less impact on the costs for Customer Care and are very efficient tools. First, they can autonomously respond to a standard set of questions that are the most frequent asked questions. Also they provide a service 24 hours a day, 7 days out of 7, covering those time slots that may not be covered by real operators.

The relationship between the chat channel, whether human (live) or virtual (bots), and conversion rate is indisputable: the chat should not be seen only as a tool to provide support, but also to make up-selling, to improve the customer experience, to acquire leads.
The Direct Interaction System Engagent, is a hybrid chat tool that allows to communicate with the users through a human team, supported by the potential of virtual assistance. Engagent is designed to enhance user interaction with the brand and enables proactive widgets, that can be activated on the basis of particular navigation rules or according to user behavior.

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A win-win situation for the customer and the brand:

• Customers may chat with customer service, ask for suggestions about products in real-time, compare alternatives, get personalized recommendations and offers and buy more easily.
• Companies could automate the customer service standard requests, solving problems faster, for instance the orders and the delivery notifications. These systems help to engage customers and recommend products, making up-selling and cross-selling activities.

A Direct Interaction system, as Engagent, improves the dialogue of users with the brand and enables the proactive widgets, on the basis of certain business rules related to the navigation or to the behavior of the users.

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