Customer management is a critical task for any company since customers usually seek customer service when they have a problem or complaint. No one will call to say everything is fine. In other words, most customers are either nervous or excited when they get to the beginning of the process – everyone who has already dealt with customer service is aware of this.

However, because of the issues mentioned above, it is particularly important for customers to be able to present their problems as quickly as possible, with as few administrative obstacles as possible. The telephone IVR system is straight from our nightmares with the annoying music and menu items, and the topic that interests us is most certainly always in the last place. Then, when we finally manage to connect to a representative, we have to tell them everything from the beginning about what we want to get help with.

Chatbots offer effective help here, too.

First of all: on a broad average, 90% of the questions customer service receives can be answered with an information set of 10-20 answers. Why not teach this “basic set” to a chatbot who tirelessly recognizes frequently asked questions day and night and answers them right away? The benefit is twofold: on the one hand, the customer gets the answer immediately without any kind of waiting, on the other hand, we can save the time and nerves of the customer service team by avoiding monotonous responses.

But the questions we get are really unique, we can’t give standard answers to them!

Of course, there are unique problems, personalised answers that the chatbot can’t help with, but there’s no problem as the bot instantly transfers the customer to its human colleagues by extracting the relevant keywords and thus prefiltering the client. The staff member will already know what topic they need to prepare for.

Moreover, the system is also able to redirect each customer to a colleague who is an expert on that topic based on the “skill” attributes associated with each customer service representative.

In many cases, pre-screening is essential. When reporting a bug, not all bugs require acute or immediate treatment, and not everyone knows the differences between the exact categories. If such a report includes accurate location data, it can often be reassuring to know how many people have already reported a similar error and that the process is already underway.

The webshop is not a pipe break, the pipe break is not a printer problem.

Even with IT Support, pre-filtering the type of the issue is essential. It can be a great relief for customer service professionals if a chatbot does the first few trivial steps of defining the problem and actual professional assistance is reserved for people. For IT managers, however, a frequent restart, like troubleshooting, can indicate the presence of a more serious problem. They can get accurate statistics about it from the chatbot database on a regular basis.

Responding to frequently asked questions instantly and pre-filtering complex issues are two areas where chatbots can make the lives of customer service representatives and customers easier.