Businesses have deployed chatbots for years, but changing consumer needs and demands are making most bots a thing of the past, particularly for customer experience departments. 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. The pressure on companies to deliver personalized interactions is huge but the results are significant. Personalized marketing can lift revenue by 5% to 15% and increase the efficiency of marketing spending by 10% to 30%.
Chatbots can’t cut it. Their inability to resolve even straightforward requests, such as multi-part questions, result in inadequate customer service experiences that do more harm than good. Customers deserve better than being left without solutions or having to jump through frustrating hoops to receive support. Personalization is the answer for businesses to unlock the full potential of their business and custom service offerings.
Personalization and immediacy pay, but chatbots aren’t the way to get there
The proof of the success that a personalized touch can bring is incontestable. 75% of consumers indicated their preference for buying from brands offering personalized digital experiences. Corroborating that enthusiasm, an overwhelming 97% of marketers reported a significant increase in personalization efforts in 2020, with a quarter achieving a revenue spike higher than 20%! However, paired with the trend toward personalization was a need for immediacy, with a significant study showing 82% of consumers expect immediate responses to their queries. The answer to those trends was deploying chatbots, which ended up solving the issue of immediacy but also creating new problems with personalization and customer satisfaction.
Man Beats Machine
80% of consumers prefer to connect directly to a real, human customer service agent rather than talk to a chatbot. While bot technology has advanced significantly in recent years, there’s still no way to replace the natural flow of human conversation. The inability of bots to respond to customers with personalization or emotion serves as a significant issue for many customers. Customers, especially those dealing with a problem, want their frustrations to be met with empathy and understanding, which chatbots cannot give them, given they lack the ability to improvise and lack the capacity for emotional understanding. The results of negative customer experience can be detrimental to a business’s health, with a shocking $35.3 billion lost every year to avoidable customer experience issues in America alone.
Messaging Platforms Offer New Opportunities
Instant messaging platforms, which are commonplace, provide a major opportunity for businesses to excel at communication with customers today. WhatsApp is the world’s primary social messaging platform and is utilized by 31% of the world’s population, leading it to expand its services to businesses. WhatsApp has 175 million customers across the globe who interact with companies. Given social media’s influence over everyday life, it is undeniable that business communication will move to these platforms and away from chatbots.
With billions of people using social messaging platforms, it is a comfortable ‘home turf’ for consumers, the significant majority of whom use these applications on a daily basis. The language of chatbots is not tailored for the kind of causal communication that occurs on instant messaging platforms, yet this informal level of communication is what consumers expect. The en-masse adoption of social messaging platforms is proof enough that they are the future of customer-business communication, making chatbots, which are unusable on public and highly personal platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp.
As consumers demand greater personalization, they expect to be able to communicate with retailers on the platforms they already use. 80% of customers use social media to engage with brands, wanting these channels to be authentic, honest, and personal. Aligning with those preferences means bypassing bots and automating the most time-consuming processes for humans instead. By syncing to the CRM, quickly accessing customers’ personal preferences, etc., and personalizing service human to human, customers and businesses win. Tuvis perfected the process and can be leveraged by your business with just a few clicks while providing increasing value over time.
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