Cost-effective and standardized customer service
Virtual assistants during the ordering process for online retailer
is an ideal solution to provide cost effective customer service
Process
Customers visiting the e-commerce website have a lot of choices on products and features. It is a common phenomenon that customers drop out from ordering a product even though they intend to buy. The primary reason for this is observed to be as not having answers to specific queries related to either product features, shipping times, return policies, etc. Retailers loose out on potential sales due to not having enough information available to customers, or their inability to replicate a store shopping experience online. After an order is placed by a customer, having customer support is a key factor in providing a great shopping experience. Although most online retailers target to proactively push as much information to customers, it often is not able to answer specific questions that customers have.
Solution
A virtual assistant was developed to provide shopping assistance to potential shoppers, and to customer service for customers who have already placed an order. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis was used as a solution to create this virtual assistant with a backend integration through Robotic Process Automation (RPA), to not only respond to customer queries, but also execute any specific tasks requested by customers. The virtual assistant actively took on some of the important responsibilities, and executing tasks for operations and marketing. Automating the order processes was an effective solution for providing a cost effective customer service.
Challenges Addressed
Revenue loss
Large number of customers not placing orders due to not having enough information about the products on sale.
Inconsistent customer service
Customer queries after purchasing a product were handled manually, resulting in low customer satisfaction.
Large volume of customer queries
Retailers depend on high volume of sales which does result in high volume of customer queries.
Low cross sales revenue
Retailers value the time of customer interaction, and take this as an opportunity to cross sell products. E-commerce companies loose out on this opportunity.
Round the clock operations
Online retailers drive sales round the clock. Providing manual customer support 24x7x365 days prove to be costly and cumbersome to manage.
Outcome
- Customer interaction rate and online dwell-time increased form 17% to 40%.
- Customer query response time reduced to 0.4 seconds.
- 24×7 support for handling of all customer queries.