The quality of customer service is essential to a company’s survival. In the digital age, speed (responsiveness) and personalization of exchanges are crucial to avoid losing customers to competitors.
Support employees, not replace them
It is now possible to combine traditional customer service with automation and artificial intelligence technologies to make your employees’ work easier. Please note, however, that the aim is not to replace employees, but to facilitate their day-to-day work.
Automatic replies are risky
There are virtual communication assistants whose mission is to automatically respond to customers in the absence of customer service employees. This is possible, but risky in certain business contexts. Indeed, if you’re a dental practice and your communication assistant gives the wrong answer about oral health, it could do you more harm than good. In fact, we tested ChatGPT with dentists and specialists, asking questions about oral health, and unfortunately, many of the answers were wrong.
Start by centralizing your customer exchanges
The first step in setting up a customer communication assistant is to organize your exchanges. This means synchronizing your customer database (e.g. CRM, ERP) with your virtual assistant to unify all interactions across all channels, such as calls, e-mails, text messages, documents, invoices and notes. Ideally, you record all exchanges made by all employees to obtain a complete history and ensure consistency later on.
Building your corporate memory
Indeed, for your virtual communication assistant to help your employees serve your customers better, it first needs to know your customers. Then, it can learn more about them. So, once your assistant has recorded and organized your customer communications, it will be able to use this data to assist your customer service employees. So you need to start by building up a data history, also known as “corporate memory”. Over time, your virtual assistant will improve its understanding of each customer to suggest personalized responses based on age, gender, style, purchases and past experiences.
Your virtual communication assistant aims first and foremost to facilitate your employees’ work, not to answer for them. Of course, over time, artificial intelligence and automation will suggest answers under the supervision of your employees. The ultimate goal is to make exchanges smoother, better and, above all, faster, to ensure quality customer service 24-7.
The first step in setting up a virtual communication assistant in your company is to gather and record customer exchanges. Then you’ll be able to analyze them, and possibly automate certain repetitive, non-value-added exchanges. You need to make sure you have a reliable data source where you can find all your customer interactions.
What your communication assistant can do
- Formulate or reformulate a response to a customer with the employee’s approval;
- Offer a personalized automatic response in case of absence;
- Establish the customer’s availability to communicate only when he or she is available, and avoid calling for nothing;
- Research and suggest useful information links to answer a customer’s question;
- Analyze customer feelings during exchanges to detect dissatisfaction and intervene quickly;
- Automatically transcribe voice messages to avoid manual transcription on paper;
- Follow-up on communication feedback within the agreed timeframe;
- Automatically translate exchanges into the customer’s and employee’s language;
- Correct employee clerical errors before responses are sent;
- Suggest improvements in style, tone and politeness based on customer history.
- Recommend a response in the customer’s preferred communication channel;
- And much more!
Thanks to automation and artificial intelligence, your virtual communication assistant reduces interruptions and repetitive tasks. As a result, it re
Equipping your employees with a virtual customer communication assistant enriches your employees’ interactions with your customers and strengthens the bond of trust to ensure your organization’s longevity. I invite you to read the RBC article on virtual communication assistants.
