September 9, 2020

Personalization and chatbots: tips for creating the best experience

Ilustration showing how chatbots can be personalized for a good customer experience

Table of content

Today, personalization is the key to a good experience. The more personalized treatment you give your customers, the more satisfied they'll be with your brand. 

They'll feel special receiving a service designed especially for them, plus it'll also increase their chances of buying.

According to a study by Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand when they're acknowledged, remembered or get relevant recommendations.

In order to do this, artificial intelligence-driven chatbots can be a great tool. In this article we'll tell you why.

Your customers’ preferred assistant

AI virtual assistants have a lot more features than you think, especially when it comes to personalizing interaction with your customers.

Let's see everything they let you do, plus some recommendations to improve the experience.

Related article: Personalization and empathy: 4 ways to apply it in CX

1.   Create a chatbot tailored to your customer

The first step in offering a personalized experience is knowing your customers' needs and predicting the questions or problems they want to solve.

Some frequently asked questions, for example, are store hours, product availability, payment methods, or the status of a purchase.

Once you know what your customers will ask, it's time to act and upload your content. Aivo's bot offers you different ways to upload knowledge. You can upload the questions and answers manually or import them from Excel or Zendesk Guide.

A good way to personalize the dialogue even more is to design conversations and guide your customers towards the answers. For this, there are flows. These are structured sets of questions and answers so you can build a decision tree for the user. This way, they'll follow the conversation thread until they get the information they're looking for.

That said, you need to understand that flows are a good feature as long as they're not the center of the conversation. Customers have to be able to communicate with you whenever they want, apart from this decision tree. This brings us to the next point.

2.   Speak in your customers' language

While flows are helpful for some things, if you want to have more human conversations with your customers you need just that: talking!

To get this, bots driven by artificial intelligence can understand natural language, regionalisms, and even typos. This is crucial in order to offer a contextualized experience.

Let's look at the following example. Say your business offers products for all Latin American countries. Your bot can speak Spanish, of course. But wouldn't it be great if you can understand each country's regionalisms?

Your customers will clearly feel more comfortable chatting in their everyday language.

3.   The key is to be playful

Go ahead and create fun conversations! Surprise your customers and break the ice using emojis, gifs, and images. You can also use holidays to continue contextualizing the experience.

Aivo's solution, for example, has a really useful option to download pre-loaded content from a Marketplace within the platform. It includes packages for holidays like New Years, Mother's Day and Halloween.

All of this is a way to get a smile out of your customers. And don't forget: they'll always remember how you made them feel.

4.   Metrics and analytics: discover patterns and personalize your bot

Once your bot is up and running, you need to constantly monitor its performance.

This is key to improving your content and detecting potential flaws. But it's also a great way to get to know your customers better.

With reports and analytics, you'll be able to thoroughly understand their needs, questions, and concerns, so you can provide increasingly personalized answers.

For example, Aivo's smart bot has two basic sections: Analytics and Training.

The first shows chat reports, channels most used by customers, and satisfaction survey results.

The second section, on the other hand, shows unresolved interactions, which lets you find new content that can adapt to the actual needs of your customers.

This is how you'll learn from your users and enrich the bot's content with new intents, meanings or ways to ask.

Related article: Data and personalization: Zendesk’s approach to customer experience

5.   Get to know (and remember!) the customer

Metrics will help you obtain general customer patterns. The next step? Get to know each one individually. “But how?!” you're asking. Don't worry, it's easier than it sounds.

If you have Live Chat integrated with your bot, your agents will be able to access the “customer profiles.” This tool lets you access all relevant information about each customer, including their conversation history, products and services they bought, and any issues they had.

Besides accessing this data, your agents will be able to add notes and reminders, and pick up conversations where they left off. 

So you'll be able to provide a unique and personalized experience, and your customer won't have to repeat the same information each time they contact you.

6.   Answer on their preferred channels

Personalization is also related to being present on each customer's preferred channels.

Today the brand doesn't determine the channels for interaction. Instead, it's now the customers who choose when, how and where to communicate.

This is why omnichannel service is essential for offering the same quality of service across all channels and serving all customers equally.

With this kind of service, your customers will be able to get a fluid and consistent experience on channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or SMS.

And this is one of the best features of bots: they can be implemented on any channel, without any extra work from your team.

In the case of Aivo's bot, for example, you can upload, edit and manage content for all channels from a single platform.

7.   Offer immediate solutions

Just like customers choose where to contact you, they'll also choose when. This means three things.

First, your customer service has to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Second, the faster you answer and the faster you provide a solution to your customers, the more satisfied they'll be.

And finally, you must adapt to their time. That means you have to offer asynchronous communication. What does this mean? That a customer can communicate with you on WhatsApp in the morning, and then come back to answer you in the afternoon when their job's over.

This is where your chatbot becomes the hero. It would be impossible to provide this type of service only with agents. Not only would it be a huge cost for your company, but your employees would be overwhelmed trying to answer immediately and asynchronously.

A chatbot, on the other hand, can do just that: provide immediate answers any time of the day, adapting to each customer's routine.

8.   Make personalized recommendations

The more personalized your service, the greater the chance of customer conversion. Not only because they'll be delighted with the experience, but also because you can offer them exactly what they're looking for.

Chatbots are great for applying cross-selling and up-selling techniques, because they can make fully personalized recommendations based on your users' preferences.

So for example, if a customer requests a pair of red sneakers, the chatbot can also show them another type of casual footwear in the same size and color.

For that, you can use multiple resources, like a carousel, buttons, and flows. You simply have to create the content with the relationships between the products from the Knowledge section.

Ready to create a personalized experience with chatbots? 

There are a lot of features that conversational chatbots offer to personalize the experience. And you know what's best of all? If it's a solution created for customer service, you can implement all these recommendations in less time than you think.

You can quickly and easily improve your content, connect new channels and download reports with just a couple clicks from the same platform.

If you want to know more about how our solutions can help your business, don't wait to schedule a demo with one of our representatives.

Are you looking for new ways to improve your CX?

Our customer service solutions powered by conversational AI can help you deliver an efficient, 24/7 experience  to your customers. Get in touch with one of our specialists to further discuss how they can help your business.