Omnichannel Experience with Chatbots: Obstacles and Solutions

Anastasiia Bilous
Chatbots Life
Published in
6 min readOct 3, 2018

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Omnichannel and chatbots were meant to be together. While first enables seamless customer experience, the second provides the speed and accuracy of interaction with the business. It also helps business to save money and increase efficiency, and currently businesses are trying to use them in couple.

Chatbots and omnichannel are mostly used in these business domains:

  • Retail
  • Job search
  • Delivery
  • Consulting
  • Booking
  • Tourism

On of the greatest examples of such tandem is FirstJob — it is a company that uses an advanced chatbot Mya that works as a personal recruiting assistant: Mya manages candidate pools, gives personal consultations via SMS, Facebook, Skype, email or chat, asks candidate questions and alerts them when a position has been filled.

She works through different channels and processes information about candidates, so they don’t need to repeat the same thing twice.

FirstJob reported that Mya automates 75% of the work with clients. Studies show that Mya increased candidate engagement by over 150%!

However, not all businesses manage to use chatbots with omnichannel this successfully. Let’s explore, why they should, and what issues are to be solved.

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What is omnichannel?

Omnichannel is one of the most important parts of any modern business. At its core, omnichannel means seamless interaction between a business and its clients, who have a single user journey no matter which platform they use. In the world where businesses become more and more client centric, it is very important that all platforms are united around the user.

According to Walker, by 2020 customer experience will mean much more than price or product quality for a consumer. That’s why currently companies try to integrate omnichannel into their business processes.

Customer needs first

What do customers need? While the answer is simple and even obvious, businesses struggle to provide these:

  1. Instant and relevant feedback
  2. High-quality online service
  3. Omnichannel
  4. User-friendly interface and a possibility to buy a product online in just a few clicks

To achieve this, companies need to learn how to identify and track the client journey, gather data and give instant answers to requests via any digital channels.

However, like you could already notice, businesses have problems with this. These are three main obstacles companies face:

  • Inability to process and interpret Big Data correctly
  • Lack of knowledge in automatization of the customer service
  • Struggles with identifying a client between channels

According to eConsultancy, customers prefer to get support via three channels: phone, email or instant chat on a website. It can be challenging for businesses to be able to process requests effectively 24/7, because of the human factor and limited work hours.

Chatbots are almost a 100% solution to this problem. Here’s why.

Chatbots and omnichannel

Different technologies enable omnichannel, but people don’t really care about technologies. They just want their issue to be solved effectively and quickly, without any effort from their side.

The biggest challenge here is the ability to continue the conversation where it started even though a customer can address support from different devices and social media accounts. It probably won’t be hard for you to imagine how irritating it is to repeat the same thing for several times.

Сhatbots united with omnichannel can help solve this, and with better customer service will bring more clients and also save money businesses currently spend on call centers and in-house support teams.

Though many businesses currently shift from phone calls to live chats into their websites and apps, they struggle to provide quick answers, which are key in chats. A customer won’t wait, and even a minute is a massive delay. Chatbots solve this problem completely, answering in a blink of an eye.

Source: Twilio

According to Twilio, 90% of consumers prefer to use messengers for connecting with a business. This is a key to a success for businesses both from a customer perspective, and that of business as well: chatbots help to automatize primary requests and save human resources.

How and why use chatbots in business

According to BI Intelligence, chatbots are able to save up to 30% of resources companies spend on customer service.

YouDrive’s case illustrates this data perfectly: after integrating chatbots in their customer service, this car sharing company managed to shrink a number of incoming phone calls by ⅔. As a result, they saved money on corporate call centers and improved service, as chatbots open a possibility of processing text requests.

Another example is Nina — web-assistant of Swedbank, that is able to have 30.000 conversations per month and is able to process over 350 different requests from clients. Such service scale is a dream of many companies.

Some studies show that only a 10% improvement in lead management, that includes customer service as well, can lead to a 40% increase in sales.

Concerns and issues

Some businesses are concerned about the ability of chatbots to respond correctly to customers requests. Therefore, they are afraid customers won’t enjoy a conversation with a robot, and it will drive them off.

Statistics shows, however, that most modern consumers don’t mind using chatbots to get quick answers to their questions. According to Emarketer, chatbots are popular among one third of all internet users.

A survey by LivePerson showed that 33% of consumers are positive about chatbots being more personal, compared to the 19% of participants who think of them negatively. The remaining 48% were indifferent as long as their issue was resolved.

What businesses should really worry about, are these issues:

  • Most companies lack experience in implementing chatbots and tailoring them according to business structure and needs
  • Chatbot development is far from business-processes, and some IT vendors just use the hype around bots to sell them
  • There are almost no solutions on the market that can be integrated with third-party platforms, that’s why it can be difficult to enable omnichannel
  • Some companies practice pseudo-omnichannel approach: they learned how to use several communication channels, but they are still not integrated enough with each other to allow truly seamless interaction between channels

Some of these issues will be solved with time: chatbots are becoming more and more intelligent, and closer to business. That’s why I expect that integrating them with different platforms will become easier with time.

However, there are no magical out-of-the-box solutions — businesses will still need to make great work on digitizing their processes and adjusting them to chatbots.

Conclusion

Chatbots have great potential to help businesses save money, increase effectiveness of communications and increase customer loyalty. All of this results in bigger sales and greater advantage among competitors.

Soon chatbots will become a must-have solution for any business that wants to stay relevant on a market that’s changing at a crazy pace. Early adoption of chatbots can help businesses to gain necessary experience and therefore become one of those companies that can provide truly omnichannel experience for their customers.

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Seasoned operations and growth strategist. I am that kind of person who tries to understand «why» and not only «what».