Cookie Preferences
close
Articles Related to Chatbots
Reading time icon
10
min read
August 25, 2020
Aug 25, 2020

How our sales & customer success teams use chatbots

Liselot Hofman
Written by
Liselot
Rebekka and Janine

In 2020, more and more customer-facing teams are taking on an extra team member: the chatbot. The same goes for our sales and customer success teams. Chatbots take care of a lot of work, giving them the opportunity to work more efficiently and create a great customer experience at the same time.

With Trengo, you can make your own chatbots without having to use code. But there is a difference between just using them and getting the best possible results out of them. That's why I asked Rebekka (sales operations manager) and Janine (customer happiness specialist) how their teams use bots to sell more and make customers happy.

How to use chatbots and flowbots

Chatbots

How to use chatbots and flowbots

A chatbot is best used for answering frequently asked questions. For example:

  • “What are your shipping costs?”
  • “What are your business hours?
  • “When will my order be delivered?”
  • “Can you forward me to somebody from department X?”

According to Janine, you don't want these types of questions to be answered by an agent. “You would like to have these questions answered automatically. Chatbots can give direct answers or provide in-depth information by replying with one of our help center articles.” Rebekka agrees: “Time is very valuable, especially when your team is busy. Answering all these questions manually would take up a lot of time for our agents.”

Both Rebekka and Janine stress how continuous training is key for creating strong chatbots. “Chatbots are easy to set up, but you have to keep training them if you want to get the best results out of them. You can make them really intelligent if you want to,” says Rebekka.

Janine can relate to this: “For me, working on your chatbot is a never-ending process. You have to keep adding questions and answers that your customers may have."

When using a chatbot, you have to make sure to offer good fallback options. “If the chatbot is unable to answer a question, it's important that it routes the conversation to a human employee. If this takes too long, your prospect will get frustrated fast. This means you have to closely monitor and regularly train your bot to prevent this from happening,” says Rebekka.

Flowbots

How to use chatbots and flowbots

By using the flowbot, our visitors are led to the required information step by step. “When you’re on a boat in the middle of the ocean, a flowbot would give you the tools to come on land,” Janine says with a smile. “You really have to think about the right journey. You have to think through every step.”

Rebekka has an extra tip when it comes to mapping out this journey: “Draw out the customer journey with your team. This makes it easy to create the steps within Trengo afterwards.” After creating your flowbot, you can test it in the playground. “This is super valuable because you want to test it before you activate it for your customers.”

“When you’re on a boat in the middle of the ocean, a flowbot would give you the tools to come on land.” - Janine

So how do we keep a pulse on our bot's performance? "In the end, it's important to know if your chatbot is actually helping out customers. You can monitor customer satisfaction at the end of every conversation, which is super helpful and valuable", Janine explains.

The flowbot also has a location tool. Janine explains what this does: “For example, if your business has offices in five different places in the Netherlands, you can set up a flowbot and then ask your visitors to give their address. When the customer says Utrecht, the flowbot then connects you with one of your offices that is closest to Utrecht.”

Making your bot human

When making your bot, there are some importants aspects you need to think about before you let it interact with your customers. Rebekka shared her golden tip on using chatbots: "Your bot should be efficient, but also feel kind of human. I like the feature within Trengo where you can delay the reaction time so that visitors get to see that the bot is 'typing'. This gives off a human feeling."

But there is a thin line between this customer experience and their expectations. "You do not want to trick people into having a conversation with a real human agent. They should know it is a bot from the beginning," says Rebekka.

The benefits of using a flowbot

When I asked Rebekka about the benefits of using a flowbot ourselves, she became enthusiastic right away. “One of the biggest benefits is that no leads are lost during the hours we're closed. Outside of business hours, we receive inquiries and questions, which we can follow up the next day.”

"Because of the flowbot we can be of better service, and if needed, we can do our homework before reaching out.” - Rebekka

The flowbot is a true lead generator and asks leads for basic information about their business. “Because of this information, we already have an idea of what the prospect wants before contacting them. This way we can be of better service, and if needed, we can do our homework before reaching out.”

Rebekka uses the analytics in Trengo to monitor the flowbot’s performance. "I can see exactly how many conversations our bot has per day. I can pick the channel, set the exact time period I want to analyze, and then get statistics on all conversations. This helps me to set up KPI's and measure the team's performance."

How to use chatbots and flowbots

Why our customers use bots

After speaking to our Trengo bot, customers also want to create one themselves. Rebekka tells me why: “There are three main reasons why our customers want to use bots, and they are pretty much the same as ours. First, timesaving. They see chatbots as convenient. Some businesses get the same question 20-50 times a day.“

“Besides the timesaving part, the biggest reason is that we are living in a time where we have so many different communication channels. As companies, we want to be present on each one of them so we can let our customers choose how they want to reach us. Of course, being available on all those platforms is a challenge - time, money, and capacity wise - but flowbots make it much easier,” says Rebekka.

The flowbot also makes companies look professional. Rebekka: “If you do it right, adding a chatbot to your website definitely makes you look more professional and advanced."

According to Janine, the biggest reason that companies want to use flowbots is efficiency. “They want their tickets to automatically go to the right department instead of landing in a big pile somewhere. This also makes customer contact more measurable and provides companies with better insights. Some of our customers have created some really nice bots. It is great to see them create these cool things out of our piece of code."

I hope that these insights got you just as excited about chatbots and flowbots as we are. Would you like to know more? Feel free to chat with us! Chances are you will meet our flowbot too. 🤖

Liselot Hofman
Written by
Liselot

Table of Contents