Want sticky customers? Think virtual assistants!

Acquiring customers is a long and tedious journey for all businesses, that requires a lot of investment and time before leads finally get converted into customers. While it is a moment of celebration for businesses, it is just the beginning of the customer journey. Providing excellent customer engagement will be the differentiating factor between a new user getting frustrated and abandoning the product or creating a loyal customer with increased lifetime value.

Customer engagement help customers familiarize themselves with the product or service. With conversational AI the customer engagement can be personalized and interactive depending on the needs of the customers. Virtual assistants are AI-enabled and can be integrated easily into existing systems.

Virtual assistants from interface can influence and shape the customer journey in multiple ways. They are available 24*7, allowing customers to interact at their time, convenience and pace.

Pre-Boarding – Virtual Assistants provide first-time customers with much-needed guidance when it comes to making decisions. The assistants can conversationally understand the customer’s requirements to offer the best plan or product that meets their requirements. Virtual Assistants can help new customers with onboarding, by simplifying processes and helping them navigate through complex forms.

Discovery – Discovery is an important phase in the customer journey. It can be overwhelming of there is too much information to process at the beginning of the journey. The easiest way is to provide small incremental steps that customers can follow without getting lost.

Virtual assistants can ace this method by “talking” to the customers through each of these steps. By assessing the preferences of the users, assistants can help recommend products that are in line with your preferences. If the customer understands the product well he will be able to achieve his first success with the product faster, reducing the churn rate of customers.

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Customer experience – Virtual assistants gather a lot of information on customer usage, based on how they interact with the assistant. This helps businesses find the pain points in the customer journey, and use it constructively to make changes for better customer experience and usage.

Updates – For most online services, updates are sent to users to their email accounts. With an average user receiving 90 emails on a daily basis it is easy for things to get lost in a cluttered mailbox. AI assistants can provide an alternative channel for the updates in an engaging way and even have quick query resolution.

Account Management – Assistants can provide functionalities for account management without any human/agent intervention such as updating account details. The users can take control of their account and update their information quickly and accurately through the AI assistant.

Customer Survey – Customer surveys are obtrusive and boring, and most users have to be incentivized to take it. AI assistants provide customers with a conversational medium to provide their feedback; making it more interactive, quick and personalized. Asking survey questions one at a time along with conversational personalized messages helps creates a better experience.

AI-enabled virtual assistants have the power to transform customer engagement and bring them along on a positive journey so that they use their products or services. It is essentially a synergistic way in which businesses can eliminate antiquated methods like paper-based application forms, the session-based format of live chat or in-person meetings, and the challenges of interrupted web sessions. It can create a seamless engagement process through the customer lifecycle.

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