Customer service chatbots are booming. The coronavirus crisis, which has been accompanied by lockdowns and store closures, has shown how important online services are for customer support. Increasingly, customers are looking online for ways to get answers and find help without being bound by regular business hours. Fast and easy 24/7 service is of the essence. The green electricity and gas provider eprimo launched its Sophie chatbot before the pandemic, relying on solutions and expertise from adesso. Sophie answers questions from eprimo customers and has already conducted over a million chat sessions. The results have been outstanding, with Sophie able to independently handle nine out of ten enquiries to the satisfaction of the company’s customers.
Chatbot support for a service package from a single source
Chatbots such as Sophie can relieve the burden on call centres and help to reduce costs. However, chatbots must also be able to efficiently and dependably handle the more complex questions for companies to achieve truly high levels of customer satisfaction with this new technology. This is where factors such as response quality, stability and scalability come into play, all of which require the latest expert knowledge. In addition to outstanding cognitive abilities thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning methods in dealing with customers, chatbots also need to be connected directly to back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The integration of further customer channels – such as telephone, messaging services like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, mobile apps and text messaging – is also a must for any modern ominchannel strategy.
Enabling customers to enhance their own chatbots
adesso supports companies such as eprimo during chatbot development with a package of services that are necessary to connect chatbots with a business’s information systems. Training and the further enhancement of the assistant are a part of that package. As a result, clients receive support from a single source, without having to oversee and coordinate a variety of different service providers.
adesso enables the specialists at eprimo to train the chatbot as a learning system and successively make it more intelligent. That allows Sophie to subsequently handle ever more complex queries while triggering downstream data processing in the company’s ERP systems.
Solutions for chatbot projects: Workbench and Runtime
On average, Sophie responds to roughly 70,000 enquiries a month, and that figure is rising. adesso’s Hans-Peter Kuessner oversees the project on behalf of eprimo. “Customer satisfaction depends to a decisive extent on the number and scope of benefits that the chatbot offers users,” he says. “That is why the success of the chatbot’s integration into the company’s processes is so important and sets our solution apart from other providers who are unable to deliver on this promise.”