Conversational AI can make your social media presence a huge asset. 64% of respondents say that they would rather talk to a company than call them. This statistic is applicable to you if you are active on social media and communicate with customers via your social channels.
Facebook Messenger receives over 1,000,000 messages every month from people and businesses. Chatbots and virtual assistants can save the day with all those questions, but only so many people who can answer them. Conversational AI technology is a great way to increase efficiency in your team and enable more customers access the help they need quicker.
Continue reading to learn how you can use a conversational AI tool to help social customer service and social commerce.
Bonus: Receive a simple-to-use Customer Services Report Template for free. This template will help you track and calculate all your customer service efforts each month.
What is conversational artificial intelligence?
Conversational AI (artificial Intelligence) is a term that refers to technologies like chatbots and virtual assistants that “talk” with people (e.g. answer questions).
Conversational AI tools work thanks to machine learning, natural language processing, and automated responses. They are expected to be able to recognize and imitate human communication and language, and thus create an experience of human interaction.
Customer service is often handled by conversational AI applications. These applications can be found online at websites and in social media. AI technology can speed up and streamline the process of answering customer questions and routing them.
What is conversational AI?
Conversational AI works mainly because of two functions. Machine learning is the first. Machine learning, which is simply put, means that technology “learns” from its users and improves with each use. It gathers information through its interactions. The information is then used to improve itself over time.
This system will perform better six months after it is added to your page, and even better a year later.
This second stage is known as natural language processing or NLP. This is how artificial intelligence learns to understand language. It can then move on to natural language generation once it has learned to recognize words and phrases. This is how it communicates with customers.
Natural language generation simply means that the AI mimics human conversation. The AI chatbot can respond to customer messages on social media asking when their order will ship. Based on its previous experience answering similar questions, and because it knows which phrases work well in responding to shipping questions, the AI chatbot will respond accordingly.
Although it may sound tedious, conversational AI chatbots can make customer service very easy. This is an example of what you can expect it look like in action.
Heyday
Conversational AI tools have many benefits
Time-saving
If everything were perfect, all your customers would receive excellent customer service. However, some customers will come to you with simpler questions than others. Chatbots and virtual assistants are a great way for everyone to be satisfied without having to overextend yourself or your team.
Chatbots that use AI can handle simple customer service problems and let you and your team deal with more complicated ones. It reduces both the wait time and cost. Heyday by Hootsuite is a chatbot that helps businesses automate up to 80% of customer service calls!
Heyday
Conversational AI is able to handle multiple claims simultaneously where you and your team cannot. This makes it a much more efficient customer service system.
Accessibility increased
Your customers can’t reach you 24 hours a day, seven days a semaine. This problem can be solved by equipping your social media platforms with Conversational AI. Chatbots can help customers who need assistance outside of normal business hours. This solves a logistical problem and helps chatbots save time. But there is more to it.
Because conversational AI increases your accessibility, it can help customers feel more loved and cared for. It is possible that midnight may be the last time someone can get their question answered. Heyday is an AI tool that makes it easy to get an answer to your shipping question in seconds.
Heyday
Although not all problems can be solved by a virtual assistant chatal AI allows customers to get the assistance they need.
Help your customers make purchasing decisions
Conversational AI is a great tool for solving customer support issues. It can also help in the creation and modification of sales.
Machine learning has the ability to personalize customer experiences. A Conversational AI platform can recommend products or add-ons to customers that they may not have considered.
This is an example of how these recommendations look in practice:
Heyday
Heyday, a conversational AI solution, makes these recommendations based upon what’s in the customer’s cart and their purchase inquires (e.g. the category they are interested in).
The result? You can make more sales without lifting a finger.
Outside of normal business hours
Conversational AI is able to assist customers in making purchasing decisions. The best thing about running an online business is that sales can be made at any hour. Only thing that could interfere with this is the type of shipping, sales or product questions customers might have if there aren’t representatives.
This is easily solved by a chatbot or virtual assistant. It is available 24/7 so it can help anyone who has a question before they complete their order. This allows you to close more sales and reduces the chance of customers abandoning their order.
Heyday allows you to set up your chatbot to include “Add To Cart” calls and direct customers to checkout.
Heyday
No more language barriers
Conversational AI’s ability to eliminate language barriers is a key feature. Virtual assistants and chatbots almost all come with language translator software. They can interpret, detect, and create almost any language easily.
This means that customer service interactions are not impeded by linguistic differences. This makes your business more accessible and welcoming to a wider range of customers.
Heyday
Best practices for conversational AI
When to involve (human) customer service representatives
A great tool for solving simple problems is artificial intelligence. It’s important to be aware of their limitations. Conversational AI is not able to handle every customer’s issue. Chatbots can be used as an assistant to customer service agents, but not as a replacement. Keep agents available to assist with more complicated inquiries.
Optimize for Social Commerce
Your Conversational AI should be used to its full potential. Customers should also have access to as much help as possible. A conversational AI tool that is optimized for social commerce is the best way to achieve both of these goals.
Heyday is a tool designed with retailers in mind. It seamlessly integrates with ecommerce and shipping tools to connect your back-end business and customers, allowing you to create the best customer experience.
Some integrations by Heyday include:
ShopifyMagentoPrestaShopPanier BleuSAPLightspeed780+ shipping providers
Heyday allows you to connect conversational AI with any of your customers’ preferred communication channels, including:
MessengerInstagramWhatsAppGoogle Business MessagesKakao TalkWeb and mobile chatsEmail
All of this interaction can be managed from one platform.
Conversational AI can be used to automate sales when it is optimized for social commerce.
Heyday
Examples of conversational AI
This is how big and small brands use chatbots and virtual assistants powered by conversational AI to communicate with customers on social media.
mazon
Although they may not be social media platforms, it is a good idea to learn from the largest online retailer in the country.
Amazon’s virtual assistant is its first line for customer service. Amazon’s experience is heavily driven by prompt questions such as the one above. It also includes data from recent orders, which allows customers to see what they might be interested in.
DAVIDsTEA
Heyday is used by DAVIDSTEA for social customer support. The Canadian specialty tea company uses a more language-oriented approach. The chatbot uses common speech patterns in order to give customers the information and answers they seek.
Clocks and colours
Clocks and Colours, a jewelry brand, uses a Facebook chatbot. The brand’s virtual assistant activates when someone reaches out. This virtual assistant, similar to Amazon’s bot services customers via prompt questioning and light language generation.
The brand’s traditional customer support channels are integrated with Clocks and Colours bot. The AI will notify a customer service representative if a user requests to chat with them. If no one is available, an “away” message will be sent and the inquiry is added into the queue of customer service representatives.
Heyday’s conversational AI tools for retailers allow you to engage with customers on the channels they prefer and convert customer conversations into sales. At scale, deliver 5-star customer experiences
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Conversational AI: What it is, Why you should care and how to do it right.
