How conversational self-service transforms customer experience – eBanqo

These days, all business interactions are powered by conversations. Before now, customers weren’t active participants in discourse with businesses. Communication was one way; the business spoke and the customer merely listened.

The rise of messaging platforms enhanced communication between businesses and customers. Businesses extended their services to where customers spent a lot of time, making conversations easy and frequent.

Conversations are a significant part of the customers’ journey; from onboarding, sales to after-sales support. Considering that customers leave a business after one negative experience, how can business convert self-service into a delightful experience for a customer? The answer lies in conversational self-service.

What is conversational self-service?

Conversational self-service refers to a process where issue resolution is powered by near real-time exchanges between the customer and the business. It is an improvement from the old self-service options where customers are given a series of instructions, with little room for the customer to interact and provide specific details.

Now, through messaging apps, self-service is engaging, allowing more input from the customer. Just like the previous self-service alternatives, it uses an interactive flow. The difference is that the customer has some element of control. The Customer adheres to the conversation’s flow, yet is able to contribute to the conversation, leading to issue resolution.

The rise of conversational self-service

Self-service has evolved over time. At first, it was a brochure or printed material that educated customers on what to do in certain situations. From print, it evolved into FAQ pages on websites that contain a series of instructions or actions to take if customers encounter certain difficulties. Then there are IVR and web interfaces.

IVR follows strict programming and flows with little flexibility. To resolve issues, customers must follow the instructions issued. Constrained by a strict menu, customers input was largely limited. Then came web interfaces that enabled customers to perform some services in browsers, like purchases, without getting in touch with a business.

Technological advancements addressed the shortcomings of each of the methods above. Businesses are now using messaging platforms to make self-service a two-way conversational experience.

Conversational interfaces are a newer and better approach to self-service. It widens the range of self-service options and makes them accessible through messaging. Businesses extend their offerings into third-party platforms, not owned by the businesses but actively used by their customers. These businesses bring none of their unique identifiers or branding to the platform. Rather, they utilize the platform’s features, feel and familiarity to serve their customers in new and better ways.

Different forms of conversational self-service

Conversational self-service empowers customers to complete a transaction without any assistance from the business. A business determines the services it wants its customers to perform independently. Here are some examples.

1.Customer support: traditional customer support revolves around contact centres. As the only means to get help, contact call volumes are high and customer satisfaction low as customers wait a long time to speak to harried support agents. Issues aren’t always resolved at first contact, leading to another round of calls and lower satisfaction.

By widening support channels, customers have alternative means of solving their problems without any input from or direct contact with the business. Through conversations, customers bypass contact centres and email to resolve issues themselves.

2. Appointment booking and confirmation: Another form of self-service is appointment booking. Before, appointments were scheduled through calls, web forms and scheduling apps. With messaging, customers can schedule appointments without consulting a business. It enables a business to exchange documents or other multi-media contents with the customer if any, within the same conversation and in real-time.

3. Tracking order status: When customers want to inquire about the status of an order or transaction, they typically call or send an email. With conversational self-service, a customer has an alternative means of tracking a transaction without contacting the business. This removes the stress associated with intermittently logging in to other platforms to track progress. Within a messaging app, customers receive updates on current status, delivery dates or even delays. Using messaging platforms doesn’t make other self-service channels redundant. Rather, it offers customers more options, enabling them to choose a platform that is most convenient.

How conversational self-service improves customer experience

Here are some of the ways that conversational self-service improves customer experience:

1. Convenience: An advantage of conversational self-service is that it utilizes platforms where customers spend time. Therefore, a business’ services are within easy reach. This removes the need to log on to another platform to access a service.
2. Familiarity: before the evolution of conversational self-service, customers had to follow prompts or even sometimes, were left on their own to navigate through the platform. In conversational self-service, customers navigate a familiar route. They are not required to learn new skills no matter how simple. It simply follows the operational model of the messaging platform.
3. Quick resolution rate: Before conversational self-service, customers resolve issues either through contact centres or email. Conversational self-service enables customers to resolve issues at a much faster rate compared to emails and phone calls, where they deal with wait time and delayed response. Now, through conversations, a customer is guided through issue resolution successfully.

Customers are willing to resolve issues themselves. This presents an opportunity for businesses to innovate another touchpoint, making an otherwise tedious process easier, interactive, and humane. It’s another opportunity to create a better experience for customers.

To address the need to deliver real-time, convenient and personalized services and support to customers, eBanqo Inc., a customer engagement start-up, has built a value system for businesses, enabling them to deliver faster and efficient services in messaging apps. Leveraging the rise and adoption of conversational AI, they help businesses of all sizes build digital assistants for their websites, mobile apps and messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Slack, facilitating speedier responses that customers have come to expect.

As one of its use cases, eBanqo helps businesses to innovate their customer service, by eliminating the need for customers to spend several hours trying to reach businesses via email or phone calls. eBanqo leverages the rapid rise of messaging apps and the progress made in conversational AI to automate responses to common customer questions as well as provide Live Chat assistance in customers’ preferred messaging platforms. This speeds up response times and also resolves issues at first contact. On its platform, organizations can manage all messaging platforms and all social media interactions from one dashboard. The platform’s robust analytics provides insight into customers’ behaviour, helping businesses make better decisions.

eBanqo’s CEO, Charles Ifedi, started his career over 20-years ago in the technology sector as a software engineer. In a recent interview, he discussed eBanqo’s value proposition saying “eBanqo aims to simplify digital interactions between businesses and their customers. Our solution is completely self-service and automated, which means we can offer organisations 24/7 services. We reduce the organisation’s costs, improve their efficiency, and potentially increase revenue for businesses based on the fact that their customers are now able to transact across more channels than they currently have.”

Charles has had an interesting and successful career; starting off at SystemSpecs, PwC, and then Accenture. In 2002, he co-founded Interswitch where he helped build the business for over 15 years. At Interswitch, he led the business solutions team, the international expansion team, and he went on to lead the Consumer business. In parallel, he became the CEO of Verve, an offshoot of Interswitch, where he led the brand to carve a niche for itself; from its inception till early 2018. The culmination of his wealth of experience and insight were instrumental to the birth of eBanqo.