Category: Blog

As Language Models (LLMs) continue to become more sophisticated, prompt engineering techniques have become increasingly essential to make the most of their capabilities. Prompt engineering involves crafting the right input prompts to prompt the LLMs to generate the desired outputs. In this article, we’ll explore four prompt engineering techniques:

1. Zero-shot or few-shot prompts
2. Chain of thought prompting
3. Self-consistency
4. Knowledge generation prompts

Zero-shot or few-shot prompts:

Zero-shot prompting involves presenting a task or question to the model without providing prior examples or context. For instance, we could use zero-shot prompting to ask a language model to analyze the sentiment of a given tweet and classify it as positive, negative, or neutral.

On the other hand, few-shot prompting involves providing a language model with a task or question along with a few examples of the desired output. This approach helps steer the model toward generating responses that are more relevant to the task at hand. For example, we could use a few shot prompting to give us the sentiment response of the tweet in a format that we desire as shown in the example below:

Chain of Thought (CoT):

Chain of Thought (CoT) Prompting is a technique used to enhance performance on complex reasoning tasks and generate more context-aware responses. This method was proposed by Google in 2022. The authors explain that this reasoning ability can be developed in language models via a simple process of providing a few chains of thought demonstrations, known as CoT prompting. With CoT prompting, the model is instructed to produce a few reasoning steps before generating the final answer.

For example, we can use CoT prompting to solve a customer churn problem. Consider the following scenario:

Using CoT prompting, the language model is prompted to generate a few intermediate reasoning steps to arrive at the final answer. This may include calculating the total number of customers at the end of the month, subtracting the number of customers lost due to churn, and dividing the result by the starting number of customers. By prompting the model to generate a chain of thought, we can ensure that the model arrives at the correct answer while also gaining insight into the reasoning process used by the model.

Self-Consistency:

Self-consistency is a decoding strategy that aims to improve the chain of thought prompting more complex reasoning problems. The traditional approach of using a single reasoning path may not always yield the most comprehensive or accurate results, as complex reasoning problems often have multiple valid solutions that can be arrived at through different paths. To overcome this limitation, self-consistency involves sampling from a diverse set of reasoning paths and selecting the most consistent answer.

User: Q: A company sells three types of products: Product A, Product B, and Product C. The sales data for the month of January is as follows: Product A – 100 units, Product B – 50 units, and Product C – 75 units. The sales data for the month of February is as follows: Product A – 125 units, Product B – 100 units, and Product C – 125 units. If the average price of Product A is $50, Product B is $75, and Product C is $100, what is the total revenue earned by the company for the two months?

To solve this problem using self-consistency prompting, the language model first generates a diverse set of reasoning paths, considering various factors such as the sales data, average price, and time period. The model then selects the most consistent answer by marginalizing out the sampled reasoning paths.

Knowledge generating:

Generated knowledge prompting is a technique that utilizes additional knowledge provided as part of the context to improve the performance of complex tasks such as commonsense reasoning. It involves using a language model to generate question-related knowledge statements, which are then used in a second language model to make predictions. The highest-confidence prediction is selected as the final output, which helps to improve the accuracy of the model.

This technique offers a simple and effective way to incorporate external knowledge into pre-trained sequence models, without requiring task-specific supervision or access to a structured knowledge base.

Consider the following task:

Question: “What will happen if you put a metal spoon in a microwave oven?”

Answer choices:
A) The spoon will melt
B) The microwave will explode
C) Nothing will happen
D) The spoon will get hot

To solve this problem using generated knowledge prompting, we could generate knowledge statements for metal and microwaves. For example:

• “Metals conduct electricity well”
• “Microwaves heat food by exciting water molecules”

We would then use a second language model to make predictions for each statement. Based on the highest-confidence prediction, we can choose the answer option that is most likely to be correct. In this case, the correct answer would be D) The spoon will get hot, based on the knowledge generated.

Please check the whole prompt sequence below:

Get ready to take your prompt engineering skills to the next level! In part-1 of “Advanced prompt engineering techniques,” we covered some fundamental techniques, but in part-2, we’ll explore even more advanced strategies. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to enhance your NLP expertise – read on to part-2 now!

The oxygen of any business is its customers. One of the core competencies that might differentiate your business from your contemporaries, is the ability to implement customer feedback in your line of products or your brand quickly and effectively. How do you get the feedback? Yes! run a customer satisfaction survey – a no-brainer, right? Just put your questions in a customer-survey questionnaire and get them to fill it up. Simple? Not really! It’s easier said than done. 

It involves ideating and implementing a question-answer interaction at various touch-points across the customer journey between your customers or your clients and your brand. Knowing what to look for, whom to include in surveys, the right questions to ask them, and mapping the answers to what it means to your product or brand can be overwhelming. But nonetheless, it is a vital step that could unearth your next competitive advantage. The measurements could course-correct your efforts towards what your customers actually want and not what you think they might need. 

How to do that you ask? Don’t worry that is exactly what we will be covering in this blog.

We will be looking at what types of customer satisfaction surveys you can run, the appropriate times for you to run them during the customer journey, the probable insights customer responses could indicate for each survey, and a little more. So brace yourself, you might get a reality check once you run your surveys. Irrespective of the outcome, we think implementing an intelligent chatbot can help you alleviate customer pain points by sending out personalized support right at the top, so there’s no volleying of efforts.

Before we get to the crux of it, there are a few things we need to get off the way. Think of them as hygiene practices that should be followed for an effective customer psyche measurement.

Good habits to have while running a customer satisfaction survey:

1) Know what to look for. Have a proper hypothesis built around what you want to measure. It can be a specific feature, demographics, product, or interface change. Nailing exactly what portion has to be measured is A MUST and cannot be compromised on.

2) Ask short, effective questions to get actionable insights. The whole point of running a survey is to effect a change if needed or maximize value proposition delivery. Juggling with too-many questions may be counter-productive to what you are trying to achieve.

3) Ensure your surveys are not intrusive and leave some time gap for your clients to absorb in the experience. In many cases, asking for feedback immediately may not work very well but for others, it might. Knowing when to use a hiatus is key.  For example, in case one of your clients wants to downgrade to a cheaper subscription plan, it is a good idea to immediately ask them what’s wrong and address their problem on the table. That could be your last hope of preventing the dollars from slipping away.

4) Take in at least a couple of customer details before the survey. Just Name, email, gender, organization, and age should suffice in most cases. While it is not mandatory, it helps your company profile your client base and their opinions based on such demographics. It can impact your positioning, marketing, and even your sales pitches to prospects.

What is a customer satisfaction survey?

A customer satisfaction survey is a set of questions sent to your customers to measure specific perceived values of your brand or business once customers have tried out relevant portions of your product or experience. The questions can be open-ended, close-ended, binary, numbers on a numerical scale, descriptive, or in any other form relevant to the type of survey. 

Types of customer satisfaction surveys. There is a surfeit of surveys you can use to measure different things. The variance in different survey types comes across demographics, types of questions, answer type, what you are trying to measure and what the survey is suited for best. If you are unfamiliar with the terms being discussed in this blog or want the numerical formula behind how numbers are computed for each of the following KPIs, feel free to check out our blogs on business KPIs that will matter in 2021.

1) Customer Satisfaction Survey

• What it measures?
  Customer satisfaction across touch-points including pricing, features, service, and much more.

• When can it be used?
  It can be sent to prospects after they have crossed key stages in evaluation or have been familiar with the service for a decent amount of time.

• Ideal length?
  Less than 10 questions. Depending on the context anywhere between 5 to 10 questions should be enough. Asking more than 10 questions in a survey is not advised.

• Answer Types?
  Customer Satisfaction surveys are usually a measure of many things. So having a mix of open-ended and close-ended answer types is a good idea.

• Ideal Answer Range?
  CSAT scores are generally above 98% if your business is doing well. If there’s a sudden trench in the score, it is a good idea to look at where things are going wrong. I most cases, it is just 1or 2 touchpoints that make the difference.
  

2) Net Promoter Score Survey

• What it measures?
  The overall brand value of your product. Net promoter score measures how likely someone is to recommend your product to their network. Depending on the number customers choose on a scale of 1 to 10, they are classified into detractors, neutrals, and promoters. The more promoters you have, the better it is for your product.

• When can it be used?
  It is best used when customers have been using your product for a significant duration and have had the chance to experience all wings of your product including support, replacements, billing issues, updates, and the like.

• Ideal length?
  5 questions should be more than enough. While the first question can be used to measure the net promoter score of the customer, the follow-up questions can be dynamic depending on the bucket each customer falls into. These questions can be focused on to get further insights such as why customers want to recommend your product or what’s holding them from recommending your product.

• Answer Types?
  Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys have to be numerical at the core since the segmentation is based on the customer response number. The follow-up questions however can be close-ended with answers focusing on why they did or did not want to recommend your product. Hint: Having the same list of product verticals that can be plausible reasons for both ends of the customer perception, gives you a black and white idea of which verticals need improvement and which ones can be maximized further. That is, just changing the consequent question depending on the context without changing the options could work a charm.
• Ideal Answer Range?
  NPS scores depend heavily on the industry and the customer demographics. So putting a lid on the exact number might not be very relevant. A good litmus test is to see if the number of your promoters is higher than the number of your detractors and neutral users. If yes, you are already doing much better than most of your competition.

3) Customer Effort Score Survey

• What it measures?
  How much effort did your customers have to put in for getting a specific service from your product or accomplishing a specific task using your product. In other words, how easy or difficult it was for them to extract the proposed value out of your offering.

• When can it be used?
  It can be designed to be part of the product and show up when the customer is done completing a defined use-case of your product. It is best suited to measure this immediately once the customer has completed a task since it is unlikely that they will respond to such a survey several hours or days after they’ve achieved their objective of using your product or service.

• Ideal length?
  Usually, just a couple of questions should get the job done since CES scores are measured individually for each task. Just asking how easy or difficult a task was and how you can improve the user journey for a specific use case should be adequate.

• Answer Types?
  Customer Effort Scores are measured on a subjective measurable scale ranging from ”˜Very Easy’ to ”˜Very Difficult’ for all the use-cases you are trying to measure. The subsequent question in the CES survey can extract insights on how the user flow can be improved.

• Ideal Answer Range?
  The lower your CES score is the better it is for your business. Here too the ideal score range is heavily impacted by the industry. So a one size fits all approach may not be the most suited. However, if your company is able to maintain an overall CES of less than 5, you can be confident that your user journey mapping needs no immediate tweak work. However, a keen year to what customers say on the follow-up question could be the difference between a ”˜just works’ experience and a ”˜just works so seamlessly’ experience.

Even with all the survey questions and the best practices in place, the tallest orders are the scalability and the monotony of establishing a consistent feedback loop. The process is not only difficult but is also hugely error-prone. Automating the interaction at critical customer journey points and tailoring solution flows for them using a smart chatbot such as ChatGen is a sure shot way to catalyze the feedback loop. The chatbot can do all the heavy lifting for you including reaching out to customers, aggregating their responses, adding them to custom-built communication flows, and giving you the analytics of their responses. All you have to do is just map your customer flows. Yes, it’s that simple. 

Confused about where to start implementing your feedback loop or how a chatbot can integrate with your business and help improve your revenue streams? Talk to our business consultants for free. They would be happy to help you with industry-specific insights and give you an overview of the projected soft and hard improvements in your business that a chatbot can bring.

Customers like companies the most that deliver excellent customer service. If you fail to deliver good customer service, your customers always have a choice to switch with your competitors. Apart from pricing, customer service is another important aspect that influences your customers’ decisions. They will quickly choose you if you charge high prices and offer better services. AmEx studies stated that on average, happy customers often tell approximately nine other people about their experience.

One of the best customer retention strategies is customer happiness. The best customer experience often adds real value to your services, which attracts your customers to willingly spend more money again and again.   

What is CX, how it helps a business to attract/retain customers?

Customer experience is much more than interaction. Apart from interaction, there are touchpoints like availability and the level of engagement that plays their part too. 

• Touchpoints: It’s where your customers come in touch with your brand. It could be through an employer, product, or through your brand message which can occur through different channels and devices. 
• Interactions: It is a communication process between customer and employee.
• Engagement: This is counted as the quality of interaction. 

Importance/Benefits of having a great CX and how it affects the business 

Customer experience has a lot of potential to bring out a lot of value, but many companies don’t get it right, it’s still a pretty solid competitive advantage. 

According to an Oracle survey, 74% of senior executives said customer experience impacted customer’s enthusiasm for being brand advocates.

In a study by American Express, 60% of participants stated that they were willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

80% of companies that participated in research conducted by Bain and Company thought that their customer experience was great. Though, only 8% of customers agreed. 

Techniques to improve customer experience  

1) How to improve customer experience in Telecom

Mobile video viewing has increased by nearly 10 million minutes per day over the past two days. Video engagement is one of the ways to provide a better customer experience. This is particularly relevant to assist customers, with 70% of Youtube viewers watching videos for “help with a problem.” Apart from video, you can use any of the visual communication channels to provide information to your customers. Other ways include live video, recorded video, photo chat messaging, or photostream. 

The best example in the telecom industry that uses the power of visual identity is Vodafone. It uses the technology well to ease the burden on its contact centers, which were handling a large amount — 5.2 million technical assistance calls per year. With the power of technology, Vodafone agents can point, annotate and visually guide the customer, which results in a quick and effective call solution and a more satisfying customer experience. Many of the earlier issues that required a technician dispatch can now be executed by agents, where they can act as virtual technicians — effectively lowering the dispatch rate by 26%.

2) How to improve the customer shopping experience

One of the pleasures of enjoying Amazon Prime is getting exactly what you want in a few clicks. But brands know that some people want to spend more time shopping instead of less and they are way ahead of their competitors. This is the aspect where companies should focus more to provide a good customer experience. Nike hosts weekly run clubs out of its stores, while Lululemon offers in-store yoga classes. 

The experience can be given online also to make the shopping experience more pleasant. For example, Sephora uses AR to let their customers learn how to use contouring makeup or experiment with false eyelashes. Lowe’s has created holographic rooms for their DIYers customers to explore colors, layouts, and fixtures before they pick up a sledgehammer. At the North Face (No. 46), IBM Watson’s AI skills help customers find the perfect product. Watson mirrors in-store conversations and takes unstructured text like, “I need boots’ ‘ and delivers personalized recommendations accordingly. 

3) How to improve customer experience in e-commerce

Normally, online shoppers lie under three categories based on an individual’s needs, expectations, and intentions. It includes:

• People who already know what they are looking for. They will directly go to the product search bar. To help them, you can incorporate autocomplete which helps in improving the customer experience.
• People who are browsing your store. They need a variety of products to choose from. You can help them by personalizing the search experience.
• People who need assistance in filtering products. They have specific criteria for their product search but they don’t know how to. You can help them by including product features in the sorting options so the filtering of products becomes easier. 

4) How to improve customer experience in the insurance

To improve the customer experience you should remove all the intermediate steps and roadblocks who know what they want and want to buy it online right away. A recent study done on the top insurance websites showed that the main method of engaging with their customers is the online application or quote form. Insurers want their prospects to fill out the form first, so they can collect the qualified lead data. They sent a quote and a link to buy the policy.

Insurers want people to fill up this form first, so they have the qualified lead data. The customer is then sent a quote and a link to buy the policy. This is probably the most efficient way to sell insurance online while still keeping a small window open to verify the lead before offering the cover.

5) How to improve customer experience in hotels

The technology used in hotels is very exciting and game-changing. Nowadays, hotels are installing “smart room keys” that allow guests to open their door with a simple swipe of their smartphone. Hilton and Sheraton have already implemented their technology in their hotels. Tablets are also providing an important communication tool for guests and staff members. The hotels can use tablets to promote paid luxuries and local attractions. From their rooms, guests can request in just a few clicks that are routed to a staff member’s mobile device and answered in just a few minutes. 

6) How to improve digital customer experience

In 2021, it has been expected that most online purchases will be done mainly through phones. Thus, it’s only common to make sure that your mobile app, website, or other materials can be optimized for mobile so that your customers get a good customer experience. Make sure that the page load time and navigation are optimized according to mobile devices. In a survey done by Google, 40% of customers will leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load. The study also found that 59% of mobile users have a more positive feeling when apps allow them to buy things quickly. 

7) How to improve airline customer experience

Forrester said that to influence learnings and to give a cohesive customer experience for customers, collaboration is required. But it’s much more than that, an open communication between customer service and other departments helps both customers and company to be on the same page. This method is applied successfully by KLM. When an employee noticed that a lot of people were asking about social media payments, the person reached directly to KLM’s IT team to see if it’s feasible. This results in a new social media payment tool which now takes 4 million euros a year in sales. 

8) How to improve b2b customer experience

When a company decides to work with you, they will have expectations that you’ll need to meet. Those expectations will be developing and your approach has to be flexible enough to evolve along. You can easily improve your customer retention rates if you simply listen to these companies. You can send surveys, and ask what areas of the service and overall experience they would like to improve. This data will help you to give them exactly what they are looking for.

9) How to improve your call center customer experience strategy

It’s always annoying to put on hold during calls and it’s more frustrating when a call center agent does that. The customers don’t care if their problems take time to get resolved and the agent can’t help but make them wait. Many customers feel that calling customers should be a one-stop solution for all their problems. They see it as a single department instead of multiple sections and thus they can’t help but get frustrated when the call center puts them on hold. There are many practices that you can try to imply to reduce the waiting period. Short waiting time keeps customers happy and ends up leaving them satisfied. 

10) Improving the customer experience in banking

Live chats that provide help in account selection and application is one of the easiest ways to provide the best customer experiences to your customers. Acorns have successfully implemented a smooth onboarding process, after they identified that the main issue with the current solution includes “poor online user experience, particularly around account opening.” The Chief Commercial Officer of Acronis shared that the new registration process includes 3-5 minutes, and they have live chat support to help them during the process. This reduces friction when opening up a new account. 

Conclusion

The above studies show that a good customer experience opens up new opportunities that directly impact performance. The CX strategy that converts helps in improving customer experience and makes your company customer-centric with long-term benefits. Whether you are a startup or a big company, focusing on improving customer experience will always long a very long way.

What is a chatbot and why is it important for customer experience?

A chatbot is an Artificial Intelligence software that can trigger a conversation with a user. 

Many industries like banking, entertainment, healthcare, news, fashion, etc., have adopted chatbots to chat with their customers. In 2020, 85% of customer interactions were done by chatbots. Chatbots are the main difference for brands that provide a good customer experience versus the rest.  They are changing how companies interact with their customers, and the changes are usually positive when the chatbot is of high quality. 

A Ubisent study found that 35% of consumers want to see more companies using chatbots, which is interesting since the practice is still quite new. Companies like Duolingo, H&M, Sephora use chatbots to offer their services. The H&M chatbot plays the role of a personal stylist. When the conversation ends, the chatbot recommends an outfit based on the customer’s style. 

In the banking sector, Bank of America launched its chatbot called ‘Erica.’ Erica helps in making payments, checking balances, and also educates customers, and saves money. 

7 Ways to Improve Customer Experience using Chatbot

1. Impactful business insights

Businesses can collect valuable data from chatbot conversations. With the help of these data, companies can find out early issues regarding UX or any roadblocks that customers are facing. By finding out problems early and resolving them, similar issues can be prevented in the future. Using advanced customer feedback analytics tools like Thematic, companies can analyze the data from these conversations. They can interpret insights by theming and interpreting verbatim using AI free-text analytics. 

2. Reduce wait time

Chatbots solve your customer’s queries quickly and reduce their wait time. This provides better customer service to your customers. 

3. Always-on customer service

Chatbots always offer 24-7*7 customer support. They are an affordable and reliable way to provide basic support. Chatbots are trained better by using historical conversations, which can take some action on some of the common tasks such as answering basic questions and amending an invoice. In some situations, chatbots can even tell human emotions like happiness, anger, and confusion. If the customer is angry, the chat or will transfer the interaction to a human support agent. 

4. Personalized human interaction

Depending upon the user, chatbots can also personalize the customer experience. Chatbots gather data from their conversations. Through this data, support reps. Use the information to personalize their interactions with customers. The information can be provided to the agent in real-time so that the agents can provide relevant solutions based on the previous conversations and current needs.  

5. Encourage employees

AI can also be used to encourage staff to focus on more challenging tasks. AI can mimic human behavior perfectly, and employees may fear their jobs are at risk. To reassure them, companies should show their employees what’s in it for them. Chatbots are used to support employees to focus on more high-value activities rather than routine tasks. Like, sales reps can use AI to make a better offer on a renewed contract, insurance policies can be sold more when they offer more personalized advice. 

6. Seamless live chat

Many chatbots now use NLP methods to analyze the customer’s questions and respond to the customer’s needs. 

Chatbots can also be seamlessly integrated into the company’s website or mobile apps, which saves the customer time searching the company’s online resources for the answers they need. Customers can talk to the support reps. Anytime without leaving their messaging apps like Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger.  

7. 24/7 customer service

Chatbots are available 24 hours every day to solve your customer’s queries. Customers often need help outside of business hours. They need a way to seek out answers to vital questions at times when customer service staff members aren’t available. Chatbots offer your customers the opportunity to get their queries solved at any time, and they don’t have to wait for voicemail or emails. The best chatbots can also offer your customers the feeling of chatting with a live operator at any time. 

(Using a chatbot allows you to offer a 24-hour service | Source)

See how chatbots help some great brands to offer a premium customer experience

1. Lyft

From Lyft’s chatbot, you can request a ride via chat or voice. The chatbot will also let you know your driver’s current location with the car model and license plate.

2. Fandango

Fandango’s chatbot lets you watch movie trailers, find local theaters, and see what’s new. To get started, you will have to enter your city or ZIP code, and the chatbot will show you what’s playing nearby and send you to a page where you can buy tickets.

3. Spotify

Spotify’s chatbot makes it easy for you to listen, search and share music. You can also get playlist recommendations based on your mood or any genre of music you want.

4. Whole Foods

With the help of the Whole Foods bot on Facebook Messenger, you can always search for recipes. You can also search by an emoji to search for those recipes, and it also lets you filter your results if you have any special needs.

5. Sephora

By chatting to Sephora on Kik, you’ll get all types of makeup tutorials. The chatbot also shares product reviews and ratings when you are shopping in a store.

6. Mastercard

Mastercard’s whatnot makes it easy for customers to check on account transactions. Like, asking ‘how much did I spend on restaurants in May?’. With Masterpass, customers can also buy from Mastercard partners like FreshDirect, Subway, and Cheesecake Factory.

7. Staples

Staples have an intelligent, easy system which makes customer service very easy. It dined in partnership with IBM’s Watson. The chatbot can answer common customer questions, which tend to be about orders- tracking and returns ABC whether the particular items are in stock.

8. The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal Chatbot makes it easy to stay on top of big news and stock quotes with Facebook Messenger. You can also customize alerts according to your needs by simply typing basic commands, and you’ll get live stock quotes, company information, and key financial metrics.

Conclusion

In various cases, chatbots have proved themselves by yielding good results:

Companies have reported a reduction of up to 70% in chat, call, and email inquiries after implementing the chatbot.

Brands also reported an increase in their customer satisfaction and a 33% saving per voice engagement. 

Chatbots are changing the way companies interact with customers. Now’s the best time to put chatbots in use. If you have already, let us know in the comments if that’s working for you.

You are browsing through an online nursery store, looking for a specific flowering plant to adorn your balcony. You use the website search function to look for it, but you are unable to find it. Your next instinct would be to contact the business directly to enquire if they have the plant. What if you can do that without having to take your phone, dial the number, greet the person, and then state your inquiry?

What is Live Chat and why you need it?

Live Chat is a medium that allows businesses to engage with customers in real-time. In the above example, you can simply click on the ”˜Chat with us’ button available on the webpage, and an agent will be available to assist you instantly, via messaging. You can state your question, and obtain answers without having to dial a number or talking to someone. The software that enables businesses to message customers in real-time is called live chat software.

63% of customers say they’re more likely to return to a website that has a live chat. (Furst Person)

Live Chat is extremely useful if you’re conducting your business online. You can capture leads, reduce bounce rates, interact with customers in real-time, and reduce cart abandonment rates. Customers can use live chat to get instant answers to their questions on a website. Marketing and sales teams can make use of live chat to collect and convert leads, and helpdesk teams can use live chat as a support tool to solve customer issues faster and better. 

Let’s now look at how you can effectively implement live chat on your website to serve different purposes.

Live Chat examples for Marketing 

It’s highly unlikely that you’ll be thinking of what software to buy for your business when you’re out grocery shopping. This is why contextual marketing is important, and live chat is one great way to turn your website visitors into customers.

A large number of your website visitors who might be potential buyers do not usually find their way to a contact form or demo request. This is where you can use live chat to display prompts and provide resources that prospects can use to know more about your product/service, eventually resulting in conversions.

Here’s an example of how you can use live chat for marketing:

Your website visitors usually land on a page and end up moving across your webpages for many reasons. Maybe they’re researching price points between you and your competitors. They might be looking at specific features and researching who offers it the best, and what other related features they can get along with it. 

The longer they stay and the more product-specific their searches get, the higher the chance that they’re looking to buy from you. It would be perfect if you can start a conversation with them at this point, nudging them on what you offer and the direction they should take. You can use live chat here to display simple messages like:

• Hey! You’ve been checking us out for a while. Is there anything we can help you with?
• We’re only a message away. Here are a few resources for you to check out (Add few related resources)
• Hey there! Would you like to talk to us to understand what we offer?

You can offer a few simple options like below that lets them click on one, and this will help them through the purchasing funnel:

• No, I’m just browsing.
• I need help with the features that are available.
• Show me the pricing.
• Something else. 

You can set this up such that the bot shows more automated replies based on the visitor’s input, or you can allow them to ask for a live chat with an agent. 

Here’s how Chatgen.ai does it:

Live Chat examples for Sales

When it comes to using live chat for sales, being proactive is the key. You don’t want to be over-selling, but you can use a tone of language that naturally highlights the benefits of your product. One way to get your lead excited about your product is to share a link to an existing customer’s success story that will allow them to see how your product works.

Letting your leads know that the person on the other end (you) is human is important. People usually associate live chat with bots, so proactively reaching out and establishing that you’re human can work wonders. Add a short bio or introduce yourself in a friendly way so that visitors warm up to you. 

For example, if your website visitors are on the pricing page, you can display a pop-up message asking:

• Hi! I’m <xxx>. Got any queries on our pricing?
• Hey there! You’ve been with us for quite some time. Would you like to set up a call so that we can discuss pricing in detail?
• Hello! I’m <xxx>. Looking for something specific? I can help you with your queries.

Here’s an example of how Chatgen.ai can help you use live chat to convert more leads:

Live Chat examples for Support

Live Chat is the preferred choice for many customers, and it has the highest customer satisfaction level of any support channel. 

Providing support through live chat on your website helps your customers talk to you from right where they are. They don’t have to visit a new page or download a contact form, they can simply click on the chat icon available on every page of your website. This ease of access reduces customer effort (Link to customer services KPIs blog), an important factor in building customer loyalty. 

Customers don’t like to be treated just like any other ticket, and live chat is one way that can help you provide instant support. Good live chat software will help agents find out where the customer is in the process and what they were doing before asking for help.

Live Chat will help you provide automated responses based on customer inputs. For example, consider a customer who has come to your website looking for their order status, and they ask “Where is my delivery?”. You can provide options like:

• Enter your order number
• Which order are you looking to track?
• Provide your email address to help us track your order

Here’s how Chatgen.ai helps you provide intuitive customer support using live chat:

Live Chat is the future, and it is here to stay

Customers today expect instant responses, 24/7, and people want to talk to businesses on their own terms and on their preferred channel. Live chat can help you provide a great customer experience, be it 1:1 or through automated bot responses. It is now the ultimate way to connect with your customers contextually and in real-time, as and when they are checking out your product/service. 

With live chat, there’s no waiting to hear back on your ticket. No downloading contact forms. No emailing with a message. Just the best and instant experience possible for every visitor that comes your way.

Types of customer service 

When your company has to deal regularly with customers, it sometimes becomes daunting to handle every customer interaction. Some customers prefer live chat, some like email, and while some of them will like to call you. This doesn’t matter what system you choose, your customer service has the ability to make or break your company’s reputation. In a survey by American Express, a customer who’s happy with your business will tell about it to nine friends – which is like getting nine referrals. If a customer is not satisfied with your products, share them with sixteen friends. That’s sixteen people who are less likely to try your product. There are four types of customer service: live chat, e-mailing, social media, and self-service customer support. You should try to pick the one that resonates better with your company and needs and where you will be more consistent. 

1) Self-serve Customer Service

There are solutions available that don’t entirely need customer service representatives. These solutions let customers and leads find the solution on their own without taking the help of anyone else. This is best for those who would spend time and do the research on their own rather than asking for a customer support team to help them. That might be because the users want to limit their interactions with another human as minimum as possible. The other reason could be that the user is an expert in his field. They know how to run the software, and are just looking for important information on their own will be the best decision. 

Keeping all this in mind, every business should include some level of self-serve customer service solution as there will be some industry-experts and introverts using your services or products.

The best thing about this customer service is that once it’s public you can forget about it. There is always some updating of the resource until you can make changes to your offer. 

Example: Zendesk

The way to get started with self-serve customer service is to let your users do their research on issues and to build a knowledge base.

The knowledge base is a one-serve solution to those who want to know how your product works and how they can fix the issues for a particular problem. A well-designed and updated knowledge base is a great way to support your customers with a self-serve solution.

2) Live Chat Support

In some cases, customers need an answer to their questions quickly. In such cases, the best way is to connect with an expert who can provide a good solution and guide them on what can be done to their problem. You can provide this kind of direct service by implementing the live chat on your company’s website. 

After the implementation, anyone who visits your website will be able to start a conversation with one of your customer sales representatives. Through live chat, you will be able to quickly solve the problems of your users within minutes. Live chat works best for those who want quick solutions and the queries are also resolves instantly. 

Example: Livechat

LiveChat is a live chat solution software that can be implemented on your website. It’s a great way of providing quick, smart customer service and allowing your customers to connect with your customer support reputation team. Live chat not only solves your customer’s issues but also brings new sign-ups and leads, as your lead might have a few questions before making a purchase. Live chat solution works as the low-friction way of connecting with someone who can provide an effective answer to their queries.  Live chat can be used on your website and other channels. It allows your customers to chat 24/7 with the support agents. This helps to help more customers quickly and in a shorter period of time. 

3) Social Media Support

With 2.38 monthly active users on Facebook, it’s hard to ignore the power of social media. To make full use of social media you will have to constantly monitor all the available channels. So that you can resolve all your customer’s social media queries and can use a social media monitoring software that will notify you whenever someone mentions your brand or product. Also, you can use a software similar to live chat and can let anyone who visits your Facebook business page connect with your customer support representative via chat. This method works best when there are lots of people visiting your company’s profile. You’ll be able to make better use of social media and also make sure that none of them gets bad service. 

Example: Brand24

Brand24 is a great software that lets you monitor your social media and get feedback whenever someone mentions your brand. This way you’ll be able to react quickly whatever the case is. You can get quick feedback whenever someone mentions your brand name. Thus, you’ll be able to react quickly and put the situation under control.  

4) Email support

Email support is one of the most used and popular forms of support. To use email support you’ll need someone to handle queries. The only thing you have to do is to show the email address on your contact us page and in the website’s footer. Through email support, your customers can contact your customer support team without directly contacting them. Email is also a good way to explain the complicated issues to your customers as you can take your time in writing down the response and explaining it properly. 

Example: China World Hotel, Beijing

China World Hotel provides its services in the accommodation sector. The hotel makes sure that their customers from different time zones can make an inquiry through an email–which is perfect to make inquiries from any time zone. 

What is your option among this to improve your business?

These are all different types of customer service that you can choose for your business. Speculating that you want to run your business as long as possible, it’s considered best to mix speed, comfort, personalization, and self-service to create good customer service for your brand. It doesn’t mean you have to use costly solutions for your customer service. You can always start with the solutions– like Chatgen which is affordable, flexible, and works according to your business requirements.

Your customers don’t come back? The long-term success of your company stands or falls with your customers. You therefore presumably attach great importance to the acquisition of further new customers. But do you also pay attention to the opinions and activities of your existing customers? If not, you should definitely look into customer engagement measures.

What does customer engagement mean? In a nutshell, it’s about keeping your customers loyal to your business so that they’ll want to come back, keep buying your products, and using your services. And believe it or not, customer engagement is cheaper and more profitable than customer acquisition. 

10 customer engagement strategies for your company

The most common cause of customer churn is their dissatisfaction with the treatment they have received from the company. Unfortunately, in the majority of cases, you will never know what exactly happened. The emigrants may have already been disappointed several times, so that for the sake of simplicity they prefer to switch to the competition straight away instead of telling you what went wrong by filling out a complaint form. However, they will definitely tell their friends about their dissatisfaction – or they will post bad reviews on Facebook, Twitter and a single disheartened customer can be followed by many more.

In order to ensure the success of your company in the long term, it is, therefore, advisable to follow some rules of customer engagement management and thus increase your customer engagement rate.

Engagement strategies that really work

1) Optimal customer service

Evidence shows that negative events are more firmly stuck in human memory than positive ones., This means that your customers will retain any negative associations with your company for a long time and will comment on them both in real life and on social media.

The importance of excellent customer service should therefore not be underestimated. Because even if the customer is not satisfied with the product, an apology from friendly staff can maintain a positive attitude towards the company. The incident may even generate profits.

With this in mind, however, keep in mind that customer satisfaction can only be achieved with good staff. Show your employees appreciation, because customers can also feel a positive attitude of your employees towards their job and customer service and leave a lasting impression. Every employee who represents your company externally and who is in direct contact with customers should have a positive and professional attitude.

Provide your employees with tools with which they can carry out customer communication as efficiently as possible and without many questions. Every customer must be given the feeling that the company knows them and their purchasing history and that solving their problems quickly is a priority. Always keep in mind that you will not only lose individual customers if they are met with disinterest – future profits are also at stake and possibly even the reputation of your company (after all, you never know whether the dissatisfied customer might decide to give up his disappointment to share with others and to “warn” them).

2) Build & maintain customer relationships

Use customer service as a tool for customer engagement to create trust and gradually build customer relationships. Once you have gained the trust of your customers, they will look after you for any mistakes and show understanding instead of complaining.

From the first time a customer makes a purchase, you will receive a wealth of information about them. Use this to maintain contact with customers and to send them discount codes, small gifts or information on current sales promotions. This will make them remember your company and buy from you instead of the competition – and maybe even recommend you to others.

3) Individual approach to your customers

Nobody likes to feel treated like one of the many or like part of the crowd. Every customer is different and this needs to be addressed in an appropriate manner. Today’s customers expect a shopping experience that is tailored to their individual wishes and needs. Personal notifications and discounts can decide whether a customer buys from you more often or not at all.

4) Appreciation for your customers

Show customers who are satisfied with your products, who say positive things about your company or who simply keep coming back that you value them. Get active – it can be something simple, e.g. B. a discount code, special offers for particularly loyal customers or thank you messages. Use this measure for customer engagement and your customers will reward you for your efforts with engagement.

5) Exceed customer expectations

Let your customers know what to expect from you as early as possible. A little trick: keep customer expectations a little lower and then exceed them. This creates a positive surprise effect and, if the worst comes to the worst, gives you enough time to keep your promises. For example, include a response time limit of 24 hours in the automatic response message for customer inquiries, even if your customer service department may need less time to do so. If the customer gets the answer after an hour or two, they will be impressed by this quick response. In addition, your customer service employees have enough time to complete their tasks and there are no bottlenecks if some duties have to be delegated in the event of illness. Be sure to, Always keep your promises and deadlines.

6) Social media as a customer engagement tool

Nothing misses such a growth spurt in customer retention rates like the skillful use of social media. Your customers are probably active on various social networks right now, so use these channels as a tool for customer engagement. Depending on the type, industry, and business model of your company, you can create official accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, YouTube, Snapchat. Find out which platforms your customers use most often and get in touch with them there. Not only will this help you reach your customers better, it will also help you learn what their views are about your company and encourage them to share more content or even act as brand ambassadors. 

7) Get customer feedback

Don’t be afraid to ask your customers for their honest opinion about your company. The sooner you know about any defects and weaknesses, the faster you can eliminate them. 

You can avoid negative public feedback by asking your customers for their opinion on a personal level. Get in touch with your customers through short messages or use a survey to determine the Net Promoter Score (NPS) of your company, which also provides information about the satisfaction of your customers. You can also ask your customer service representatives about their experiences: Are the customers satisfied with the products? Are there any suggestions for improvement? Direct customer feedback is much more valuable than expensive market research studies. In addition, your customers feel that they are being taken seriously and that they are empowered to bring about changes themselves. By combining the aforementioned transaction data that is stored in your customer engagement system and the information gathered in surveys, you will develop a deeper understanding of your customers’ behavior. This plays a central role in customer engagement, which is why you should not do without this customer engagement measure.

8) Usability on all channels

The following applies to the purchasing process: the easier, the better. Your customers must be able to understand how your website/app works. Also, provide a sufficiently large selection of payment options. Complications and barriers to shopping lead to abandoned purchases and unpaid orders. Make the purchase process as easy as possible, conduct tests with focus groups, provide multiple language versions, and ensure that the content of your website/app is understandable for all customers. The worst thing you can do is let your customers feel stupid.

9) Provide your customers with relevant content

Provide your customers with the expertise that you have as an industry expert and become the point of contact for support and advice in case of problems. Use positive reviews on your products for this. You can also create a blog and post informative and interesting content on your subject. So not only sell your products/services, but also your knowledge.

10) Customer Care Systems

As your customer base grows, professional customer care becomes more difficult and time-consuming. For this reason, you should consider introducing a customer care system. This relieves your employees and ensures the provision of excellent customer service. A good system can manage your customer database, send automatic messages, suggest special offers, and trigger payment reminders. This enables customer engagement concepts to be implemented more professionally and efficiently, which in turn gives you more time to complete other tasks.

Today, most businesses have switched to digital platforms and they have started communicating with their customers via different communication sources. 

Social media, emails, chatbots, and everything that can be named.

A chatbot is the frontline brand representative of your company. It is also the first point of contact with your customer, and probably your first impression. Being the first impression, the chatbot must perform well and relevantly. For this purpose, you must train your chatbot accordingly. 

It is unpredictable to determine the kind of queries a human might come across. Someday, a query might be, find me a perfect blue-colored dress or find me something in pink. Now, these queries might sound logical to a human being but to a chatbot, this might sound confusing sometimes. 

In this article, we have covered all the essential pointers you need to keep in mind while training your chatbot: 

1. Defining your target persona
2. Categorization of customer queries
3. Creating and training chatbots with datasets
4. Asking users to test the chatbot
5. Improvising the chatbot 

Now, let’s study each of this one by one.

Defining your target persona:

The target persona is the foundation of chatbot development. The training stage comes later. Every time you make a decision, you’ll hit back to the target persona. 

You need to start chatbot development by identifying the type of your audience. Give your chatbot a voice, a tone, and a relevant flow. Other parameters like vocabulary matter too. Adding to that, you should also consider age, gender, location, language, income, profession, industry, behavior, interests, and most significantly, the challenges that are likely to occur. Later, you can form some demo personas. Also, you don’t need to build only one target persona. You can have multiple, to begin with.

Later, you can analyze the data and form some sample questions based on the persona. One quick way to define your target persona can be by connecting with your customer support team. Since they’re the people who handle customer queries daily, they are in a better position to give you a rough understanding of the kind of queries the chatbot might come across. 

Categorization of customer queries:

Categorization saves a stitch in time. The types of queries can be categorized into different categories like informational, regarding the product, tracking, services, or any grievances. The simplest thing anyone can follow is by connecting with the support team or sales reps. There exists your gold mine of queries. Often, people call up the support team in expectation of getting their queries solved. Also, the emails like @info or @contact can be dug up too. 

The best resource to find common customer queries would be the customer service center of the organization. For example, if you find several queries like “How to use this?”, “How to operate this product?”, “How to fix an XYZ error?”, you can group all such queries under the category of “Product Info”.

Create and train your chatbot with datasets:

Datasets are like knowledge stacks for a chatbot. The more they are trained with one, the more efficient they become. Once you group up all your queries, it becomes necessary to either find alternatives to these are find a wide range of answers for the same. A chatbot training involves much than just training. Right from collecting to analyzing data, and formulating the next steps, a lot goes into the process. 

However, there are two easy steps you can follow:

Training your chatbot with the available data:

As we mentioned above how you can collect data from the customer support team, the same can be used to come up with a certain dataset that includes commonly asked questions. A little brainstorming about phrases or specific keywords you would ask a chatbot can help build a dataset. Think of all the ways or variations you’d ask a question to a chatbot.

Training your chatbot with ready-to-use datasets:

Another alternative can be to train your chatbot using pre-made or ready-to-use datasets. 

Here are a few categories and some sources of datasets that can be handy:

1) Q & A Datasets: 

• Question and Answer Dataset: This collection includes all the Wikipedia articles, manually-generated factoid questions from them, and manually-generated answers to these questions, for use in academic research.
• The WikiQA Corpus: This corpus is a publicly available dataset whose source is Bing query logs. Each of its queries has a probable solution linked to Wikipedia.

2) Customers Support Datasets:

• Ubuntu Dialog Corpus: Ubuntu Dialog Corpus includes almost one million two-person conversations extracted from the Ubuntu chat logs. These conversations were used to receive technical support for various Ubuntu-related problems. The full dataset contains 930,000 dialogues and over 100,000,000 words.
• Customer Support on Twitter: This corpus on Kaggle includes replies from the biggest brands on Twitter. 

3) Dialogue Datasets:

• Cornell Movie-Dialogs Corpus: With a large metadata-rich collection of fictional conversations extracted from raw movie scripts, this corpus includes 220,579 conversational exchanges between 10,292 pairs of movie characters involving 9,035 characters from 617 movies!
• Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English: This dataset includes approximately 249,000 words of transcription, audio, and timestamps at the level of individual voice modulation units.
• The NPS Chat Corpus: This corpus consists of 10,567 posts out of approximately 500,000 posts gathered from various online chat services following their terms of service.

4) Multilingual Chatbot Training Datasets:

• NUS Corpus: This corpus was created to normalize and standardize social media texts. It is built by randomly selecting 2,000 messages from the NUS English SMS corpus and then translated them into formal Chinese.

Ask real users to test the chatbot:

Ask your staff or your real customers to test the chatbot. When a human interacts with a chatbot, that is when you realize where the loopholes are.

In the initial beta testing phase, you can ask your co-workers to test the bot.

Remember, your co-workers may have a completely different perspective, and they may be familiar with different terminology, vocabulary, information, etc. They are not your chatbot audience. Hence, their opinions and queries may vary from the ones that are desired. 

Another way to go is by encouraging your loyal customers in the process. Since customers may ask questions that can be listed down as potential queries, it would be a win-win situation for you. 

You can also hire QA from various platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, etc. Another way to test your chatbot would be using some platforms like Botium, Zypnos, or qbox.ai platforms to test the bot.

There are also a few freelancers whom you can hire for this purpose. 

Keep on improvising your chatbot:

• In the initial days, the chatbot might need human agent help to deal with the situations. As a freshly launched chatbot, it might come across certain queries completely new and unfamiliar. Also, the more it is trained, the better it gets. 
• Keep analyzing the kind of interactions your chatbot is having with visitors. Look for all the underperforming answers and try to rephrase them.
• Look for all the errors and loopholes in the chat flow. Check the analytics for the performance of the chatbot. ChatGen’s dynamic dashboard provides in-depth research about the chatbot performance like at which point of conversation did the users drop or leave the chat, etc. 
• Also, do not forget to support your chatbot in the future as well.