Bots

5 Reasons to Deploy Customer Retention Chatbots

Introducing Customer Retention Bots and ideas on a winning customer retention strategy using bots.

Attention and investment from AI companies to date have been largely on the automation of general inbound customer service inquiries through the use of machine learning and chatbot technologies.

While cost reduction and customer experience gains can be attractive, the majority of these solutions don’t address the immediate and often more significant commercial risk exposure associated with complex customer journeys such as acquisition, conversion, complaints, collections, delivery, loyalty, and retention. Simple FAQ chatbots alone aren’t enough to help reduce customer churn or increase conversion rates.

However, a shift in focus from customer service chatbots to other use cases has gained traction. For example, PWC believes that investment in more complex, tech-led collection strategies could stem the rising bad debt in the UK energy market’ (£400m in ‘11 to £640m in ‘15) while Forrester believes that the more successful bot technologies will be those that stick to a narrower purpose.

At ServisBOT we have developed a solution that allows you to deploy and blend an army of specialized bots into your organization wherever and whenever the successful delivery of your operating plan is linked to timely and effective engagement with your customers. 

In this blog, I’ll discuss how deploying different chatbots as part of a customer retention strategy can deliver substantial commercial benefits while enhancing the customer experience. Many industries incur high costs due to customer churn. Energy and utility companies, for example, deal with rising churn rates due to increased competition and regulation. This is evidenced by the over 4 million UK households switching providers, representing over £5.2 billion in revenue. Insurance companies face similar challenges as customers seek insurance quotes prior to their renewal date, switching as they find more competitive policy prices.

5 Reasons to Swap Telesales and Snail Mail for Customer Retention Bots

1. Enhanced customer reach 

White mail and email, along with outbound telesales remain the channels of choice for proactively engaging customers. These channels are used not because they are effective and efficient, but rather because they are the only ones that have been made accessible thus far. Today, you may use SMS (as well as email, in-web or in-app) to deploy specialized renewal and/or win-back bots to proactively contact your clients utilizing a low-cost channel with a 98% open rate.

Is it so hard to imagine that reaching out to your consumers using the same channels they use to talk to their friends and family would be more convenient and lead to a greater engagement rate? In fact, your rival may eat your lunch if you don’t start planning to move your communications to mobile channels.

2. Perfectly timed customer engagement

Because of changed licensing terms, increasing competition, and easy access to information by consumers, the time between a customer considering leaving and actually doing so has shrunk significantly. As a result, you must adapt how and when you interact with your customers. Especially in response to customers who have already canceled, relying on conventional channels like telesales, mass white mail, or email that ends up unread or in spam is no longer sufficient. Before your rivals do, provide your value proposition to clients by deploying a contract renewal and/or a win-back bot with personalized messages at the correct time.

3. Improved customer convenience (their time, their way)

With a quick and seamless experience, you can assist your customers in completing the journey from the comfort of their mobile device in a matter of minutes. As previously mentioned, why wouldn’t you want to reach clients utilizing the messaging platforms they use to talk to their friends, family, and coworkers? These platforms include SMS, mobile web, and in-app messaging. Friction merely serves to obstruct the customer’s path and creates a window of opportunity for your competitors. For example, switching from voice to email or requiring multiple steps to complete an action is inefficient.

4. Lower service delivery costs

Replace the expense of having human agents on telesales teams attempting to make contact with ALL your customers to try and win them back or secure contract renewals. AI-powered bots can engage in conversations and secure customer contracts using personalized, interactive messages (defined by you). As a result, you may hire a significantly smaller team of human agents to work on trickier customer retention problems. In order to improve the success of your customer loyalty quotient and overall campaign, you may then choose to reinvest these labor savings in your customer value proposition through special incentives.

5. Differentiated customer experience

According to Forrester Research, as long as the process is accurate and effective, consumers prefer to carry out tasks or receive answers in a self-service fashion. Low on intrusion and high on immersion, ServisBOT’s like win back and renewal bot provide your customers with a conversational interface that fuses with a chatbot, AI, human workflow, and API capabilities to deliver an engaging and immersive experience at the point of contact.

By providing your clients with a multiple-choice approach to renewal and win back and a clear path to completion supported by rich media content, you can deliver a customer experience that is consistent with both your commercial goals and your brand values.

The Benefits of Deploying Customer Retention Bots 

In summary, using a WinBack Bot, together with various other bots such as Loyalty Bot, Renewal Bot, and Quote Bot, can play a crucial part in a retention strategy to engage customer who have already left, are close to the end of their contract, or are at-risk of leaving to a competitor.

See the case study from one of our insurance clients to learn how they improved renewal rates for current clients and conversion rates for new customers by using Quote Bot.

In summary, here are the benefits that chatbots can generate 

• Reduce customer outreach costs,  in order to free up resources to offer stronger incentives for gaining back lost consumers or encouraging current customers to stick around.
• Boost customer satisfaction with interactive and personalized conversations and a clear path to completion.
• Increase customer reach and engagement by delivering timely messages with high open rates.
• Boost ability to re-capture lost customers with automation that deploys WinBackBOT the moment you know a customer is leaving.
• Increase recurring revenue from lower customer churn rates
• Reduce the costs associated with customer churn. It costs a lot more to acquire a new customer than keep and existing one. 

Check out a sample animation of WinBack Bot.

Check out additional resources like our Insurance Bot eBook or our Customer Engagement Bot eBook.