Founded by Hugo Mulliez and François-Xavier Trancart in 2013, Artsper is the European leader in contemporary art sale. This French company was established with the ambition to reduce the distance between both new and established collectors, art lovers and the art market. Customer experience is thus really important to them.
Customer service secret weapon: Hybrid chatbot
Many e-commerce or media websites now use chatbots to answer to their customer requests. Their ability to understand demands is quite variable. They can sometimes bluff us, and sometimes, leave us puzzled or annoyed. How to create chatbots that almost always positively surprise customers? How to make sure a chatbot will not fail?
This article describes the results of a hybrid chatbot that was setup on Artsper.com to automate and personalise answers to customer requests.
A problem (too) often encountered: a chatbot fail…
- Among all requests, some are necessarily incomprehensible for a chatbot. The chatbot will then, in the most possible fluid way, redirect the client to a human agent.
- A customer who cannot get an immediate response from a chatbot, will feel that the brand is not able to solve the problem.
Unhappy customer + Failed chatbot answer = VERY unhappy customer
Based on Botmind researches, chatbots can understand 40% of customer requests, in the best case. This means that more than half of customers reaching a brand through a chatbot would face a failed chatbot answer. When they finally talk to an agent, these customers are even more angry…
A solution that works
At Botmind, we found a fairly simple and effective way to avoid irritating customers who talk to a chatbot. Which one?
“Do not tell customers that a chatbot will answer them?”
Wait, what?! Create a chatbot that is not a chatbot, how is this possible?
The solution is actually to plug the chatbot on a chat interface with agents on the other side and then involve the chatbot only when the latter is 100% sure to understand the customer’s request.
Artsper and Botmind set up all this inside Intercom which was already used by the customer service agents. For instance, the chatbot will take over the conversation when a customer asks to directly submit artwork on the platform.
What are the benefits of a hybrid chatbot for the customer?
- Fast and efficient response. With the hybrid chatbot working with your customer agents the response rate is increased by 4X.
- The chatbot and the agent work together in harmony. As a result, the agents are just provided with value added and complex questions.
- The customer always gets a quick and appropriate response from the chatbot, which is no more than the promise of this technology. This is responsible for causing an increase of customer satisfaction rate by 37%.
What are the benefits of a hybrid chatbot for Artsper?
- User satisfaction is greatly improved since frequent requests get a fast answer from the virtual agent and complex requests get a faster answer from agents who have fewer simple requests to deal with
- Agents feel like their job is more interesting and they do not deal with customers that were irritated by a failed chatbot response
- The hybrid chatbot is able to detect prospect lead requests and notify agents so that these requests are processed faster
- A hybrid chatbot project can be launched only with a few intents and then the scope is gradually increased without risking to disappoint customers
A hybrid chatbot significantly improves customer service
Thanks to this solution, a customer who has a simple request will receive a very fast response from the virtual agent and a customer who asks a complex question will receive a personalized response from an agent. This will lead to an increase in customer as well as the agent satisfaction rate by more than 30%.
Machines are useful and efficient: responding to many frequent, time consuming demands and personalizing answers using user context.
Humans are at heart of the technology and service: understanding the complex problems of other humans.
So the result is simple, human and machine working in harmony and in a hybrid condition for Artsper to significantly improve the quality of its customer service.