GUS Brings Chatbots to All Industries

Q: How important is customer service in a digitalized world and how can it help to attract and retain clients?

A: Providing a great experience is essential to retaining a customer. Every touchpoint a client has with the company should be superior to the competition’s. In Latin America, smartphone users spend 84 percent of their time on a messaging app and, on average, open their WhatsApp 200 times a day. The future of customer experience is messaging. It requires knowing who the consumer is, where they are in their customer journey and making every step more comfortable, effective, frictionless and satisfying.

Q: How should these systems evolve to ensure the human element in a transaction is not lost?

A: Chatbots should not be 100 percent automated. It is necessary to create a hierarchy of needs, in which the first is a good experience. Some interactions are easy for a chatbot but others are next to impossible. For example, after a car accident, a person might be scared and trembling and would prefer a person at the end of the line to soothe them; they would probably not want to start typing to provide information to a chatbot. The key is to provide options. A client may prefer to contact a call center to report a claim and later continue that conversation on WhatsApp.

GUS bases the customer journey on the customer’s emotions at different stages. We map out the customer journey to understand what points are appropriate for automation, for a human or a webpage.

Q: What kind of personalization and attention should a customer service solution, such as a chatbot, offer to ensure customers feel listened to and understood by the company?

A: In a customer service case, you want to keep people in the chat as often as possible. Start with a chatbot and if the customer has any doubts, have a human agent respond. Measure why people are being handed off to a human agent and where they need better web services or other features. Our first action is automating the chat, followed by sending out some proactive messages. Brands are realizing how proactive a WhatsApp message can be at different points of the customer journey. It improves the customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and the net promoter score (NPS) by 10-15 percent.

Q: GUS offers services on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. How have you developed stronger solutions using these platforms?

A: WhatsApp has more users but every platform has its own strengths and weaknesses. Some brands target numerous platforms, from Google Assistant to Twitter to WhatsApp. Generally, we focus on one and expand from there but some solutions can be used on two different platforms. Often when we start working with clients, we launch live chat, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram Messaging simultaneously as one homogenous experience. Then we separate them and add new features depending on the platform.

Q: How does GUS’ sales automation help to keep better track of customers and transactions?

A: For example, if a client visits a webpage looking for a TV but does not buy it, that information is not useful for a webpage but it is highly useful for a WhatsApp campaign. We start simply, sending a WhatsApp message offering a 10 percent discount to visitors. The process later becomes more complex as we analyze chatbot conversations, webpage activity and app sales and integrate that data into the salesforce. Then we create a predictive experience. We ran a similar campaign with one of our e-commerce clients and saw a staggering 82 percent reduction in their cost of acquisition.

Q: What advantages does AI offer in facilitating communication within the company and with its clients?

A: AI is generally good for almost any business area as long as it is fully understood. The quality of the data plugged into an algorithm is directly linked to the quality of the result obtained. A company needs someone who understands the objectives of machine learning, predictive analytics and other tools. Our vision is that every touchpoint of the customer experience with our chatbots creates data, which is plugged into an algorithm to further improve customer experience. Later, we analyze where the customer is on their journey and send them proactive, relevant messages. This can be a part of our customer service, such as informing clients of a product delivery. This step greatly improves customer experience but few brands do it.

Q: What strategy has GUS developed to boost client loyalty through its chatbot solutions?

A: We created a solution that speeds up a chatbot by 10 times and makes it 17 percent easier to understand with absolutely no code. We teach customers to create a good customer experience and created an e-book explaining this process. The difference between a good chatbot and a great chatbot is understanding what it needs to do and having the appropriate back-end with web services connected to APIs.

On GUS chat, it is possible to create a well-functioning chatbot in minutes. Some customers use our platform to build simple chatbots, while with others we work on a larger scale and map out a customer journey.

We boost client loyalty with proactive messaging. When a customer wants to increase retention, we find every point of friction in their customer journey to resolve issues and perform an internal escalation using our CRM to ensure problems are resolved as soon as possible. Generally, customer experience and retention go hand-in-hand and require proactivity, personalization and fast solutions.

Q: What future awaits chatbots and what are GUS’ plans to continue developing these services?

A: We plan to make our platform as easy to use as possible and our chatbots more personalized. To do so, we are increasingly automating, using more backends and better user interfaces that allow clients to build a chatbot in minutes. We are also developing our own CRM so our customers can just plug and play our solutions into their architecture.