Customer experience integrations

An omnichannel chatbot is a customer service solution that can be built once and deployed to a variety of platforms where customers conduct their shopping. These platforms, or channels, can include phone, company websites, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, and even voice assistants like Amazon Alexa. Omnichannel chatbots make the customer experience more enjoyable and consistent by working seamlessly across all channels, personalizing interactions to each customer’s interests and preferences, and providing fast response times. Over time, these features lead to more sales and better customer data collection.

Yes, in fact deploying chatbots to mobile apps is a common use case. Lloyds Banking Group, the UK’s largest retail bank, has multiple virtual assistants, most prominently a retail mobile banking app where more than 10 million mobile customers can communicate with the bank at a time that suits them.

Yes, you can deploy your chatbot to Facebook Messenger, Intercom, Slack, SMS with Twilio, and WhatsApp. You can even deploy to Amazon Alexa. Learn more about Watson Assistant integrations.

Watson Assistant integrates to your existing CRM and customer care systems, helping you improve issue routing by connecting customers to the right agents the first time. You can integrate with Salesforce, Genesys, Zendesk, and more.

Customer care is the most common chatbot use case. Chatbots are helpful to both product- and service-based companies looking to provide a superior user experience by to answering customer questions, guiding customers through simple troubleshooting, and connecting customers to the resources they need. Chatbots are also often used by sales teams looking for a tool to support lead generation. Chatbots can quickly validate potential leads based on the questions they ask, then pass them on to human sales representatives to close the deal. Chatbots can even be used in e-commerce by acting as a digital sales clerk, akin to what customers would experience in brick-and-mortar stores. E-commerce chatbots can provide a personalized shopping experience that converts passive visitors into engaged prospects.

A customer browsing a website for a product or service may have questions about different features, attributes or plans. A chatbot can provide these answers, helping the customer decide which product or service to buy or take the next logical step toward that final purchase. And for more complex purchases with a multistep sales funnel, the chatbot can qualify the lead before connecting the customer with a trained sales agent.

Today, chatbots can consistently manage customer interactions 24x7 while continuously improving the quality of the responses and keeping costs down. Chatbots automate workflows and free up employees from repetitive tasks. A chatbot can also eliminate long wait times for phone-based customer support, or even longer wait times for email, chat and web-based support, because they are available immediately to any number of users at once. That’s a great user experience—and satisfied customers are more likely to exhibit brand loyalty.

A chatbot can answer questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It can provide a new first line of support, supplement support during peak periods, or offer an additional support option. At the very least, using a chatbot can help reduce the number of users who need to speak with a human, which can help businesses avoid scaling up staff due to increased demand or implementing a 24-hour support staff.

By default, the web chat window shows a home screen that can welcome users and tell them how to interact with the assistant. For information about CSS helper classes that you can use to change the home screen style, see the prebuilt templates documentation.

Utilizing an omnichannel chatbot like Watson Assistant makes it simple for customers to provide feedback on the channel with which they’re most comfortable. One common way to collect feedback is to ask customers to comment on their experience with your business right after a live chatbot interaction. This will provide unstructured feedback that can be invaluable for your business. For more structured responses, consider sending a link to a survey in a CTA at the end of a live interaction or creating a dedicated feedback chatbot.

Yes, chatbots can store customer data to provide personalized interactions and build datasets for your business. At IBM we believe your data is yours – and yours alone. Watson services (including Watson Assistant) for IBM Cloud will not share unique insights derived from your data unless you instruct us to use it. For more information on IBM’s practices for privacy, compliance and security for Watson services, read our point of view (PDF, 465 KB).

Every customer journey is different depending on the industry, product or solution, and the number of customer service channels employed by the business. However, in general, there are about 4-6 touchpoints that can involve a chatbot in a typical customer journey. Customers can interact with a chatbot on a company’s website, through social media channels like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, on phone calls using integrations like Twilio, on a mobile app, during their online retail shopping experience, or when giving post-purchase feedback.

By implementing a chatbot built with Watson Assistant across multiple channels, support agents can spend more of their time answering complex customer questions since the chatbot can handle simple and frequently asked questions. Virtual assistants can also be used internally to provide answers and data to human agents while they are assisting customers. This eliminates the need to wait for answers from a traditional internal help desk. In general, Watson Assistant integrations help free up time and reduce repetitive interactions, allowing employees to focus on more value-producing activities.

To integrate your chatbot with Twilio, you need to add the Watson Assistant phone integration first, then create a Twilio Flex project and a Twilio function to handle incoming calls. Read the full instructions in the Watson Assistant documentation.