With all the technology available globally, customer service is evolving daily and expanding beyond traditional norms and strategies. Tournkey recently launched our own 24/7 community support built on AI and our own industry experience. This round-the-clock response tool now serves as an integral part of our website, providing immediate assistance to our customers.
Building Your Own Chatbot
Collaborative Effort
The first step in creating any chatbot is a collaborative effort across your entire organization ensuring each department has input. When we built ours, we generated lists of commonly asked questions along with their answers. This ensured that our chatbot would be equipped to handle a wide range of queries, whether the customer was looking for support securing a group booking, looking to build a partnership with Tournkey, or something in between.
Whatever the questions are for your customer, providing accurate and helpful responses is always the key objective. Remember, you are never done updating your chat experience. Customer experiences change and so might your platform so stay on top of this to ensure your customer has a positive experience when they need support.
Map the Flow
Next, you should visualize the customer experience to review the potential workflow they may experience. We used ClickUp's mind map feature to visualize the flow of the questions and answers there are other tools available so use your preferred tool (paper is okay too). This will help you determine points of interest where decisions are made. Information like this will be helpful in redirecting customers to the right subject matter and ultimately submitting a support ticket that is appropriate for their needs.
Build the Bot
With your plan in place, you are ready to build your chatbot. We use Hubspot to support our customers and sales efforts. If you'd like to learn more our partners at Neon Supply would be happy to walk you through the benefits of using an industry-leading tool like Hubspot. Using HubSpot's Chatflows functionality is easy for users of all skill levels and will not restrict you if you're challenged by technology. This tool allowed you to easily implement the previously mapped workflow of questions and responses, creating a seamless transition between user queries and chatbot responses.
Feedback and Refinement
Once you've installed your support funnel it's vital you measure how successful it is. To ensure you continually improve your support and refine the service offered through your chatbot you will need to implement some type of mechanism to collect feedback.
Hubspot has great tools built in to help automate this process but you could use Google Form, Survey Monkey, or any number of industry tools to gain valuable feedback. Gathering valuable insights about the user experience is good practice and will allow your team to quickly and efficiently refine and expand your chatbot.
Our Results
In the initial six months of integrating the chatbot into our website, we observed a few significant changes.
The first was in ticket submissions through HubSpot. These increased by 58%. This remarkable increase allowed us to consolidate all inquiries in a single platform, streamlining the process from the moment a ticket is submitted to prompt resolution and closure by our team. This is particularly valuable for customers seeking support at odd hours or after business hours.
In the first six months, we lowered our average response from 18 hours to 13 hours — a whopping five hours lower than the beginning half of the year! This number includes weekend ticket submissions when our office is closed.
The chatbot allowed us to expedite the entire ticket-handling procedure and lowered our average close time by two hours. This meant that customers were getting all of the support they needed quickly.
The final noteworthy improvement was the integration of support content enabling users to self-serve problems quickly and easily without inconveniencing the customer or asking them to wait for a support agent. We've seen notable customer experience improvements and we continue to build additional support tools to aid the consumer.
The support systems created by a chatbot, connected support ticketing, and/or Knowledge Base materials can be a powerful tool to help your customer achieve satisfaction by delivering immediate answers for their most important needs.
