Before Christmas, companies invest massively in marketing to get as many orders as possible and increase sales. However, they neglect the importance of communicating with customers in the process of purchasing decisions and order processing. Domestic technology company Daktela has identified the most common customer care mistakes that are costing marketers profits.
For many e-tailers, the month before Christmas is the busiest time of the year. For some items, pre-Christmas orders account for 50% of annual sales and 62% of all customer interactions. "In the pre-Christmas season, call centre traffic is 5-12 times higher than during the year. As skilled workforce with good language skills is scarce on the market, during seasonal peaks companies are forced to choose a compromise between the quality of customer care, the number of conversations handled and the amount of resources invested. Customers then wait in queues or are transferred to less experienced colleagues. E-shops are looking for other ways to make their work more efficient, including the involvement of artificial intelligence," says Zdeněk Čech, Chief of Staff at Daktele.
The goal of retailers is to make everything go smoothly - from selecting products, clicking them into the shopping cart, through payment to delivery to the consumer. If the merchant doesn't resolve the snag as soon as possible, they risk losing profits and customers. The most common mistakes made by e-shops include:
At least half of the errors listed are due to customer support staff being overwhelmed with routine queries - such as order status. Artificial intelligence can help sort out the busiest time over the Christmas period so that the customer doesn't know anything. "We offer small and large businesses a free email analysis and AI bot setup to save them time in their daily routine. Our AI EmailBot will learn how to respond to what based on previous email communications over two days. It can correctly assess which queries require review by a live human. After training and testing, it can handle thousands of emails in 1 minute," says Jiří Havlíček, CEO of Daktela, adding: "AI bots can also handle repetitive tasks by linking to the company's system. This allows marketers to handle the onslaught of clients before Christmas without any problems."
Less operators, more music
AI bots will therefore not only save costs, but also give operators more time to deal with important communications. Operators can then satisfy customers where it's really needed. Yet many companies are concerned about the involvement of AI in customer communications. They perceive customer frustration and fear that an angry customer will feel even worse when communicating with a robot. Daktela therefore decided to conduct market research with the help of MNForce among 1,000 Czech consumers in the customer care field. And what did it show?
Live versus artificial intelligence on a working line
The results of the MNForce survey show that Czechs are experiencing poor customer care more and more often. If all companies offered flawless and exemplary care, AI bots would not be needed in customer communication. Where customer care is excellent and bots can do everything a human can, customers prefer a human operator. In total, 60.9% of respondents prefer a human operator, 28.2% of respondents do not care who they communicate with and only 11% of respondents prefer a robot.
I'd rather talk to a robot now than a human in five minutes
Daktela researched how long customers were willing to wait for a live operator to respond if the robot's response was of the same quality but faster. If respondents had to wait 5 minutes for a human to resolve their phone request, 46.2% preferred to speak to a robot. Only 37.5% of respondents would prefer to wait 5 minutes to be transferred to a human operator, while 16.2% of respondents would not care about the resolution method.
I'd rather wait three minutes for an email from a robot than three days from a human
In response to the question: 'Would you rather wait 3 days for an email from a human operator or 3 minutes for a robot to respond?', 79.5% of respondents voted for the robot, while only 11.8% voted for the human.
Three minutes from a human or 3 seconds from an AI?
Another question asked whether customers prefer a human operator or a robot, assuming that the operator finds relevant information in 3 minutes and the robot in 3 seconds. In this case, 53.8% of respondents would prefer a fast robot assistant. Only 31.4% would prefer the slower handling by a human operator. So the time factor plays a big role in the decision between a live and an artificial operator.
The survey showed that customers do not cling to human operators at all costs. They want their request resolved quickly and with high quality. "We can say that with the prospect of faster turnaround of their customer care requests, customers' preference for AI bots is increasing. This is something that AI can help with. Its main advantages are prompt processing, zero waiting time and non-stop operation," comments Jiri Havlicek, CEO of Daktela, which supplies AI bots to companies, on the results.
About Daktela:
Daktela is one of the largest SaaS companies in the Czech Republic, currently operating in seven markets and several others through partners. Daktela's core business is the development, delivery and full operational support of an application to unify customer communications and manage the customer experience. Daktely's software is used by more than 1,200 companies of various sizes worldwide. The biggest benefit is that within a single platform, companies handle communications via phone, email, web chat and social media. In the Czech Republic, Daktela came to prominence as a co-author of Smart Quarantine as part of the COVID19CZ initiative and the 1221 information line.
The company currently has over 170 employees in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Great Britain, Hungary, Serbia and Romania. Daktel was founded in 2005 by then 28-year-old software experts David Hajek and Richard Baar as a telecommunications start-up. In 2021, private equity fund Sandberg Capital, one of the most important investors in technology companies in the region, invested in Daktela. The fund is now the majority owner of Daktele, with a minority stake split between its founders. For more information, visit www.daktela.com and www.sandbergcapital.com.
Media contact:
Mgr. Martin Šemík
PR agency: surikata PR s.r.o.
martin.semik@surikatapr.cz
+420 731 472 400
