Bots Assist Customers With 62% Of Queries Post-COVID World: Study Most e-commerce companies have been shifting to bots to complete orders and handle the myriad customer queries they receive

A new study conducted by customer automation startup Verloop.io on Wednesday said that bots have been satisfactorily answering 62 per cent of customer queries in the e-commerce industry. These numbers have shown steady growth, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, increasing the number of transactions that have shifted online.

The survey analyzed 1.8 million queries from 35 brands across India, the Middle East, and South-East Asia to understand the average metrics that an e-commerce company should monitor to provide the required quality of customer service.

Most e-commerce companies have been shifting to bots to complete orders and handle the myriad customer queries they receive. E-commerce companies are dealing with impatient customers who demand service response as soon as possible.

"Consumers will no longer tolerate sub-par digital support experiences as they may have before the crisis. Retailers have to ensure their brand is ready to provide consistent, instant, and accurate support experiences across devices and channels. Automation is providing customer support teams with the ability to handle large numbers of queries in accelerated time," said Verloop founder and chief executive officer Gaurav Singh.

One such metric is Bot Deflection Rate, which is the rate that automated and self-help resources satisfy service demand measured in the number of chats that would otherwise require human intervention. This includes cases of cancellation, refunds, shipment, cancel status requests, and more.

The study also points out that the average handling time of queries has also come down across the e-commerce industry; however, as indicated below, the most drastic change is observed in the fashion and beauty industry where the average handling time came down to 26 minutes after the pandemic, as compared to 131 minutes earlier.

As a result of improved time and efforts spent on responding to customer queries, another benchmark referred to as Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) has gone up in the post-COVID world.

"CSAT helps determine a customer's level of satisfaction at key interaction times, such as the moment of purchase, the onboarding process, a support ticket exchange, and a phone or digital conversation with customer service," the research report said. The average CSAT scores across the e-commerce industry are at 4.18, as per the detailed internal research by Verloop.io

As per the research report, several automated processes can improve all the benchmarks, even more effectively such as a proactive omnichannel support as its presence across multiple channels, be it WhatsApp, Web, Facebook, or In-App, to continually engage with customers.

E-commerce companies should invest in building a unified customer profile their agents and bots can pull data instantly and provide accurate responses. However, bots cannot solve all queries; hence e-commerce companies should build support systems that can leverage the best of AI and combine it with human agents to handle complex queries. In order to achieve that, automation should be developed for broad intent coverage. A bot that can answer only a specialized set of questions will need to escalate to a human agent much more often.