Chatbots: A Customer Experience Must?

Customer experience is the product of the interaction between an organisation and its clients, and it has risen hugely in importance nowadays—to the point where it's central to executive committees' agendas.

Organisations are generally struggling to grow their client bases, as competition increases. But they're also battling just to keep their current clients, perhaps related to ever-easier client onboarding processes employed by competitors and industry newcomers, alongside the fact that the cost of keeping a client has been consistently rising in recent years.

Our first KPMG Customer Survey looked at 80 Luxembourgish institutions and helped quantify the benefits of new technologies with regard to keeping customers. One such technology is chatbots, whereby a business's services or data can be shared, explained, or explored via a user-friendly intelligent interface. Chatbots represent a new channel for engaging with customers and providing them with information swiftly.

The future of work: humans side by side with chatbots

After decades of technological development, human-machine interactions have become possible on a new level of practicality—and their value for organisations cannot be understated. It is therefore no surprise that automation, smart analytics, and artificial intelligence are now widespread on the market. Chatbots are at the crossroad of these technologies, notably relying on natural language processing, "natural" interfaces, and the proliferation of messaging platforms.

Chatbot technology brings new features that can benefit both customer and firm. For example, firms get insights from the processing, via algorithms that can recognise meaningful patterns and anticipate future customer needs, of copious and invaluable customer data. Firms also benefit from the automation of tasks thanks to standard connectors that interact with other software.

For customers, chatbots help ensure that only relevant products matching their needs are proposed. Plus, conversations are shortened thanks...