In today’s episode of the Conversational Messaging Podcast, Gupshup’s Beerud and Srini discuss the inevitable demand for customer support with the rise of social media. They explore how shifting from traditional call centers to automated customer support is the smartest and most cost-efficient way to make consumers happy. 

The Common Mistake of Most Businesses

 Although customer support is one of the most critical aspects of a business, it often doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Most businesses compromise customer service because they think that it’s an expensive investment. Beerud believes that with conversational technology, quality customer support becomes cost-efficient as it can handle peak demand but requires little manpower. 

 “Using conversation technology is the best way to break that false choice. You can have great and high-quality customer support, and do it at an affordable cost.” - Beerud Sheth

Always Prioritize What Makes Consumers Happy

Now is the time for businesses to adapt to conversational technologies to interact with consumers. It’s easier for consumers to interact with brands using the very channels they use to interact with their families and friends. Shifting from traditional call centers to automated customer support can positively impact customer experience, leading to improved customer loyalty. 

“Ultimately, the only reality is the customer reality. The way that customers experience your company, your business, your interactions, is what matters. If they have a difficult time doing business with a company, if it’s challenging, they'll go find somebody else that they can do business with.” - Beerud Sheth

Always Go for the Smartest Solution

Conversational technology is easy to incorporate in customer support because of the simple type of questions. Through AI, Beerud proposes to create a chatbot that understands structured queries, unstructured queries, or a combination of both. For everyone’s satisfaction, human agents can handle the most complicated ones, those the bot can’t resolve, making the solutions inclusive to all types of queries. 

“It depends on the specific business, the brand, their consumers, the nature of the product, the complexity of the conversation, and so on. There's a lot of different ways to slice and dice this problem. There's no question that taking this approach is indeed the right way to automate customer support.” - Beerud Sheth

To know more about Conversational Technology in Customer Support, listen to this episode.

Bio:

Beerud is the co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, the world's leading platform for cloud messaging and conversational experiences. It is used by over 100K+ customers and developers and handles over 6 billion messages per month. He previously founded and led Elance (now Upwork, a publicly listed company), the pioneer of online freelancing and the gig economy.

Prior to founding Elance, he worked in the financial services industry – modeling, structuring, and trading fixed income securities and derivatives at Merrill Lynch and Citicorp Securities. His graduate research, at the MIT Media Lab, involved developing autonomous learning agents for personalized news filtering. Beerud earned an M.S. in Computer Science from MIT & a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Institute Silver Medal.

Srinivas has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.

Resources:

Gupshup.io