Manual, one-to-one, communication can become labour intensive. But there are a number of ways to effectively engage customers on a large scale.

Scripted or ‘canned’ responses are an essential part of the online customer service toolkit. These pre-prepared responses to common questions take a lot of the time out of responding to queries, whether through social platforms, conventional channels, or digital customer services tools such as Zendesk or LiveAgent. Just ensure that these responses are sufficiently personalised to be received as genuine.

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Additionally, on a growing number of social platforms, you can set up chatbots to handle the initial phase of a customer conversation. On Facebook’s Messenger platform, these chatbots can provide complex functionality and hold complete conversations as well as greet consumers. In theory at least.

It’s important here to recognise that consumers have become aware of chatbots and understand that they are not human. Many brands openly call their agent a ‘bot’ and are transparent about it being an automated service. Avoid pretending to be a human member of staff, and understand a chatbot’s realistic limitations. In most cases, human intervention will be required at some stage, and these automated bots are simply a way to: a) make the customer feel like their query is progressing immediately b) route that query within the business to the relevant staff or team.

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Transport for London’s TravelBot is a perfect example of this approach, clearly providing a bot as an automated information service that customers can call upon at any time of day to answer queries around the UK capital’s transport network.

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