Chatbots in Membership Services: An Overview for Augmenting Your Team

Companies are adopting membership programs to sell their products and services, taking advantage of the benefits of steady and predictable income.  With lower marketing costs on acquisition, these membership models are looking for opportunities to maximize retention and let word of mouth bring in additional revenue.  In fact, 48% of companies have seen an increase of members over the past year alone.

A strong trend seen in membership retention can be directly attributed to companies providing a strong online presence to service their people. By offering a way to assist in product and service offerings through the internet, the potential scale has grown exponentially.

Yet many customer service teams have found it challenging to assist the massive audience at their disposal, often understaffed and working overtime to avoid a bad customer interaction.  So, they turn to technology as a means to overcome the large customer volume.

Working alongside CIOs and IT staff, one such solution for membership services has been the chatbot.

Chatbots by definition are virtual assistants built to augment customer service representatives in their daily communication needs.  This AI-powered software is designed to serve at scale and around the clock.  Here are just a few of the common use cases chatbots are managing in the customer service pipeline for members.

Membership Information
It’s important for both members and the companies they are a part of to have accurate records on file.  With correct information like phone numbers, email IDs, and home addresses, members can receive promotional specials and marketing deals.  And the company has a rich database to know who its primary audience is.  A chatbot can assist a customer service representative help members add, delete and modify their personal information on the fly.

As an example, say a member was interested in adding a new dependent to their account.  The chatbot would collect account details, verify the member is who they say they are, and process the request.  It can do this because the chatbot integrates with the company CRM system.  So, forget about making your customer service representatives manually type in all the details!  Let the chatbot do the heavy lifting.

The member updates can be applied to a variety of different areas depending on your core business.

Often companies offer different tier packages of their membership services depending on the individual or business needs (yes, businesses can be members too!)  A chatbot can easily upgrade or downgrade member preferences and process payment adjustments to assist the customer service representatives.

The removal of repetitive tasks that draws many hours of a customer service teams labor and at scale is a digital solution that has no downsides.  Even when complex problems arise, the chatbot can handoff the conversation to a live agent.