Effective Use of Chatbots to Enhance the Customer Service Experience

Chatbots – automated chat systems – have become sophisticated. Do you need to design and deliver that can interact with your customers? If you’re a decision-maker right now, you may feel caught between the AI hype on the one hand and the fear that machines aren’t treating your customers well on the other.

Chatbots are a broad category that includes everything from the Amazon Alexa smart speaker to automated text chats on corporate customer service pages. The most powerful chatter – and the ones that can impact customer experience and business results – are agents. These are chatbots with AI that can understand and answer various questions from customers and are able to facilitate conversational commerce.

Virtual agents need to analyse the customer’s request, combine it with all the other information they have (such as their previous purchases, account settings, or geographic location), and determine the customer’s goal: what they want to achieve. The goals of social media clients may include, for example, “fix my broken job”, “reset my password”, “help me move house”, or “upgrade my job”. Once the objective is identified, the virtual representative uses a script aimed at solving the customer’s problem.

What Exactly is a Customer Service Chatbot?

The chatbot uses artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and natural language understanding (NLU) to mimic human speech. Businesses are always adopting chatbots and incorporating them into their workflows to answer customer questions and work around the clock. Although chatbots have some weaknesses – they are not very intelligent – they can be useful when they do the right work.

Some companies may have reservations, and rightfully so, about the impact customer service chats can have on the customer experience. Our research shows that with a satisfaction rate of 28%, chatbots have not won the hearts of customers. However, young customers have a high opinion of chatbots. Gen Z and Millennials believe that customer service chats resolve issues quickly and easily.

How Can Chatbots Improve Customer Service

Chatbots are personal assistance tools to improve communication. Brands can use it to improve their customer experience, increase sales, and build deeper relationships with customers.

They allow your customers to easily interact with your brand through prompted conversations.

Chatbots provide quick feedback to users

Customers want immediate responses to their questions. They want to be able to overcome challenges on their own until they can no longer do so. Only then will they seek the help of a live chatter.

At the very least, customers will be happy to receive a welcome message from the chatbot telling them exactly when they will get an answer to their problem, especially when a solution for the bot has not yet been fixed.

Chatbots create engagement

Chatbots are the future of brand engagement. Engaged customers are more likely to reach your bottom line quickly. Chatbots make life easier for brands. Customers are happy to interact with robots, especially when they show a sense of humour or personality like a real person.

Chatbots can reduce costs

While chatbots can’t replace customer agents, they can save you a lot of money because you don’t need to hire multiple customer agents to handle customer inquiries.

Businesses use chatbots to make things easier

Complex questions that require rigorous analysis are not for chatbots. Using chatbots to answer simple questions and engage customers with offers can be effective.

Chatbots allow brands to provide 24/7 customer service

Customers are happy to get the information they want when they want it. But the customer representative will not be there all the time.

This is where chatbots come in handy. A chatbot is always present and active at all times of the day ready to intervene.

Chatbots reduce human error

One of the reasons we use chatbots is that we want to have time for other things while we let something else do our work. Can we trust chatbots for this job? Of course, we can. Sometimes we can forget, but chatbots never forget.

Benefits of Chatbots in Customer Service

You may already know that you can use a chatbot tool to handle a lot of support questions, but it can do a lot more. As with any new technology that disrupts an established industry, the benefits of chatbots multiply. With unlimited capabilities and availability, chatbot benefits go beyond adding automation.

Reserve an agent’s time for a high-value requests

The promise of AI has always been the ability to replace people with repetitive tasks, and this is one of the main advantages of chatbots. With bots in place, customer service teams can reduce repetitive, low-cost tasks that waste employees’ time.

Similarly, many companies are adopting chatbots to solve low-level queries. This ensures that employees are always available when high-quality marketing requests come in and can generate revenue.

Provide 24/7 availability

Today’s customers expect instant support at any time of the day. Most customers rate “immediate” responses as important or very important to customer service. One of the biggest benefits of chatbots in customer service is the ability of chatbots to provide consistent support around the clock.

Although many organisations are initially hesitant to hand over support to a bot, in practice, a well-trained bot can handle up most incoming conversations without human intervention. By providing night support, organisations not only satisfy their existing customers but also open the possibility of reaching new customers in other time zones.

Provide support to agents during limited periods

Introducing a chatbot can provide unlimited potential as chat volume increases. This is one of the main strengths of chatbots in customer service in cyclical industries.

Improved response time

Most consumers say speed is one of the most important aspects of a good customer experience. Because chatbots respond instantly, bots eliminate waiting time and ensure that every customer receives the prompt support that today’s customers expect.

Even better, customers who wait to speak to a human operator are also indirectly benefiting from chatbots. With shorter lines for agent attention, customers with complex questions will have their questions answered more quickly, and more attention from agents with less interaction and more service.

Reduce support costs without compromising CX

With intelligent AI chatbots handling multiple requests, companies can easily scale up their operations without incurring support costs. Cost savings is just one of the many benefits of chatbots for growing organisations, since most customers prefer chatbot communication, companies do not see a decrease in customer satisfaction.

Benefits Of Chatbot in Ecommerce

In the world of e-commerce, chatbots are changing the user experience in business and replacing it with the experience they have with friends. Since they are built with AI and have specific rules, they learn and adapt to complex business problems and provide quick answers to user questions – just like humans would.

24/7 support

While having a 24-hour customer service team is an (expensive) option, with chatbots you can eliminate that cost as you ensure that your customers are handled directly by chatbots, no matter what.

Personalisation

Chatbots can be used to collect data about your visitors and use it to make better product recommendations and suggestions. Understanding customer wants, needs and preferences can allow you to tailor product pages and build customer loyalty and relationships.

Cost reduction

Having a chat for most (or maybe all) of your customer service can help you save a lot of money on customer service. An effective customer support chatbot requires little human support, allowing you to focus on the most important aspects of your ecommerce site, such as processing or checkout.

Product recommendations

Chatbots can help customers find the right product they are looking for from a large catalogue and go directly to the checkout page or get information about current sales. By providing answers or recommendations to specific customer requests, chatbots can guide customers and allow them to make purchases on the fly.

Cart recovery

Chatbots can remind users of their abandoned vehicles and ask them if they are ready to check out or if they want to empty their vehicles. In many cases, these reminders prompt customers to look at their vehicle and allow them to purchase some or all of the items in their vehicle.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence has become an integral part of employee engagement strategies and is changing dramatically as companies provide support to their customers. With the increasing use of AI, brands are finding it wise to use customer service chatbots to provide instant answers and reduce the risk of human intervention going backwards.

Similarly, AI-powered bots also help reduce costs, which translates into higher customer satisfaction. According to research, chatbots for customer support are set to have advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to understand the context and impact of customer questions and ensure that the answers are similar to the language of the users.