Chatbots have arrived. They’re no longer the domain of sci-fi movies or high-tech companies. They’ve gone mainstream. Last year, more than two-thirds of consumers report interacting with a Chatbot.
People are embracing them, too. 40% of consumers said they don’t care whether it’s a Chatbot or human that helps them as long as they get what they need. 47% of consumers say they are open to the idea of buying products or services from Chatbots.
AI-Powered Chatbots
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are two of the main reasons Chatbots are becoming more accepted. Some of the more advanced AI-Fueled Chatbots make it difficult to know whether it’s a Chatbot or a real person.
Machine Learning (ML) can improve over time as Chatbots analyze additional data to learn how to answer specific inquiries. They can handle relentless amounts of inquiries and can be programmed to recommend upsell opportunities.
Most importantly, they take the burden off of overworked and stressed out customer support teams. Chatbots can produce savings in customer service costs by as much as 30%.
Chatbots Are Augmenting (Not Replacing) Support Teams
While Chatbots can handle routine functions, they can also direct more complex inquiries to the right person. When a human touch is needed, virtual AI assistants will gather information and use the data to efficiently route the call to an agent. Rather than force the customer to repeat the information they’ve provided, it will be queued up for the agent when they connect.
Support staff is relieved of dealing with some of the tedious and repetitive inquiries and instead spend their time dealing with specific customer issues.
Working in tandem, Chatbots and support teams can more efficiently handle customer interactions.
The Benefits Of Chatbots
Chatbots don’t take time off, lunch breaks, or call in sick. They provide service at times that would be prohibitively too expensive for most companies to manage. They can handle more queries and handle them more quickly. This addresses one of the most frustrating consumer complaints: long wait times to get queries answered or problems resolved.
Consumers Expect Businesses To Be Open 24/7
Customers are used to getting instant answers for queries on search engines such as Google. They don’t care when you’re open. If they need information, they expect it now. A study by Oracle conducted in 2016 reported that more than half of consumers expect businesses to provide service 24/7. Nearly four years later, you can only imagine how that number has grown. The Harvard Business Review calls it a seismic shift in consumer perception. Consumers are demanding frequent, low-friction, customized digital interactions as part of their customer experience.
Thousands Of Personalized Interactions
Chatbots can handle thousands of simultaneous conversations at the same time. No agent can do that. Drawing from data, such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, browsing habits, or social media queries, Chatbots can personalize responsive to individuals.
Reduced Call Volume
Chatbots can handle many routine queries or direct customers to online or self-help resources to reduce overall call volume. Because they can handle queries quickly, they can also improve resolution times.
Proactive Customer Support
Customer support teams usually only interact with customers when they have a problem or a question. Chatbots can take a more proactive approach by monitoring how customers are interacting with websites and landing pages to initiative conversations. This can be used to help customers navigate the site, offer incentives, or answer questions.
Training And Coaching Call Center Teams
Implementing Chatbots is a change for call centers and support teams. It will take training to help them make the transition and coaching to reinforce the lessons learned. Companies are implementing training and coaching tools, including:
- Live Call Monitoring
- Call Whisper
- QA Scorecards
- Manual Scorecards
- Automated Scorecards
- Call Recording
Chatbot Adoption Will Only Grow
As the ability to assimilate more data grows using AI and ML, Chatbots will become even smarter. They will provide deeper customer insights and begin to move into predictive customer behavior.
Adoption continues to grow. By mid-2018, Facebook’s Messenger App already had more than 300,000 business Chatbots. 80% of all businesses are expecting to implement at least some Chatbot automation functions by 2020.
