How chatbots can take your customer service to the next level?

For seamless interaction with your customers and to engage with them and solve their queries on a real time, chatbot is one of the fantastic innovations in the recent times. Before jumping into how chatbot is a great asset for your website, let’s me give you a basic understanding of what is a chatbot?

Chatbot is a form of artificial intelligence, and with machine learning technologies facilitates conversation and engagement with customers and prospective customers. It has taken customer service experience to the next level by optimising and streamlining the process. Chatbots are trained or rather programmed with responses that shows up based on the user’s previous response or query.

Here are the few benefits of having chatbots for your customer service experience:

24X7 customer support – Crisis management is one of the key element for all businesses, as frustrated customers can actually create a lot of problems for your business; think if your customer support doesn’t respond them on time a single tweet or review on google can tarnish your brand image. Therefore, you need to be available 24X7 as customers’ needs or queries may arise outside business hours. You need to reply them on real time in order to have customer satisfaction, here comes the benefit of having chatbots, which can respond to customers’ query at any given time.

Cost effective – As mentioned above, one needs to answer customers’ queries any given time in a day and without a chatbot you need to deploy a team which would come at a price. Therefore, chatbots can help you to cut down your costs to a great extent. Also, many of the queries by the many customers maybe similar and it might get little frustrating for a person to answers the same questions. Thus the productivity increases with chatbots which would answer these repetitive questions easily and instantly and thus saves a lots of time as well along with cost.

Immediate Response – Your customer support team are human and they cannot answer more than one person at a time, hence usually the waiting time for IVR calls usually takes time. This waiting time can make a frustrated customers angrier. The immediate response by chatbots can engage the customers and understand their needs. Besides, in many cases, after waiting for few minutes once a customer finally speaks to an agent, the agent would tell that s/he will transfer the call to the concerned person, which makes the customer impatient. Whereas, a chatbot can initiate conversation with your customers and by understanding their needs they can transfer the call directly to the concerned team thus providing a hassle-free experience to the customers.

Reduce Complaints – Since many queries are simple and common and the prospects/ customers need little guidance, a chatbot can redirect the users to the designated page or to the FAQ section on the website. This saves lots of time for the customers as well as your agents.

Language Support – If your business caters to a larger geographic areas, chatbot is a great asset for you as it can handles thousands of queries at a time in multiple languages. Sometimes, it is hard to find speakers of foreign language and it is expensive too. Therefore, chatbots are a great alternative for global companies who doesn’t need to employ multi lingual agents for customer support all the time.

Consistency – Another important aspect of chatbot is the consistency, it caters to everyone with the same tone and words as programmed. Your agents are human and suppose one of them is having a bad day, s/he might respond to the customers little differently. But this won’t be the case for a chatbot. Also, all the agents cannot speak in the same manner, same tonality, they might not use the best of words everytime, thus chatbots can maintain supreme consistency all the time.

Customer Friendly – Chatbots pleasantly greets a customers or prospective customers every time, it also understands customers’ intent. Also, as mentioned above, chatbots can answers to many queries by itself or it can direct customers to specific section where they would they their answer or solve their needs themselves.

Multichannel Support – Chatbots are not only meant for your website, chatbots can also be integrated on your social media platforms, your mobile applications, thus enable multichannel customer support.

Customer Satisfaction – As there is no waiting time, chatbots lessen the frustrations of the customers. With immediate and accurate response, chatbots streamline the process of customer service and thus keep customers happy and satisfied.

Personalization – Chatbots can fetch past data of the customers and shows relevant information. Upon integrated with CRM system, it can also fetch customers’ personal information as well. For example, it can greet a customer with his/ her name and thus it creates an emotional connect with the customers.

Lead Generation – Though there would be call to action on your website, social media platforms, apps which would generate leads for your business, but chatbots also does it efficiently. It initiates conversation with prospects, engages with them and entices them to take an action. Chatbots can be programmed in such a way that a question might prompt maybe I know your name, or may I know your phone number to serve you better. Thus it is a tool for lead generation as well.

Data Gathering – Though most of the IVR system have call recording features, but in-case if it doesn’t then it is hard for your agent to remember everything about the conversation. Chabots gather and store all the data which can be used to analyse the data, understand customers’ queries, and to serve the customers better.

Conclusion – Chatbots may not completely replace human interventions and customer support agents, but its cost effectiveness, 24X7 availability, multi-language support, immediate response, data storing and analysing capabilities surely makes it a great tools to strengthen your customer support services.