Enhancing Customer Experience: How Chatbots are Transforming Customer Support
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Science fiction writers of the past had visions of how technology would help people with their lives. Isaac Asimov wrote about robots doing day-to-day tasks for people, for example. We’re not at that stage yet, but we do have ways that allow people to do tasks for others even if they are thousands of miles away – like the Philippines virtual assistant.
Chatbots are another recent advancement in technology, and they can help your business provide great customer service. They show up as an instant message text box when people first come to your website. The customers can ask questions and the chatbot can answer them based on what information you have already programmed into it. The chatbot can then send it over to a live agent if the person has a more complicated question.
Here are some of the ways getting a chatbot can really help you provide the best customer service:
The Chatbot Can Be On 24/7
Do you want to go far beyond being local and sell things worldwide? You need to think about time, then. For example, New York is in a completely different time zone than Japan. Trying to coordinate everything can seem like a nightmare, especially for new businesses that have limited budgets. How do you service all of these customers? You don’t want to lose those people due to the time difference. This is especially a problem for new businesses, since they can only have so many people on call at a time. You don’t want to lose business either if these potential customers become impatient at not getting an answer right away. Since a chatbox never has to sleep, it can be there to answer people, no matter where they are in the world.
Basically, a chatbot could wind up helping around 80% of the people who have questions. That takes a lot of the workload off those who you have working for you – or even you yourself. If 20% of the people had to escalate the situation to a human being to answer those questions, then it’d be easier to give more in-depth answers then, rather than feeling rushed due to a lot more people asking them.
The Chatbot Can Save You Money
Customer service is extremely important for a healthy business. Would you rather have to pay a lot of money to have people answer common questions or would you rather they were able to just focus on the more complicated ones? You’ll save a lot of money by using a chatbot. That’s money that you can redirect to other parts of your business. Also, the whole workflow will be much better, which will make life better for your workers and also result in happier customers.
The Chatbot Can Be Used on Social Media
A lot of businesses have Facebook pages because the site has hundreds of millions of people who log onto the site each day. Those are all potential customers and it’s also a place where they can ask questions about what it is you do. If you have a chatbot using Facebook messenger, they can get answers to those questions. If it turns out that the question is too complicated, all you have to do is then have a member of your social media team step in. The presence of the chatbot will free those team members up to do other things – like come up with the next viral Facebook post.
The Chatbot Can Improve Email Automation
Email isn’t going anywhere. There may be times when people want an email answer instead of going through a chat messenger. It can give them documentation that they can refer to later, if they want. Others want more immediate answers, though, and that’s where chatbots come in. The chatbots can make those people happy by giving them the relevant information immediately without the need to wait for an email hours later. It’s all about streamlining things and this is a perfect way to do it.
The Chatbot Can Personalize Things
People want to feel valued, and you can program your chatbot to do just that. They can recognize previous customers and even call them by their name if you have paired the chatbot with your CRM system. The chatbot can then send any data on new customers to the CRM so that it will recognize them when they come to the site again. You can also have the chatbot recognize certain patterns and they can even guide customers and recommend things that they might not have thought of before.
This is just the start, though. Technology is going to keep improving over the years, and chatbots are going to get better and better. It’s going to be part of day-to-day life and your customer service will greatly improve too. Then, maybe one day, those previously mentioned robots might be invented and fulfill those visions of the science fiction writers.
