How Customer Service Chatbots Are Redefining Customer Engagement With Ai

By Author: Veronika Golubeva
Total Articles: 2
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How customer service chatbots are reinventing customer engagement
Back in the day, artificial intelligence used to only exist in science fiction films. That’s the reality we live in at the present time. Today, brands are embracing this cutting-edge technology to boost efficiency and optimize spend in all business areas.

According to Fortune Business Insights, the market size of AI was estimated at more than $27 billion in 2019. This number is projected to have a tenfold increase of more than $265 billion by 2027.

So it’s no surprise that most established companies and startups are looking to invest in Artificial Intelligence to hop on the technology train. Whereas these investments come in various forms and shapes, AI-enabled chatbots have seen a surge of interest the most.
The proliferation of AI-enabled chatbots lets you do what was once unprecedented: serve customers 24/7, provide instant replies, and take the shopping experience to an unprecedented personalized level.

This article will look under the covers of chatbot technology and highlight the benefits customer service chatbots entail ...
... for businesses. Without further ado, let’s get into it!

What is a customer service chatbot, and do I need one?
We live in a world of instant messaging and communication, where customers appreciate instant help and support. Some questions pop up often, some call for in-depth knowledge and understanding, and some questions are something in between.

If you don't offer supersonic and appropriate customer support, you lose customer loyalty and the future value it generates. And If you opt for customer service agents everywhere, they end up answering the same questions again and again and missing valuable cross-sell opportunities. This is very distressing so you can easily start losing staff which is expensive.

This is when chatbots come in. A customer support chatbot is software that takes advantage of AI and ML algorithms to address basic customer inquiries. These questions may vary, including such inquiries as “What is your fee?”, and so on.

The chatbot technology comes in handy when questions are simple and systematic. As for more complex ones that need a human touch - chatbots hand them over to human agents. On top of it, you don’t have to be a coding genius to operate chatbots. They are so simple and user-friendly that the customer service agents can teach the bots by themselves.

A chatbot doesn’t have to conduct an entire conversation with a customer from the beginning to the end. It can take over the early stages of greeting and engaging with a customer, then route that conversation to a human agent for enhanced support. Most business owners leverage the chatbot technology to automate and scale mundane tasks, provide superior service as well as reach a larger market, and gather valuable data to fetch customer insights.

Based on technology, communication can feature different components:
Welcome screen: an introduction page that is demonstrated to the users. Typically it includes the name, image, and description of the bot with a greeting message.
Structured messages: this component offers a pre-built message structure that displays options to choose from, like the action or the inquiry category.
Text messages: this feature allows users to type complete sentences that are then made sense of through Natural Language Processing.

If you are somewhat reluctant to invest in a complex and highly-developed chatbot, consider the following questions first:
Will a chatbot add value?
Can you closely maintain this technology after launch?
Will a chatbot cheapen your business costs?
Is a chatbot the best option for your target customer?
Is your team prepared to be a safety net?
Are you ready to comply with privacy guidelines?

If you’ve answered positively to most of the aforementioned questions, chances are high that your business will benefit from this technology.

Pro tip: Start by practicing target messaging and product tours to relieve the strain on your support department and stimulate instant communication.

Chatbots vs. Humans
Chatbots are going neck-to-neck with human customer service. But this obviously doesn’t make AI children irreplaceable or make social contact de trop. In fact, whereas most consumers don’t mind the technology in question, they prefer chatting with a live person the most. Thus, nearly 40% of respondents said they have a good customer service experience with an online chat platform, while only 16% of respondents said the same thing about chatbots.

This conflicting data makes it tricky to choose between sides and advocate something. Are bots indispensable to impeccable service? Or are humans?

In reality, humans and bots complement each other. When talking about support services, we can apply the 80/20 rule. The rule implies that frequently asked questions represent about 80% of your total support volume, whereas outlier questions and issues comprise the other 20%. Although the percentage may fluctuate, most companies don’t have a lot of versatility when it comes to total support volume. Therefore, chatbots help to cut costs on these high-frequency questions, since these questions are low in value and easy to automate.

With that being said:
Bots excel at answering common questions quickly, thus reducing hold times. They also help with quick routing to the right place.
Human agents should cater to complex situations that call for human involvement. People also excel at documenting or reviewing product damage and settling negative customer experience.
Therefore, chatbots and humans should work together, giving you the ultimate support strategy that fills any possible gaps. Just remember that Artificial Intelligence does streamline daily processes, but it can never supersede a human touch.

The six major benefits of customer service chatbots
Using AI-fueled technologies to supercharge your support team’s efforts is not just about chasing tech fashion. It also helps you reap major benefits and open up new customer experience levels. Let us go over the major perks that chatbots offer.

Quicker Responses
The main advantage of implementing an AI-enabled chatbot is that it speeds up the responding process. Even if chatbots can’t provide an immediate solution, they can at least address chat pings without inherent downtimes like working hours and breaks. Customers do not like slow turnaround, but keeping a large live team reachable at all times is pointless from the business stand-point. That is why a software application can be the first touchpoint, alleviate customer annoyance, and cover for specialists when needed.

24/7 personalized support
Unlike humans, programs don’t need sleep breaks. If your specialists are unreachable, a chatbot can hop in to provide an instant reply, no matter how mundane the question is. If the issue requires human participation, the software can indicate your working hours to say when a human will be able to take over.

Nobody likes to wait hours before they are attended to, even during non-working hours, holidays, or a well-deserved nap. But no one seems to care. Customers tend to invalidate a ‘slow’ brand, forcing them to look for prompt competitors. And the void between your brand and converting customers is a lack of AI chatbots.

Continuous learning

Chatbots are equipped with ML capabilities not just for answering questions. They use Machine Learning capabilities to learn continuously from interactions with customers. The ML code generates new neural pathways in the chatbot software that allows the program to provide feedback that is fine-tuned to the user’s changing demands.

For instance, if a chatbot is taught how to answer an inquiry like “What is the pricing”, it can automatically process the question like “How much is the fee?”, since they are close in meaning. The second question is then added to the knowledge base, so future inquiries are addressed properly.
Cost-Effectiveness
One of the most obvious advantages of chatbots is financial. Since a human agent can manage a limited number of chats within a particular period, businesses would have to ramp up their support teams to balance the workload. A huge full-time support team automatically blows up the personnel costs, ushering in an overstretch of organizational resources.

Human productivity multiplies when agents don’t have to handle repetitive questions over and over again. Therefore, chatbots help business owners save time and money and avoid legal statutes of minimum wages and other technicalities that apply to human agents.

Give your company a voice and enhance your brand image
If tete-a-tete communication is often scarce or just impossible, then investing in a chatbot is a great bid to shape your brand image. Thus, some brands like Hipmunk use chatbots as their company mascots. Another example of such use cases is the Disney company that has implemented the technology to engage younger audiences, as it did with a Zootopia chatbot.

The Bottom Line
The robot takeover is coming. Well, it’s already here. And we are not talking about Terminator or The Matrix level, but more like iRobot. Chatbots have become especially popular in the role of virtual assistants that are rapidly filling the niche of customer service. Although implementing a chatbot into your customer service team can be tricky and intimidating, this technology has all the chances to improve both your customers' experience and your agents' productivity.