Customers want clearer, faster, and easier support from the brands they use. To meet these goals at scale, companies are leveraging innovative technology, including automated chatbots. The role of chatbots can vary, and their adoption increased significantly in the last few years. Additionally, most customers don’t mind interacting with them to resolve issues.
But what will their defining function be in the future of customer service? There are several reasons why companies should adopt them, which we’ll cover in this article. However, not all chatbots are the same. If you’re going to deploy the technology, you need to know it will deliver a positive experience for your customers and
support your customer service agents.
1. Customers want a fast response.
Companies could risk losing customers if they don’t respond fast enough to simple questions. Employing an automated chatbot on your website can help you meet their exacting expectations. The type of artificial intelligence (AI) you use will make a difference.
Customers expect chatbots to be able to provide an instant response, with 55 percent of those surveyed in one study expecting this. That same study found that customers see the main benefit of chatbots are that they’re available 24/7. That’s critical in a 24-hour world where not all customers seek service during traditional service hours.
Automated chatbots deliver responsiveness that’s not humanly possible. Those companies that don’t employ them risk customers perceiving them as antiquated and not responsive.
2. Chatbots work across many industries.
Retail and e-commerce aren’t the only industries where chatbots are supporting customer success.
By 2022, 75 to 90 percent of healthcare and banking queries will be via chatbots. These were once areas where business leaders thought only human interaction could solve challenges. However, that’s not the case when you use conversational AI chatbots that can do more than answer simple questions such as, “Where’s the closest ATM?”
Customers also want to use them for tasks such as making reservations and appointments. Offering flexibility like this demonstrates to customers that you want communication to be convenient for them.
3. Reliability and accuracy in responses build trust.
Chatbots that deliver reliable and accurate responses leave customers with positive feelings about the experience.
The speed in which they respond matters, of course. Those answers also need to be relevant to the person’s query and actually resolve it. You won’t be able to do that consistently with decision tree-based chatbots that only use keywords to retrieve answers.
An automated chatbot built with human-centered AI is much more robust and powerful. Bots like these keep learning and getting smarter. They also don’t sound like bots because they analyze sentiment and intent.
If you can resolve issues quickly and with a high level of service and personalization, your customers will remain loyal. They aren’t looking for small talk; they want answers.
Our clients realize up to 90 percent accuracy in self-service responses, which reduces queues for human agents by 20 percent.
4. Conversational AI chatbots enable scaling for faster support.
A conversational AI chatbot can understand sentence structure, meaning, tone, synonyms, and nuance. It looks at the entire query, not just keywords. From this, it can extract the best answer based on millions of documents. It can also classify urgency and spam.
Additionally, because these chatbots use true AI, companies can implement them much faster. This technology eliminates the need to build out models or decision trees manually.
5. Chatbots offer omnichannel options.
Customers want to engage with you in the channel that they prefer. AI chatbots can provide this via chat, email, help desk, or app. It’s the same experience for them, no matter how they choose to interact. Offering omnichannel customer self-service options contribute to your customer’s feelings about your brand. If it’s too difficult for them to interact with you, they may abandon your brand.
6. AI chatbots improve the customer experience.
AI can improve the customer experience. That matters significantly in the customer-brand relationship; in one survey, 74 percent of consumers said their buying decisions are at least somewhat based on experiences.
By using conversational AI chatbots, your customers can get accurate, fast answers to queries. It’s a much more positive experience for them versus standard chatbots that trip up over somewhat simple questions, ending in the customer failing to get what they need.
These automated chatbots can also serve them throughout their journey, answering questions about products before they buy and how they use the product or service throughout its lifetime.
The future of customer success is human-centered AI.
Automated chatbots can revolutionize how you serve customers. By applying human-centered AI to these tools, your customers will have better experiences, receive accurate answers fast, and reduce the strain on agents.
