If you are not already using chatbots to better your customer’s experience, this blog will change your mind. If you want to know the reasons, there are a lot of good ones. For starters, 70% of millennials who have tried chatbots while shopping have spoken highly of them for the positive experience they brought.
Studies have also shown how businesses can cut customer service costs by up to 30% by using chatbots effectively. Chatbots have become incredibly versatile these days. They can handle multiple tasks together – generating leads, sending cart-abandonment reminders to sending customer feedback forms.
With so many applications, how exactly do chatbots make life easier for customers? In this article, we will explore five key ways chatbots improve customer experiences.
Speed and Responsiveness
One of the biggest advantages of chatbots is their quick response time in solving issues. Unlike we humans, chatbots can handle thousands of conversations at once 24/7. This means customers get instant and round-the-clock support.
With over half (53%) of customers saying that speed is one of the most important aspects of customer service, most brands using human support teams struggle with response speed. Chatbots not only help customers directly but also make interactions more efficient for human agents
How does this work, you ask?
Organizations today generally use a mix of chatbots and human agents to streamline interactions. A chatbot can analyze an incoming customer message for sentiment. This helps the human agents to respond with empathy more quickly. Alternatively, the chatbot might scan the text for keywords. This helps to quickly find the relevant knowledge base articles to deliver faster, more accurate solutions.
Chatbots can even take on the burden of handling routine inquiries. This frees up human agents to focus on complex issues, reducing the number of tickets and cutting down on wait times.
Personalized Service
True, speed is essential. But for many customers, personalization ranks higher on the list. According to HubSpot, 59% of customers value personalization more in their service experience than speed.
Personalization matters because customers want to feel recognized and valued. Chatbots improve personalization in customer service, thanks to their ability to:
- Collect and use customer data to deliver tailored service
- Offer customized advice/recommendations
- Suggest relevant items or solutions based on a customer’s history
- Ask specific questions to gather new customer data and preferences
When chatbots are connected to your CRM, they can draw on a wealth of customer data. They can look into purchase history, previous interactions, browsing behavior, demographic details, and many more intricate details. This enables the chatbot to ask contextually relevant questions and provide personalized recommendations.
Accuracy and Consistency
Customers also expect accurate and consistent service and this brings us to our next advantage of chatbots in customer service. Getting the right answers every time, from any representative they speak to, is fundamental to a good customer experience.
However, this expectation often goes unmet. 76% of customers report receiving conflicting information after speaking to multiple agents, and 87% feel frustrated when they have to repeat themselves to different agents.
This is where chatbots can make a significant impact. Because chatbots are programmed to pull information from a single knowledge base, they help ensure a consistent customer experience across all interactions. They reduce errors and can provide more reliable responses than humans.
Chatbots also support human agents by quickly fetching information from the knowledge base. This way agents are not relying on memory or lengthy searches to respond with consistency and accuracy.
If you need help training your customer support team to smoothly integrate chatbots into their daily tasks, EducationNest can help you do this. Being India’s top corporate training provider, they offer numerous training programs in areas like big data, cybersecurity, and digital marketing, and also have customization options in their expert-led courses.
Increasing Omnichannel Support
Another key benefit of chatbots in customer service is how they can improve your omnichannel support. This is done by both extending your coverage across channels and keeping customer interactions cohesive across platforms.
If your team is stretched thin, a chatbot can respond to live chats, social media messages, and other channels, making your brand more accessible while maintaining consistency across different touchpoints. Chatbots can also log interactions, track user data, and keep customer information up-to-date, helping agents understand a customer’s journey, no matter where the conversation began.
Take chatbots on social media as an example. Many businesses use chatbots on Facebook to handle high volumes of messages daily, answer questions, help with bookings, and even assist with product recommendations.
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Empowering Self-Service
Does self-service actually matter? According to research, it does:
- 75% of customers say that self-service is convenient
- 67% prefer self-service over speaking to a human agent
- 77% of customers value a brand more if it offers self-service options
Chatbots are an ideal solution for empowering self-service. This is an extremely underrated use of chatbots in customer service. You can use chatbots to guide users to knowledge base articles, FAQ answers, or even provide direct answers in a chat format.
Moreover, some companies use chatbots to assist with simple transactions that don’t require human help, such as returns, subscription upgrades, or account access recovery. Self-service options like self-checkout lanes (in-store product lookup kiosks) and online chatbots enable customers to handle tasks independently.
Scalability and Cost Savings
Finally, chatbots are invaluable for scalability and cost savings. While this benefit indirectly impacts customer service, it is essential for the sustainable growth of a company too.
For example:
- Reducing costs in one area allows your organization to enhance services in another
- Improved scalability means reduced wait times and better service
- Scaling up customer service lets you manage growth while protecting your reputation
- High-volume customer support ensures quality service even during peak periods
By handling a substantial number of requests without the need for additional human representatives, chatbots lower customer service costs. This allows businesses to reallocate resources toward optimization, data analysis, or service improvements. Chatbots also manage fluctuations in demand effectively, so companies can handle busy seasons seamlessly without needing extra staff during quieter months.
Even with so many advantages of chatbot integration, you must know one thing. Chatbots are not a fully automated solution and will still require active management, just like any customer service tool. To fully harness the benefits of chatbots, AI, automation, or similar technology, it is essential to have a team with the right expertise.
They will need to know how to program the chatbot effectively, integrate it with your existing tech stack, and implement it strategically for tasks that will drive the most impact. You will also need an expert team to look after its regular maintenance and improvements over time.
With the right team and approach, chatbots can evolve to meet customer needs and provide meaningful support in more ways than one.
If you are looking for a little helping hand to train your in-house teams to be experts at these tasks, look no further than EducationNest. The top choice in corporate training for employees in India, they offer fully customizable, expert-led training solutions in various domains with lifetime access.
