As the popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI technology) and Machine Learning increases, businesses are reflecting on their business goals to see if AI-powered chatbots are a part of their customer service strategy. To keep up with the competition, you might wonder if automation and digital transformation are a good option for your customer support teams? If you’ve heard about the ‘chatbot’ hype in the last couple of years but never really understood if you’d need to use chatbots for your organization, go ahead and give this a read.
The Power of Chatbots
Available across various digital landscapes like social media platforms (like Facebook Messenger chatbots, WhatsApp), websites, and mobile apps, chatbot technology is being used vigorously by organizations across e-commerce, financial services, healthcare, and many other industries to stay relevant, grow their business, introduce new products, increase sales, and to make a profit. In an age where clients expect immediate responses to their requests and faqs, chatbots can assist across a number of interaction points. Check out our blog to read about some great examples of chatbots in the industry.
Regarded as the simplest form of conversational AI, a Chatbot allows users to interact with a computer program through text messaging and voice to get answers to customer needs. In its simplest form, the program responds to specific keywords from the customer questions and uses a template to lead the conversation.
More advanced AI chatbots use Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to decipher the intent of the visitors’ message and allowing them to respond within the context. The bots use Machine Learning to train their knowledge base, covering a variety of useful topics that might pop up during a visitor conversation.
Does your business need a chatbot?
- Your customer service agents are often too busy and overwhelmed.
- You want to provide continuous support
- You want a better User Experience
- You are looking to generate more leads
- Building an App is not affordable
1. Your customer service agents are often too busy and overwhelmed.
The basic goal of a chatbot is to make your customers and customer service teams’ lives easier. According to Chatbots Life, companies will save 2.5 billion customer service hours using chatbots by the end of 2023. After all, time is one of the most important assets from a business’s point of view. Tackling the lower hanging fruits, chatbots can solve simple repetitive customer queries, effectively freeing up a live human agent’s time to solve more serious problems. As a leader, some questions to ponder upon are –
- Are my live agents very busy?
- Do I receive a lot of simple and repetitive queries hundreds of times a week?
- Would I rather have my live agents be well-trained backups who come in only when the bots are not able to help the customer?
If your answer to these questions is a YES, a chatbot might be able to deflect menial tickets with simple questions and save your agents’ time allowing them to work on more qualitative tasks.
2. You want to provide continuous support
One of the most important things to consider when looking for a chatbot solution is how often does your customer need to engage with you? How important is constant 24/7 accessibility for your organization? Do you get a lot of offline support tickets? How much time do you spend resolving these tickets and do you miss any of them?
If you are always available, your customers feel cared about and will reward you with their loyalty. But keeping business open around the clock is an expensive affair if you plan on having human agents online always, which is where a chatbot can come in and provide that uninterrupted service to your customers.
3. You want a better User Experience
Customer Experience is taking precedence over pricing and product. To sustain the cut-throat market, if you’re looking to implement a chatbot strategy, it might be interesting to note that a chatbot can keep your customers engaged from the get-go.
Chatbots, when utilized well, is a surefire way of improving customer satisfaction. Whether it means solving your customers’ issues by being empathetic or by being able to connect frustrated customers to live human agents faster, chatbots can prove valuable. Being available round the clock, consumers can connect with your brand whenever they want. With AI-powered chatbots, looking through stacks of data to find accurate and consistent information is made easy, helping organizations build trust among your current and potential customers.
4. You are looking to generate more leads
If you are looking to tap every channel to generate leads for your company, chatbots can prove to be a fantastic lead generation and nurturing tool. When visitors come to your website, they willingly provide you with their names, emails, and other details on something called a “Pre-chat Form”. The Pre-chat form is a customizable chat feature that asks your visitors questions before the conversation starts. Lead generation for Real Estate is already profiting from chatbots with 28%.
Selling your product can be difficult if you have no idea what your customer’s needs are. A chatbot can conduct surveys, ask pointed questions to its visitors, and provide excellent product recommendations. Throw in a wonderfully tailored experience and accurate information to the mix and you’ve got potential clients intrigued about your product.
5.Building an App is not affordable
Building a custom app from scratch is not easy, neither is it cheap. It can prove rather expensive and more often than not, requires a lot of time for development. The price of building a chatbot can depend on a variety of factors – the chatbot type, its functionalities, the channels, and the list can go on and on.
Fortunately, implementing a chatbot can be easier than that. Chatbot platforms or “Bot builders” are great solutions for organizations looking to have a powerful conversational solution that is affordable and customizable. With easy integrations with Helpdesk systems and CRMs, a chatbot platform can help you be available to your customers on mobile phones, websites, social media, and messaging platforms. Check out the HappyFox page to see how we’ve helped businesses across the world transform their customer interactions through our powerful artificial intelligence backed chatbot solution.
Conclusion
A chatbot can play a substantial role in your organization’s success story, no matter what the business use case is. Easily accessible on messenger platforms or your business websites, they can not just provide solace to your customers but also streamline your customer service practices. There are many benefits of chatbots – engaging customers with intelligent chatbots can drive customer loyalty, customer experience, and customer satisfaction by providing a personalized experience. If you’re looking to see how HappyFox chat has helped companies around the world, send us a message here and we’d love to talk to you about your business needs.
