A customer service chatbot is a bot that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to answer customer questions via a business messenger.
“Find me an agent.”
These are the most frequent words I said to chatbots.
Chatbots have become another way for me to talk to a human other than emails and phone calls. Or should I rather call it a barrier before me talking to a real agent?
I never believed AI-powered chatbots can solve real problems. Although sophisticated chatbots can be very responsive, they are still limited.
However, my views have been changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.I wanted to cancel my flights booked from CheapOAir in March. Apparently, everyone was trying to contact the customer service and figure out a way to get refunds for non-refundable tickets. After days of waiting in line, I finally gave in and tried chatbot. Surprisingly, they have a special line for COVID-19 related issues.The chatbot elaborated on the new policies for cancelation and helped me within 5 minutes.
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I realized the functions of chatbots are showing up during some emergent situation when we’re short of human agents. It actually gave me a sense of ease even It couldn’t solve my problems immediately because I knew the agency is doing something to deal with the change.
Now AI-driven bots can be trained to handle complex queries. Modern chatbots are even capable of pairing conversational data with the visitor’s profile thus enables brands to customize the entire experience of the customer.
A recent study shows that 80% of customer’s queries have been resolved by chatbots without human supervision.
One of the biggest benefits of chatbots is the ability to operate without human help. The time you would have spent answering questions at the computer, you can now spend taking care of other tasks, setting up the bot to take care of your customers instead.
Chatbots also offers instant resolutions. Humans might get tired of answering the same question over and over again. Chatbots don’t mind. They handle it with ease and never complain.
Chatbots continuously learn. Chatbots don’t just use AI to answer questions. They also use it to learn and automatically improve the quality of the support offered in the future.
You’ve probably heard: Bots are the future. In fact, if you’re wondering today whether or not your business should create a bot, you’re asking the wrong question. Bot-powered commerce is our modern-day manifest destiny.
Applying chatbots means faster, more consistent support for your customers and fewer repetitive, transactional questions for your support agents. You should think about adding a chatbot feature like this to your website if:
- You’re unable to have your support agents present 24/7.
- Customer service/support is needed across multiple channels such as social media, website and in-app.
- Your international business needs multi-lingual support.
- You want to reduce customer service costs and find more efficient ways to scale your customer support.
As marketers, our job is to understand the interactions the audience is already having with our brand. Then, harness the chat interface in a way that yields maximum impact with minimal fluff.
Before you get caught up in the technicalities, you should set a framework for building a bot your customer will want to use. No bot is meant to do it all. Instead, it should stick to a single function and do this incredibly well.
The ultimate mission of a bot is to provide a service people actually want to use. As long as you think of your bot as just another communication channel, your focus will be misguided. The best bots harness the micro-decisions consumers experience on a daily basis and see them as an opportunity to help.
If we choose the right path…
bots might be the best thing to happen to marketing yet.
