In today’s highly competitive environment, customer experience is the key to increase sales and enhance customer loyalty. Today’s tech-savvy customers are smarter than ever and they expect the answers at the click of the button and effortless customer service. They hate to call customer care due to long wait times and multiple navigation paths. They want you to address the problem instantly and Email/SMS doesn’t help them because 1-2 days of turnaround time is not acceptable.
In the last couple of years, customer service chatbots are becoming more and more popular. According to a Gartner report, “By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationships with the enterprise without interacting with a human”. This has led organizations of every type and size to embrace customer service chatbots in an effort to keep pace and meet ever-changing customer demand. In this article, I am sharing a few important factors which have led to the growth of chatbots in customer service:
- Advancement in Artificial Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made significant advancement to improve the quality of the decision making, thanks to Machine Learning and Deep Learning Algorithms. Smarter AI capabilities have let to the growth of intelligent chatbots which can learn from their past interactions and improve the results, resulting in increased customer satisfaction.
- Customized Bot Personality: Customers are excited to interact with the chatbot if it has some humor and real-human personality which can understand customer sentiments and respond appropriately. Nowadays, bot development companies do a lot of research and design the bot carefully which can understand the common customer pain points and answer in an empathetic way, with a voice consistent with the brand.
- Growth of Massaging Apps: Many studies have shown that today more people use messaging apps than social networking apps. That means people prefer to chat over messaging apps rather than over the phone, email, or any other medium. Chatbots can easily integrate with messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack, and others, enabling the customers to interact with customer service teams via their preferred channels.
- Guided Sales Path: When customers are ready to buy your product/service, it is important to make the purchase process simple and convenient. Sometimes, website visitors just leave the site just because they couldn’t find the information they were looking for and this is where Chatbots can be very productive. Chatbots can guide the buyers and take them through various steps to make a purchase.
- Personalization: Personalized experience is what customers want when they interact with your business. Chatbots can remember customers’ choices and make suggestions on their next visit. Chatbots can also be an effective channel to inform the customers about new products, promotions, and exclusive discount coupons personalized to their interest.
- 24/7 Customer Support: One of the most popular use cases of chatbots is to provide help in an emergency. However, there are many organizations which do not provide 24/7 customer service due to the operational costs. For those organizations, chatbots are an excellent option. Chatbots are available 24/7 to solve customer queries in real-time. They enable your customers to easily interact with your brand and support anytime, anywhere.
- Save Time & Money: Chatbots are the cost-effective solutions to answer simple & repetitive queries like ticket creation, data entry, and FAQs without the need of the human agent, helping organizations to reduce the support hours of human agents, which in turn reduces the operational cost. Chatbots can free up agents’ time, so instead up doing manual and tedious tasks, they can focus on resolving complex queries, take up more Cases, and increase customer satisfaction.