With e-commerce swiftly becoming popular all over the world, chat bots have become the new rage where every business online is ready to invest in them. Chat bots for customer service have become essential as this software application has proven to be an excellent online collaboration tool when it comes to automated conversations with clients.
Also known as conversational agents, these software applications are able to mimic spoken and written human speech to stimulate a discussion or an interaction with a real person.
According to a recent report published on invesp blog, around 67% of customers worldwide use chat bots for customer service and support. Furthermore, 95% of consumers believe that chat
bots are incredibly beneficial for customer service.
Optimizing chat bots for customer service
In light of this information, let us offer you some of the ways through which you can optimize chatbots to deliver enhanced customer support. Let’s take a quick look at each one of them:
1. Answering endless queries
When it comes to answering queries, chat bots can be fed a large amount of customer data into their database and then be programmed to choose the most relevant answers. As a person attending to numerous customers in a day, this process can quickly tire out even the most skilled representatives.
However, this is not the case when it comes to using chat bots for customer service. This is also probably why interest in them has risen immensely during the past five years.
However, chat bots need to be accurate in delivering answers to clients. This is why you should try out some small tweaks to make sure that they are able to address the intent of the customer. Businesses can use NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) to understand the colloquial language.
Neuro-linguistic programming is defined as a pseudoscientific approach to understanding communication and personal development. This will help your bot to comprehend messages despite grammatical errors and spelling mistakes.
Another way is to incorporate sentiment analysis into your chat bot. It refers to the implementation of natural language and its processing along with text analysis, biometrics and computational linguistics.
Through sentimental analysis, your bot would be able to identify, quantify, and extract subjective information systematically.
2. Considerable automation
There is no doubt for companies who want to make their labor expenses minimal use chat bots for customer service as they can be utilized to accomplish considerable automation.
According to a report by McKinsey, around 29% of all customer service positions within the United States have the potential to be automated through the use of chat bots.
This is due to the fact that chat bots are capable of handling an unlimited amount of interactions with various customers simultaneously. This is further highlighted in the 2019 Chat Benchmark Report by Comm100, where chat bots alone were able to manage and take care of over 26.65% of all incoming requests and live inquires by customers.
The report also highlights how bots can help and improve performances for over 14 major industries, including the likes of e-commerce, financial services, and even healthcare. So if you are looking for automation solutions that are scalable as well, then investing in this technology has a lot of promising opportunities which you do not want to miss out on.
There is no denying the fact that chat bots are here to stay, and there is possibly the future of our business applications along with positive reinforcement of the same idea from the customer’s side as well.
3. Diminishing customer frustrations
The importance of customer service throughout the world is prominent, regardless of the age factor and demographic. As a business, you need to understand that customer experience matters a lot, and it can help differentiate you from the competition.
This is precisely why chat bots for customer service can help you mitigate a lot of these frustrations and assist you in improving your user experiences. According to the 2017 Global State of Customer Service Report, the growth for chat bots, live chat, and self-service are staggering, to say the least.
Around 90% of respondents are looking forward to brands and organization that offer self-service in one form or the other. Furthermore, 52% of all global respondents, as well as 63% of millennials, initiate their interactions with businesses and corporate entities online.
This is another reason why brands should consider tapping into technologies that can help them respond to customers and intelligent machines like AI powered chat bots are indeed a viable approach to achieve these milestones.
CSAT, which is the customer satisfaction score that is used to measure how gratified customers are through your services, focuses on providing availability and immediacy as the top priority. Hence chat bots can be integrated into your Omni channels and take the pressure off of your agent’s shoulders.
4. Enhanced communication
Probably the first thing that comes to mind when using chat bots for customer service is that they are devoid of human biases. This means that there is no prejudice involved, and they cater to customer needs and requirements without any sort of discrimination.
It is crucial for constructive communication that both parties interact with each other without having to face any kind of discomfort. Furthermore, through machine learning, bots improve their algorithms and develop responses for complex queries from clients.
The importance of chat bots in the enhancement of customers’ communication can be seen in social media as well.
Back in 2016, the CEO of Facebook, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, requested third-parties to create their own personal chat bot for the FB messenger platform. Today we have more than 300,000 chat bots on Facebook Messenger, and this just goes to show just how valuable they are for businesses.
Nowadays, chat bots can be categorized mainly in three major types, namely Rule-Based, Intellectually Independent, and AI Empowered.
Rule-based is the simplest that communicate with predefined options; Intellectual bots utilize limited machine learning, whereas AI-empowered bots are the most advanced and can even decipher the context of the conversation.
5. Budget-friendly solution
When it comes to using chat bots for customer service, it all comes down to how much money they can help you save. With more than 80% of organizations considering AI (artificial intelligence) to be a key player for future markets, around 61% of them have plans to incorporate AI into their customer operations.
According to several reports, chat bots have the potential to save $20 billion in costs to businesses globally. In fact, Juniper Research shows that they can cut business costs by $8 billion every year by 2022.
When it comes to operational expense, chat bots can zoom in on relevant customer information and help the agent initiate conversation through prior knowledge regarding their queries. This can effectively lower cost-per-interaction for businesses and also offer much better use of agents and their paid time.
In another report by Call Center School, we find that chat bots can reduce labor costs as well since all call centers operating nowadays have around 65%-75% cost related to staffing. However, cutting on your staffing can also lead companies to lose on their customer expectations.
This is also another reason why bots can skyrocket your customer satisfaction levels and cut back on your staffing cost at the same time.
6. Fostering engagement
For any business to retain and sustain their profitability in the future, they need to stay relevant for their audiences. That can only be actualized by building engagement with them.
Thus there is no question about the fact that customer engagement is highly necessary for this era, and using chat bots for customer service can help you attain these objectives.
According to a Facebook study, 65% of millennials and Gen Xers, along with 63% of baby boomers prefer sending a message than calling customer service. This is a tremendous insight for businesses who want to keep their customer preferences in mind when putting their efforts to nurture engagement for them.
The most significant benefit of using this technology is that you can make your venture available to your customer around the clock, 24/7, and 365 days in a year. Regardless of whether your customers are located, whether it is day or night, your bot will serve its purpose and represent your business whenever a candidate or prospect wants to communicate.
Plus people nowadays dread to wait in line or for a response, which is a bot can be much quicker in responding to pending issues and make your clients happy.
7. Efficient customer handling
Let’s be real customers are indeed impatient these days, and the majority of them will leave your site within 10 minutes. This fact is further highlighted by HubSpot Research, where 82% of customers want an immediate response for marketing or sales questions, and 90% consider a quick response relevant to a customer service question.
This is where your investment in chat bots for customer service can really pay off. A chat bot offers you a tremendous ROI (return on investment) as per the calculations performed by analysts at chatbotslife.com, where it is shown that a bot can easily manage over 78,000 new chats per year.
These additional chats can cost a business over $1.44 million without the technology, whereas with the bot, it can cost them $1.43 million. Hence the company will make a saving of $94,564 per year, which is a terrific 59.3% in ROI.
It is essential, however, to note down here that bots simply do not offer you monetary benefits only, but they also give more time to your agents to resolve inadequacies faced by your customers. This means that the technology will help improve your team’s performance and build customer satisfaction.
8. Human error reduction
By now, we hope that you understand that chat bots for customer service are clearly imprinted on your minds as the future of brand engagement and that engaged customers are those that move further along your sales funnel.
An underlying problem this technology helps us to resolves is that of human error. We have a tendency to forget things, whereas bots never forget. Their enormous appetite for information and the ability to manage it in an impeccable manner is what makes them so immaculate in the first place.
This means that that they can cater to request without any mishaps in between, and they can stay relevant to the customer according to their preferences without any misjudgments or confusion.
This fact can be further immortalized through the opinion piece published on Insurance Edge, where it was found that more 91% of dissatisfied customers would simply move on instead of making their complaint known.
We all know that selling insurance is not easy; however, this insight clearly shows how human error can lead to frustrations and even the loss of existing customers. The post also goes on to say that 71% of customers would recommend service as useful only if the company values their time.
9. Incredible insights
Another advantage of using chat bots for customer service is that through this technology, you can gather precious data from your clients and prospects through interactions. These insights could offer you a meaningful understanding of your customers’ activities, preferences, and the problems they face daily.
All of this data can then be sorted into various categories to find the most common of all queries, and your business can then seek to comprehend the information that your customers popularly desire from you.
Moreover, there is a clear understanding that organizations cannot feel privileged in work environments by ignoring the importance of data collection and their analytics. Chat bots can thus be extremely advantageous if integrated with business systems such as CRMs, ERPs, and other forms of database management where data can be found and stored.
With their combination, an efficient bot can bring forth robust big data analysis, which, in return, can offer immense value to your organization. This can include viable insights that help create business strategies and make decision making simple.
With the right set of metrics and insights, decision-makers can evaluate the data collected by bots and process their business strengths and weaknesses.
10. Keeping milestones intact
Every business out there plans according to their visions and mission statement. In these plans, we have considerable milestones along the way that indicate growth and progress. Through chat bots, a business can drive their energies and forces to achieve such milestones and keep them intact.
These can include cutting down on cost, increasing revenues, catering to a ton of customers, and building brand loyalty. Nearly 265 billion customer support requests are made according to a study, and these can cost businesses a staggering $1.3 trillion to process and service.
However, bots can significantly address this concern and provide useful means to help enterprises to save up to 30% on their operation cost. These virtual agents can be easily transformed to deliver the first point of contact for customers as well as answer complex queries.
Further research for this industry shows that 90% of all customer inquiries in the next five years will be dealt with by chat bots. This translates to cutting nearly $8 billion on the business cost by 2022.
Not only can they help you broaden your reach by offering assistance on your website and social media pages, but they can also heighten the brand value by keeping customers engaged.
11. Lessening workplace stress
Workplace stress can get to even the best of us; however, as an innovative tech, chat bots can be used to fight off these signals and make it easier for your workers to get through their day.
According to a study, stress instigated at the workplace costs the Australian economy over $15 billion each year, and the economy of the United States around $200 billion annually.
Today we have chat bots that can be built to incorporate cognitive interview techniques. This means that they can be even used to address issues within the workplace concerning abuse and harassment. Through chat bots, you can gather not only customer data but also valuable information regarding your employees’ state of affairs.
By merely asking neutral and practical questions, your bot can determine the cause of problems without making your employees feel uncomfortable or ashamed in any way. Hence you can use them to deal with victims and allows them to overcome trauma by offering them legal support.
Such cases are invaluable to the enterprise since they represent the effective use of communication technology that is best implemented to protect and help employees.
12. Managing uncomplicated tasks
A company may ask its employees to carry out a lot of mundane tasks throughout the day, which can make them quickly tired and lose their interest. However, this is not the case with a bot as it never feels boring or even experiences monotony.
Hence you can use chat bots in a number of applications on a daily basis. It can help your track your customers and even your employees’ satisfaction with the help of natural language processing.
It is no surprise that it can also generate relevant recommendations for your customers based on their recorded history with your company and looking up for current trends and customer behavior patterns.
Bots can readily offer users terrific help and assistance when it comes to purchasing products or hiring a service according to their needs and requirements. Furthermore, they can also provide reasonable suggestions that can help users resolve a problem or find a quick solution to their pain points.
So anywhere from booking a flight, reserving a table at a restaurant, or ordering food for home delivery can all be managed by bots. Lastly, you can also use bots to send your loyal customers discounts, product offers, latest updates and notifications, season greetings, or any other planned promotions.
13. Overcoming language barriers
It seems that when it comes to facing language barriers, many businesses are struggling. By living in a connected world, corporations often receive customers from diverse backgrounds. Hence there is a lot of cultural diversity as well as preferences of language in which they want to communicate.
This is where your chat bot can come in extremely handy to deal with such kind of limitations. In particular, Google announced new systems for machine-assisted language translations, and these will significantly expand the current AI abilities to provide better communication for people across the globe who speak different languages.
There are several services available right now that can offer you multilingual support for your business chat bot, including Botsify, Chatfeul, and Haptik, to name a few. A multilingual chat bot is far better and less expensive than having a separate chat bot for each language.
Your chat bot can easily be integrated with a language translator that can detect a wide range of languages from across the world.
In fact, there are several examples available online where programmers and developers have written tutorials to create a multilingual chat bot for your own use using a combination of APIs.
14. Seamless live chat
The main objective or goal behind using chat bots is to offer seamless communication for users. They can be used to bridge the gap between your users and targeted audiences. Moreover, they can also help you qualify leads, speed up your customer resolutions, and also widen your customer base.
Even coursework writing service platforms are using chat bots for student ease. They are more effective in answering their queries and concerns regarding their academic assignments.
If we look along the timeline of how chat bots have evolved, we can clearly see that from ELIZA in 1966 to Tay in 2016, a lot of progress has been made. MIT developed ELIZA, and it is considered as the mother of all chat bots.
However, it failed the Turing Test, which proved that it was incapable of contextualizing events. Yet, with Tay from Microsoft, we have a chat bot that has the ability to take the persona of a teenage girl who based its replies depending upon the tweets it received on Twitter.
However, due to a number of trolls, Tay had to be ultimately shutdown as it became too paranoid and offensive. We cannot deny that things will and are about to move further during the current times.
15. Personification of your brand
When it comes to branding, businesses can make sure that their bot also personifies their work culture and brand image. To do this, you will need to make sure that your bot is consistent with the overall brand experience you offer to your customers.
Therefore when you plan to brand your virtual assistant, it is vital that it correctly correlates to your audiences’ demographics. This can be reflected in the way the bot communicates with users and the tone it utilizes to assert trust and credibility for them.
Likewise, if your business deals with a younger audience, then your chat bot must interact using a cheery and humorous manner that is relatable and engaging. Some chat bots also have the autonomy to choose from various slangs that can be incorporated into their responses.
Unfortunately, some cultures still have gender biases, and this can be quite challenging to overcome, which is why it is safe to stay away from all such undertones that can bring shame to your organization.
A sensible approach would be to keep clear of discrimination, racism, and any kind of prejudice for your bot to acquire.
16. Round the clock support
Without question, your bot is ready to serve customers and provide them support 24/7. With around the clock customer support, you can attend customers from various regions that do not have to follow the same time dedicated to your area and locality.
Hence you are able to provide customer service to users from different time zones. Regardless of the fact that it is day or night, your chat bot doesn’t tire or feel sleepy. Hence you can attend to calls and inquiries even after business hours.
This means that also if an agent is off duty or if their shift has ended, your chat bot is still there to assist people without any unwanted delays or inconveniences. When you link your chat bot to business resources, they can even outdo your team of representatives. All your chat bot has to do is to step in to answer questions and queries posted by your clients.
On the other hand, they can also be programmed to deliver customers’ responses by telling them the available hours of your business. This can act like a human touch by informing clients that they can receive more adept support during your business working hours.
Conclusion
We hope this post was able to offer you some meaningful understandings as to how you can use chat bots for customer service and improve your business operations through their integration. There is no doubt that chat bots have quickly become popular amongst not only businesses but also customers.
The future looks bright for them, and with more considerable progress in technology and programming software, chat bots will only increase in their efficacies and proficiencies.
Right now, we are all waiting for the greater use of AI and machine learning for the masses. Chat bots will indefinitely benefit from the progress made in AI and machine learning. For more questions regarding the topic, please feel free to let us know of your feedback in the comment section below.
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