How AI chatbots are revolutionizing customer service?
User: Hey, what time is your store closes in New Delhi today?
Simple chatbot: Our store opens until 10 pm, from Monday to Friday.
AI Chatbot: Hi, Riya! We’re open until 10 pm today. It’s freezing in New Delhi, the temperature is expected to drop to 4 degrees during the evening, so dress warm!
Imagine you need information about a store or have a problem with a company’s product, and you call their support center. Chances are most of the times you may interact with a computer at first, as an initial step towards solving your problem.
However, unlike the traditional “virtual response system” — where the computer frustratingly demands you repeat yourself, often over and over again, an AI chatbot offers a more human-like response, asking questions to help solve the issues, regardless of differences with accents and dialects. More importantly, it gives you helpful answers, quickly and accurately.
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So what exactly is a chatbot?
If you don’t know already, a chatbot is a software that can converse with humans via a live chat interface. That can happen on a brand’s website or app, or through platforms like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Slack, and even Alexa.
You must have come across a few of them while checking out a company’s website or trying to contact them via messenger.
In fact, big brands like Starbucks, Spotify, and National Geographic are already using chatbots to facilitate sales and find information.
Most of the restaurants are providing a facility where users can order through the chatbot, such as Domino’s, Swiggy and Ubereats. This is how Zoom’s bot looks like-
Most of the e-commerce apps using a chatbot to let their users purchase a wide range of products. Chatbots can easily help you manage your Tier-1 communication with the customers, thus saving your time and money. This is how Sephora is helping the users choose from their range of products-
Earlier this year, the Government of India launched a WhatsApp bot — MyGov Corona Helpdesk, to create awareness and tackle the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic in the country.
A usual chatbots look for the key phrases used by the customer to send out a pre-defined message, while AI chatbots are more sophisticated ones that use natural language processing to create responses and conversations that are more complex. You can integrate them with your CRM and CMS platforms that so they can tap into the customer information and provide personalized experiences to your visitors.
Why you need chatbots for your business?
Chatbots are great for repetitive jobs that demand simple tasks and questions that are asked frequently, thus improving the response rates, automate online purchases, customer service, and provide better communication. If your business require better and efficient customer service, acquiring AI chatbots or customer service chatbots can reduce operational costs, improve sales funnel, and encourage seamless interaction with customers. Few of the advantages of an AI chatbots include-
1. Better customer communication
The chatbots are critically designed to decrease talk time and provide faster solutions to the customers.
2. Round-the clock customer support
Nowadays, customers demand immediate responses from businesses, and chatbots can help you with that. The screenshot below of Domino’s Virtual Customer Assistant chatbot helps the user track their orders or view the latest offers and combos without having to wait for long. All they have to do is click on the menu, and the bot will fetch the information for them within minutes, any time of the day (or night)!
3. Everyone likes to save money
IBM’s prediction shows that 85% of customer interactions will proceed without human intervention. Also, using chatbots in your business process is a shortcut to saving more than 30% in customer service operations. It’s a win-win for both you and your customers!
4. Getting rid of language barriers
While interacting with a user or customer, the chatbot stores different terms and words related to customer problems. This data could be later used to develop a better interactive experience for the customers, making them capable of approximate answers to queries for which they have not received training.
5. The right agent gets the right message
One of the best features that I like about the chatbots are that it easily allows the human agents to step into conversations and provide solutions. This can further be categorized depending on the service the customer is looking for- operations, feedback, sales, reservations, billings or refunds. Depending upon the user response, the AI chatbots can designate the right department to relevant messages.
Final takes
Incorporating them into your small business plan now ensures you’ll be at the forefront of this technology. However, this is a relatively new technology with new features being released every now and then. Many companies are all set to release the chatbot for Instagram as well! Incorporate one into your business plan, even if you are a startup or a small business will help you get a leg up on the competition.
I recommend starting with a basic chatbot. Many platforms offer free versions for you to test their features. You can try Tidio, or Zapier to integrate the chatbot on your website. For FB messenger, tools like ManyChats and Mobile monkey is good. Chatfuel is also a fantastic tool to develop your Facebook chatbot, but now that they have reduced down their free offerings, the price could be an issue for some businesses. Just go ahead and develop a standard “question, reply, question, reply” chatbot uploaded with the most common customer questions and see how it goes from there.
It also frees up valuable employee time.
So, what’s your take on using a chatbot for your business? Have you tried it yet?
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