Customer support chatbots have started to gain traction in the past couple of years and are now well established as a serious customer support strategy. In general companies with AI-powered customer support chatbots can have self-service rates up to 60-70% with well built customer support chatbots.
Chatbots work through understanding customer problems from their chat messages and answer them in less than a second. The main benefits are reduced workload for call center customer service agents and increased satisfaction for customers that receive quick 24/7 support with accurate answers.
Companies are harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to boost the efficiency of customer service and customer experience, Chatbots, as the name suggests, are a type of AI that leverage natural language processing and machine learning to support customer service interactions.
A chatbot can interact with customers by using machine learning-enabled virtual assistants to understand customers' requests, prioritize the customer's needs, and deliver personalized responses. In fact, chatbots have become an integral part of most customer support centers as they are able to answer frequently asked questions.
The idea behind a customer support chatbot is simple. The customer service chatbot has been built and trained to understand customer questions. When customers ask questions in messaging apps or website chat, the AI-powered chatbot (also known as Virtual Customer Assistant) determines the nature of the query and gives an answer.
For instance, the bot can decide whether to escalate a problem to a human agent or simply answer the question on their own. In the latter case, the bot serves customers without any intervention from support agents. In the former case it means that the customer support team takes over the conversation from the bot.
There are several ways in which AI will affect the future of customer support chatbots. For one you can expect smoother and more efficient customer support automation as AI-powered customer support chatbots automatically detect customer issues and resolve them through pre-written answers.
The bots also provide a better user experience for the user. They are always available with a simple interface (free text field and buttons) so that the customer has an easy task of figuring out how to communicate with the bot.
AI chatbots offer a multitude of benefits in customer support, which are most notably the increase in customer satisfaction. Chatbots and intelligent systems can help reduce operational costs and increase productivity.
Here you can find the list of the top 15 benefits of customer support chatbots. These AI-powered virtual assistants can make customer support more efficient by:
The best option for messaging automation in customer support is to build an intelligent chatbot or a Virtual Customer Assistant. These intelligent automated agents understand user intent from free text.
Natural language understanding and ability to interact in multiple languages is a significant leap. While most chatbot builders require technical skills to be built there are emerging platforms that support the no-code approach to building VCAs where no coding skills are needed.
One suggestion before starting out is to make sure you first have a business case in mind. Usually this means that you have a financial metric that you can tie directly to your customer service automation project.
The metric can be costs saved, decreased time to resolution, increased revenue from additional personalized sales. Our recommendation is to have a metric that you can objectively determine whether your automation project in the contact center is producing results.
The second thing is to measure customer feedback. Building a call-center chatbot is an important step for any business. To make sure you have the best possible product, it's important to figure out how to keep your users coming back.
As a product creator, it's important to go the extra mile and let your users know that you care about their feedback. To keep your users engaged long-term, it's a good idea to implement their feedback.
You can set up surveys that ask users to give you a few points each time they chat with your bot on your website and messaging channels. It also gives you a way to see if they have a problem that can be solved with the built-in help desk.
And thirdly, test results quickly. No need for 6 month proof of concepts. These days there are plenty of AI customer service software companies that can provide solutions out-of-the-box and get you up and running in minutes not months. We have also put together a useful summary of detailed information on pricing estimates for your chatbot here.
We recommend building the bot in a few weeks, conducting tests for 1-2 months and by the third month you will have a solid understanding of what customers like.
The benefits of chatbots are that they are a cost-effective way to provide automated customer support. While chatbots are not a new technology, they have made a great deal of progress in the last year. With the advancement of AI-powered chatbots, customers can expect to see an improvement in user experience.
If you are looking for Conversational AI chatbots for your customer service, then feel free to sign-up for an account with alphachat.ai In just 5 minutes you can get your own natural language understanding AI chatbot that you can connect with your website.
