How Are Chatbots Redefining The Customer Experience?

Guest post by Srusthi Shah.

Easily one of the most hyped trends in tech, Artificial Intelligence has proven its value to sales professionals and marketers alike. It has evolved to become an essential means for brands that aim to deliver exemplary and personalized customer experiences. 

While it all started with automated emails, we now have AI-powered CDP software and CRM systems too. Moreover, this AI wave and the increased use of Messengers are responsible for making chatbots go mainstream, and now, it’s possible for your customers to reach out to you any time on any day. These chatbots for improving customer experience are creating a rave in the market.

According to data from Invespcro, “Chatbots can save up to 30% in customer support costs.” Again, AI offers a ton of use cases for enterprise businesses, but here, we’ll discuss how chatbots will redefine customer engagement.

 

What Is A Customer Service Chatbot And Why Should You Add One To Your Website?

Customer service chatbots are AI chatbots that are responsible for automating some functions of a human customer support agent along with other elements of a business’s customer service. It is, simply speaking, a software tool that can communicate with people through a chat interface. 

Here are some of the reasons why you should consider adding a customer service chatbot to your website:

• 24×7 Assistance: Chatbots to improve the customer experience are employed to function around the clock, every day, whenever a customer needs and demands support.
• Data Collection: Chatbots collect and maintain information about customers, including their previous purchases, issues faced, and interactions in general. With all that data, either these bots or your live agents can take charge to quickly resolve issues at hand.
• Improved Agent Productivity: Chatbots for better customer experience deal with most of the frequently asked questions and are capable enough to make decisions based on predefined paradigms. Hence, using them can drastically reduce the volume of cases for live agents.

Until now, we have only seen a glimpse of what AI chatbots can do. And while we see exciting times ahead, there’s another perspective to it as well.

 

Can Bots Ever Replace Customer Service Agents?

The short answer to whether chatbots can replace human customer service agents is “No”. But it isn’t that simple. Modern culture and science fiction have led to the disconcerting panic that AI might replace humans across industries. 

While the future is unclear, at present, customer service agents and AI chatbots shouldn’t be tested under an either/or proposition. The very idea behind this tech is to help customer service agents be more efficient and productive at their jobs and not to replace them entirely.

 

5 Exclusive Ways Customer Service Chatbots are Redefining Customer Engagement with AI

Using AI chatbots to boost your customer support team’s efforts comes with many perks. Here are 5 that you can’t fail to acknowledge.

1. Provide an Instant Resolution to Customer Queries

Chatbots aren’t just meant to assist the customers in making a decision but completely and automatically resolve queries. AI chatbots can go even further and project relevant answers based on certain keywords before the customer completes the question. But of course, the answers will be sourced from your pre-modeled data. 

2. Facilitate More Personalized And Relevant Interactions Through The Combination Of Chatbots And Knowledge Base

Chatbots are now powerful enough to process the input queries, understand the context, source the relevant answers from the knowledge base software and deliver precise solutions to customers. Your knowledge base needs an information search and retrieval system that is delivered by your chatbot software.

Moreover, chatbots need a knowledge base for knowledge management, engineering, and information architecture. Because in a way, a resource-dense knowledge base will be responsible for making chatbots “intelligent”. 

Onlim models data for Conversational AI in the form of knowledge graphs – which helps chatbots answer more complex questions and queries. Learn more about it in this whitepaper.

3. Continuously Learn To Enhance The Quality Of Customer Support Of The Future

Chatbots don’t simply answer questions for the sake of answering questions. The goal is to make them self-sufficient and for that, they continuously learn from user interactions. The software semi-automatically adds paraphrased questions to the database along with whether the user was satisfied with the delivered solution.

3. Gives Your Customer Service Team More Context On Each Customer 

More often than not, when we see an AI chatbot on a website, we’ll find ourselves checking it out. When programmed so, chatbots send the first greeting message asking how it can help you. This is a game-changer because now, you’ll have far fewer silently browsing invisible leads and more context on potential customers.

5. Helps to Provide a Consistent User Experience

Last but not least, customer service chatbots can help build a character for your brand by establishing a consistent user experience. You have the ultimate authority over how the bot functions, so everything from the language to tone and choice of words will be how you want it to be. Moreover, with AI, you won’t miss out on any customers or spam others. The results are always consistent.

 

Final Thoughts

To prevent your customers from losing interest in your brand and its products, it is imperative to maintain a flow of communication with them. More so, since in this competitive environment, you cannot afford to lose customers from lack of engagement. Of the various customer engagement strategies you can leverage, chatbots offer the most intuitive conversational means. 

These bots can direct and mold conversations given previous interactions with the customer, and that’s only one of the many reasons why we’ll soon witness all leading organizations further improve their customer engagement figures.

 

Author’s bio:

Srushti Shah is an ambitious, passionate, and out-of-the-box thinking woman having vast Digital Marketing exposure. She is working as a Digital Marketer and Content writer at Acquire. Her key focus is to serve her clients with the latest innovation in her field, leading to fast and effective results. Working beyond expectations and delivering the best possible results is her professional motto. Reach out to Srushti Shah on Twitter or LinkedIn