How To Reduce Your Customer Service Costs

Online marketing and customer service can very quickly become a costly endeavor. That’s why many businesses are looking for consistent ways to reduce their costs.

Chatbots have risen to fame because of their cool features and their capacities to reduce customer service costs. Chatbots are being used by startups and global players alike to optimize their customer experience. Meanwhile, artificially intelligent voice assistants like Siri and Alexa are gaining momentum too, becoming consistent parts of our smartphones and homes.

 

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The popularity of chatbots is increasing, especially since constant developments in AI expand potential use cases for customer service chatbots even more.

In this article we’ll show you to reduce customer service costs with chatbots.

 

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Why even use chatbots?

Before getting all hyped about chatbots and their use cases for your customer service, you should thoroughly assess why and what you want to use them for. Once you’ve got this covered, narrow down on the positive effects you’re expecting to see for your business and customers alike.

Not only will your business be able to save time, money, and hassle, but your customers will also benefit from shorter waiting times for a customer agent to support them. Thereby mitigating one of the most aggravating aspects of customer service interactions.

 

How exactly do chatbots help to reduce customer service costs?

Estimates are seeing a cost reduction for businesses of $8 billion a year by 2023, simply by using chatbots. Banks and health-related services are said to profit the most, but any industry can make great use of chatbot functionalities.

 

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The opportunities to reduce customer service costs with chatbots are multifold – let’s see which ones stick out:

1. Reduce personnel costs

Personnel costs make 70-75% of call center costs, which is huge. With customer service agents being the most important factor for customer satisfaction, it’s not a wise choice to try to cut too many costs here.

However, a smart chatbot enables to cut man-hours and thereby reduce recruiting, training and personnel costs dramatically.

 

2. Affordable 24/7 availability

Customer lifestyles are changing rapidly, and businesses must be able to keep up. Any customer queries should be answered within seconds because waiting times are becoming less and less tolerable. Trying to achieve 24/7 availability with human customer agents is in many cases simply too expensive for companies.

Outsourcing customer service to low wage countries was the go-to solution until now, but chatbots are promising an even more cost-effective solution, while at the same time building better customer experiences.

 

3. Reduced operational costs

You could think of chatbots as some sort of interactive FAQ. A central hub for all important internal and external information that employees and clients can access simultaneously. This empowers both and ensures more streamlined customer service experiences.

Chatbots help reduce inquiries via phone, email, and social media. Additionally, they are able to categorize customer questions very quickly and connect them to the right agent. Yet again, they enable more effective customer service interactions.

 

4. Higher employee satisfaction

Supporting your service agents in their oftentimes stressful encounters with clients will be welcomed by them. Chatbots can help reduce some of the over-burdening pressure of non-stop client calls and help with employee satisfaction and their mental health.

Seeing this as a long-term investment, happier and more loyal employees will, of course, help you save recruiting and sick leave costs.

 

5. Increased revenue

Chatbots are not only reducing costs, but they can also help generate more revenue. They can automatically introduce visitors to ongoing sales and discounts, help with upselling or simply increase customer engagement.

Presenting information the right way, chatbots help to create awareness for various products or offers a customer might have overlooked otherwise.

Additionally, there have been very successful inclusions of chatbots into interactive marketing campaigns that have created strong brand awareness and customer relations.

Chatbots open new doors and bring amazing opportunities to businesses. Some studies are foreseeing that more than 90% of customer interactions will have chatbots involved in the not too distant future.

To be able to benefit from these unique cost-saving opportunities, chatbots have to become a priority for your business. Click here to learn more about our chatbot and voice assistant solutions.

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