Artificial Intelligence or AI is increasingly widening its territories and getting adopted in different industries of different sizes. Many of them rely on AI, ML, and other assorted technologies to provide services that are impossible for humans or traditional computing to deliver. Though many of these technologies need a significant amount of technological knowledge, heavy investment, and intense involvement, chatbots are relatively easier to implement and something that can even small businesses utilize.
So, let’s find out what is a chatbot and how businesses can benefit from it.
An Introduction To Chatbots
Chatbots are software applications or computer programs that are powered by Artificial Intelligence, and these are capable of stimulating natural human conversation. Chatbots normally live on websites, messaging or texting apps, or other platforms and can initiate and conduct a conversation with human users. Machine Learning (ML) enables these chatbots to identify and learn the human speech patterns, grammatical rules, and linguistic intricacies. Chatbot stores the conversation logs and continuously analyzes them and related data to discover the underlying structure making the conversational experience better.
So, it is the perfect choice to complement customer support agents. These chatbots are flexible and far better than recorded responses. But they can never completely replace human agents or human conversation. When these chatbots face unforeseen circumstances or questions, they do not perform well. Generally, such issues are transferred to human agents by the chatbot for further investigation, intervention, and resolution.
Advantages Of Utilizing A Chatbot
No matter the type of services or products it offers or its operation, implementing customer support is critical for the business to perform well. Consumers or users will always have queries and complaints. But the proper handling of these issues will differentiate a company from another one and determine its fate. Better customer service will lead to a better customer experience, whereas a better customer experience will create a positive brand image. The traditional customer support operation relies on dedicated customer service executives. These agents reach out to the customers generally through voice or chat services. But now, exclusive 24/7 omnichannel chat support is being provided by the corporations. However, it is not the number of human agents that increased, but these organizations engage intelligent chatbots with an integrated chatbot support system.
Chatbots Can Solve Simple Issues Without Human Assistance
Once the chatbots are properly trained with an adequate amount of archived customer interactions, they can handle most of the queries and offer proper resolutions to the users. This corpus of past chats must include the various instances, queries, and problems that generally occur in the operation with ideal responses and resolutions. Most questions asked are rather straightforward and repetitive in nature. Problems that happen have mostly occurred before. So, the resolutions and responses that are provided previously are likely to solve it again. Therefore, when dealing large volume of repetitive requests and occurrences, a chatbot support system is more effective than a customer support team.
Chatbots are more reliable, and they remove the inconsistencies in human performance. The agents’ responses may vary, or they may deviate from the script and irate the customer more. Also, chatbots offer quick responses, round the clock for the users. Chatbot provides them with accurate and updated information. Also, unlike human agents, there are no chances of making mistakes or errors when guiding the customers for a task or resolving issues. Chatbot support systems are also implemented to assist the customer care agents. These chatbots hold a rich knowledge base and required information regarding the process. Agents can search and find the required information from a single solution. These chatbots enable agents to offer services with more precision and speed.
Chatbots Improves Scalability
A chatbot customer support framework is extensively scalable and always ready to accommodate businesses’ changing needs and requirements. Often companies struggle with scaling issues. An abrupt increase in calls or service requests in a specific season or for a particular reason is not uncommon in customer service industries. Increasing employees is not an option. Also, these high sales periods are critical for maintaining the company’s revenue stream. Here chatbots can help by handling the bulk queries, and human agents can focus on more complicated customer issues. Also, chatbots are faster than human agents. You can avoid long queues and wait time with chatbots. It will translate into more happy and satisfied customers and better reviews for the business.
Cost Saving And Revenue Gain With Chatbots
Chatbots can significantly save time and resources. As a result, it reduces the operational cost considerably for any business. Chatbots also reduce the call handling time. It also saves the labor cost for call center agents. Improved services and fewer mistakes also help the companies to increase their revenue. These conversational applications can reduce customer service costs by up to 30 %. and help deliver a better customer experience. The only price is the chatbot support system’s development, deployment, and maintenance. One way of implementing a chatbot customer support system is to build and deploy it yourself. But by selecting the right vendor and suitable chatbot solution, businesses can swiftly engage a chatbot support system with minimum resources.
