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Ever since chatbots have introduced, they are changing the way brands interact with customers. A survey by Oracle says that 80% brands plan on using chatbots by 2020. Ubisent study says that 35% of the consumers want more and more companies to use chatbots. Before digging into how chatbots are helping with customer engagement, let’s understand what a chatbot is.
What is a Chatbot?
It’s a software that converses with humans through the live chat interface. A chatbot scans the keyword in the customer inquiry and delivers pre-packaged answers. Some chatbots are powered by AL to use natural language for creating responses to complex conversations. Big brands like TeamViewer, Starbucks, and Amazon have already embraced them.
Role of Chatbots in Customer Service
As the technology behind chatbots is advancing, their functionality is improving as well. Chatbots are very effective in terms of customer retention. They are also helping with increasing the amount of time a customer spends on a website. Once a customer engages in a chat with a chatbot, you now have the opportunity to market them more effectively. These customers become more identifiable. You can even skip some marketing steps about gathering information about your customers.
When you are using chatbots, it also means you have the opportunity to feed messages directly to customers. It’s a different kind of online collaboration. Once you deliver the key messages, if the customer reads it and disengages the chat, this means your message needs work. In short, you can measure whether the answer to a question is disengaging a customer or closing a sale.
Let’s understand how chatbots are improving customer service and engagement. Below are the advantages and references of a few companies that use chatbots:
#1. Chatbots Improve Service Speed
It is extremely frustrating when you have to wait for several business days to get a simple issue resolved. And when you don’t get a reply to your messages, you just don’t know what else to do. This discourages customers.
All customers want is an immediate response to their queries. You can do that with the help of a live chat agent. The bot can refer customers to the FAQ page where they can find an immediate solution to their problem.
American media and telecom company, Charter Communications, has been using a chatbot to keep the customer experience at the center of everything. They have been able to reduce the live chat volume by 84 percent. They also experienced a reduction in password reset request by 50 percent. Overall, they have been experienced a 44 percent reduction in their cost in the first year. Their call center staff now does not have to deal with primary level requests. They have more time to solve complex customer problems.
#2. Chatbots Create Engagement
Chatbots help with brand engagement and relationship building big time. When a customer is engaged, they are more likely to buy something. In other words, they reach the bottom of the sales funnels faster.
Consider the example of the Facebook Messenger app. Once you open the chat with any brand that’s selling, a chatbot initiates a conversation to promote their current offer. It is often updating customers about the latest offer. In this conversation, a user can ask for more information on the product or any other query related to the product in question. By delivering customers interesting offers, you can actually make them click through the checkout page at your website. That’s how powerful a chatbot is!
Chatbots are helping customers make a smart decision as well. For instance, Bank of America has created a virtual assistant called “Erica” to send notifications, provide updates on the credit report, let users check their account balance, pay bills and help them save money. This bot is helping customers in making smart financial decisions.
#3. Chatbots Help Increase Sales
Chatbots can manage everything seamlessly. They can handle the entire customer journey starting from developing product desire to purchase and the product delivery. To actually move a customer at the bottom of the sales funnel, it’s important to establish a relationship and bots are very good with that.
Globe Telecom in the Philippines needed help with their call center. Their goal was to interact with customers in a personal way. They used a hybrid bot (with ServiceFriend and Facebook Messenger) and here were the results.
- Their employee productivity increased 3.5 times
- They were able to improve customer satisfaction by 22 percent
- Their hotline calls reduced by 50 percent.
The Use of Chatbots in IoT Interface
The use of chatbots is not limited to customer service, it’s being used in the IoT environment as well. In an IoT platform, chatbots can function as an interface to make the data more meaningful and accessible.
IoT makes for the smart devices that we use in our daily life. If chatbots are made a part of the IoT interface, the exchange of information will become more convenient. Chatbots will help you operate smart IoT devices and for that, you can use your everyday language. You won’t have to learn a programming language or a sequence of command to operate the devices.
Chatbots are the wave of the future in customer service. They are and they will create more opportunities for vendors to engage and interact with customers. Let’s see how this technology surprises us in the future.
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