How Much of a Difference Do Chatbots Make in Customer Service?

Chatbots are the future!! Not because we say so, but the customers seem to want that. Do you know that over 92% of users between ages 18 – 34 believe they would instead ask the chatbot about a product before making a purchase decision?

[reference- The Application of Chatbot for Customer Service in E-Commerce | Engineering, MAthematics and Computer Science (EMACS) Journal (binus.ac.id)]

It’s easier than searching through a bunch of random stuff. People generally don’t want to wait 10 minutes for customer representatives to attend to them. Chatbots can listen to multiple customers at the same time. Even popular apps like Amazon now implement chatbots in their services. But how much of a difference do they make in customer service? To understand that, you must first understand the industry’s issue.

Factors Impacting the Customer Services and How AI Chatbots Can Remedy Them?

Multiple factors are impacting customer services right now. Whether that’s the need for more resources to manage a large volume of customers or the inability to analyze all the data you gather from said customer services. Look at some of the industry’s major customer service pain points.

Customer Often Have To Wait Several Minutes

Customers often have to wait a long time before their turn arrives, which, let’s face it, nobody wants to do. A long waiting period ruins the customer experience. That’s because a human customer representative can only attend to one customer at a time and often fail to keep up with the large volume of support requests from their customers.

Solution: Faster Services

AI Chatbots are very smart and can hold rich and long conversations with your customers.
They have Natural Language Processing or NLP for short, and that helps to understand and deal with customer issues faster.
They can attend to multiple customers simultaneously.

Strict Timing

Many companies have strict customer service timing from 9 am to 5 pm, which may only be possible for some. Many customers also have similar timings for their work shifts, and they require flexible timing. What if they have an emergency at 8 in the morning and require immediate assistance?

Solution– 24/7 Service Availability

Chatbots can attend to customers anytime, whether at 8 in the morning or midnight.
Chatbots can reduce mundane and repetitive questions, allowing human representatives to look after more critical queries.

Inefficient Use of Resources

Managing hundreds of employees is not only cumbersome but also a lot expensive. Most SMBs can’t employ that many customer representatives. Not to mention, many companies still need more resources to analyze service data for improvement.

Solution– Better Use of Resources

Chatbots can now take over 80% of questions that customers usually ask, freeing up valuable time and resources for human representatives.

[reference- Digital customer care in the age of AI (ibm.com)]

Using chatbots means you can employ fewer customer representatives.Chatbots also have many analytic tools that use customer service data to figure out how to better serve them in the future, which can be tremendously helpful for large organizations.