5 benefits of using chatbots for customer experience

Customers want quick, seamless solutions to their problems. Some are used to the traditional way of phone support therefore a hard time accepting a chatbot with the notion that it is a robotic interaction, lacking the human touch. However, more and more customers are open to new technology, especially if it means a quick resolution to their issues.

Chatbots are in essence automation decoyed as human conversation, or rather, automated programs that can simulate a human conversation. The bots use natural language processing (NLP) to understand human communication in the accurate context and provide relevant answers to questions. From the customer’s point of view, they’re speaking to an actual human being, or at least, so it seems.

Here are the top 5 ways can chatbots improve your customer experience:

1. Impactful business insights

By collecting data from the chatbot conversations, businesses can get valuable insights into user experience (UX) and be notified early regarding any issues and any roadblocks that’s customers are facing. The means that early prediction of other issues can happen or similar issues can be prevented in the future. Businesses can analyze the data from these conversations, by using advanced customer feedback analytics tools, such as Thematic, which can help decipher insights by theming and interpreting verbatim using AI free-text analytics.

2. Reduce wait time

Chatbots can reduce customers wait time and get them where they want to be quicker. Remember that cringe worthy on-hold music (especially the computerized ding-dong sounds, ugh!) – these could now be a thing of the past. The chatbot is always there. Which brings us to our next point …

3. Always-on customer service

The chatbot never sleeps an able to offer 24/7 customer support. A cost-efficient, yet potent way to provide basic support. Best practice chatbots are trained by using historical conversations, thereby can action some of the most common tasks such as amending an invoice, answering basic questions about account balances, similar to a real support rep. In some cases, the chatbot can even distinguish human emotions such as anger, confusion, fear and joy. If the bot detects that the customer is angry, it transfers the interaction to a human to take over, which will provide a relief to said customer.

4. Personalized human interaction

The computerized chatbots can in fact also help personalize the customer experience in retrospect. Chatbots gather customer data from their interactions. With that data, real support reps can use the information to personalize their interactions with customers. Customer information can be fed to the agent in real time *when they’re speaking to a customer on the phone), so the support rep can provide relevant solutions based on current needs as well as previous interactions with the company.

5. Encourage employees

A surprising benefit to AI can actually be to encourage support staff to focus on more challenging tasks. As AI has such great ability to mimic human behavior, staff may fear their jobs are at risk. To soothe these fears, companies must show their employees what’s in it for them. Chatbots are actually a chance for support reps to focus on more high-value activities rather than routine tasks. For example, sales reps can use AI to make a better offer on a renewed contract, insurance providers are more likely to sell a policy when they can offer personalized advice (Forbes, 2017).
Image credit: Zapp2Photo/Shutterstock