Live Chat Vs Chatbot: Which is the best for business
Establishing and tracking engagement on website pages, giving solution to audience queries, resolving FAQs, and assisting with maintenance is a powerful way for businesses to build relations with existing and potential customers.
To support the customer-brand relationship, there are two big ways
- Live Chat
- AI-Powered Chatbot
But which one of these has proven to be the true fighter of the customer service battle game.
The modern businesses continue to look for an innovative option to improve their customers’ experience while they look for the answers to their queries in real-time.
While some businesses have opted for live chat, others prefer AI-Powerd Chatbots. But the ultimate intent remains the same — Improving customer service.
By the year 2020, Gartner has predicted customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with humans. Another report by Grand View Research has shown, “the global chatbot market is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025, a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.3%. Within the global chatbot market, approximately 45% of end users prefer chatbots as the primary mode of communication for customer service inquiries”.
Source: Grand View Research
Top Articles on How Businesses are using Bots:
2. How Businesses are Winning with Chatbots & Ai
But the rise in chatbot doesn’t mean the decline of Human powered Live Chat.
Here are some of the industry leaders who have shared their experience on Live chat vs Chatbot.
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach says,
“We provide the most valuable customer service to every customer globally when we use human intelligence and technology. Human chat reps provide the real-time “We Care You Matter” message far better than technology. AI Chatbots can address routine inquiries, reduce queue times, and collect ongoing trend data for the enterprise to use for improving customer experience. Customers don’t require companies to choose AI over humans. It’s time for us to see the value in both just like our customers do.”
Jeff Toister, Consultant, Trainer, Author of ‘The Service Culture Handbook’
“AI and humans really should compliment each other for an effective chat. AI can effectively handle simple, transactional queries. It can also work in the background to help human agents quickly find answers to customer questions. Human agents excel at solving more complicated issues and empathizing with frustrated or upset customers. The key for humans is to consistently prove their worth by bringing humanity to the service they provide.”
Reading these opinions we know that both these ways go hand-in-hand for a powerful customer service experience. But there are cases where a chatbot can overcome live chat’s functionality and there are some other cases where live chat can be powerful. Let’s discuss this below.
Chabot Vs Live Chat
Chatbot Knocks-out Live Chat
- Availability
Today businesses want to offer customer support 24/7/365. This requires hiring support agents that can work in rotational shifts.
This is where a chatbot excels. Offering support services around the clock and providing instant responses.
Presently, if a business is not available at all conceivable hours, there are chances to lose a lot of customers. So, it is better to have support available to your customers at all times.
2. Time and Money Saved
Chatbots can respond to chat at any time and for any length of time without any help of a human agent. This helps in cutting down support costs and time.
And unlike humans, bots are never tired of replying the same questions any number of times.
3. Multitasking
Chatbots can handle an unlimited number of chats simultaneously. Consider a scenario where you are expected to handle 50 calls at a time. Well, this is not feasible. And if you are handling several clients at a time there will be disgruntled customers. These customers are tired of being on hold and might be considering switching to a competitor.
4. Faster Response Time
AI-powered Chatbots respond much more quickly to incoming chat request compared to live chat agents.
A human agent can be responding to other chats and end-up in delayed responses.
With chatbots, customers get real-time attention and responses to their queries.
5. Multiple Languages
Suppose you are a global business. It may be difficult and expensive to hire chat agents for every language your customers speak.
Whereas, Chatbots, can be programmed to speak with your customers in several languages.
Live Chat Knocks-out Chatbot
- Capable Of Answering Complex Queries
Chatbots are capable of answering simple Tier 1 Questions. But it lacks the ability to think and adapt difficult questions where the customers might need answers out-of-the-box.
For a chatbot to answer a question it needs to be in a very specific context. Even with ML and NLP, a chatbot to answer a complex question is beyond its scope.
While a human agent can help set-up a product and can offer other related advice to solve issues.
2. Chatting with a bot can be discouraging
Chatting lacks empathy and customers can often miss the emotional response they receive from a human agent.
There are times when a customer needs empathy to help them resolve a frustrating query. If the bots fail to work on this, it may give the impression that your brand is cold and impersonal.
3. Spelling and other errors
Chatbots respond to keywords and might fail to respond to spelling mistakes.
A customer making a typo error can easily confuse a bot. Human agents can figure out a question, even if there is a spelling mistake or a typo error, by understanding and adapting the context.
4. Problem Solving Skills
Human agents are considered more efficient in addressing and resolving issues of customers without any hassle. Humans can offer high efficiency in query resolution and complex problem-solving.
Takeaway
Chatbots are improving in the coming years and will play a much larger role in customer service, that doesn’t mean the role of human agents will be completely eliminated. The future of customer service isn’t just AI chatbots, predictive analytics, and automation. Live agent supported live chat is still a very colossal customer service tool, especially for small and mid-sized businesses.
Chatbots can fulfill adequacy, speed, and accuracy but cannot take over human empathy. An AI-powered chatbot can execute processes more quickly but doesn’t have the capability to reflect with the customer.
So, an amalgamation of both is the best-suited choice for an ideal customer support tool.
Originally Published at: https://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/live-chat-vs-chatbot-which-is-the-best-for-your-business
Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !
