Will AI-Powered Chatbots Transform The Customer Support?
Social Media is now one of most used medium for dealing with customer related issues. Brands are now using Twitter and Facebook to respond to customer queries and complaints because curious and dissatisfied customers take their issues up on social media. It is the easiest way to grab the attention of a brand. It is obvious that brands need to respond to customer service issues on social media, as and when they arise. Leading the race in this particular aspect is Twitter, as it is fast, instantaneous and provides more real-time interaction opportunity.
Sensing its usage as a medium for customer service, Twitter has now started offering chatbots that companies can utilize to send messages to their customers. These chatbots enable brands to help customers without the intervention of a human (a bit scary!), send out automated direct messages to customers, or to simply interact with a customer seeking to talk to a live person. Companies like Airbnb have already started taking advantage of this feature by automating their customer engagement. Facebook, the popular social media medium, is in no way behind and has already integrated chatbots as an integral part of their Facebook Messenger experience.
Let’s go back in time to understand this. In the early days, we used to have automated, scheduled telephone calls that were used for telemarketing. It is more or less the same phenomena with only a slight difference. Consumers in this digital age are now more educated and understand when they are talking to a human or a chatbot. So this raises the million dollar question: Are chatbots the future of customer service? Alternatively, is it a bad idea to automate the human-intensive field? Let’s have a look.
Instant Responses
Many brands take 24 hours to respond to a query. This gets frustrating for an industry that needs to have 24x7 support. Take the example of the managed cloud hosting industry. If a user lodges a complaint, or even sends out feedback, and receives no response for a day, then the frustration on his end is going to boil over. Now if you are the one responsible for the customer success in the organization, you would want to be responsive and thorough in your approach. For that purpose, you can certainly utilize a chatbot.
Even the simplest of responses, like an acknowledgment of the receipt of their complaints, go a long way for building customer goodwill. When a customer sends out a message and is greeted by the chatbot, followed by an approximate time frame of when the user can expect a solution, the organization is going to garner a lot of trust factor. This is most beneficial for companies that operate in interaction-intensive industries.
ChatBots Need To Be Tried and Tested
The case with the automated phone systems is that they are capable of detecting customer agitation. However, same does not hold true when we move to the chatbots. Even though AI is making quite advancements, it is still a long way till chat software’s can gauge the level of frustration a customer has when they come for customer service chat. It is easier to detect pitch and voice patterns, but at the moment, there are no ways in place to detect chat patterns or interruptions of a customer dealing with a service chatbot.
Because of this limitation, brands, specially B2C, need to walk in the shoes of their target audience before implementing chatbot for customer service. They need to understand the reactions of their customers and whether or not they should limit the customer-bot interaction to certain frequent problems or areas of the website. For instance, if I want to know the price of an airline ticket, I would not mind the interaction with the chatbot as it is going to be straightforward. Therefore, these things need to be taken into account before adopting the AI approach to customer service.
Frequently Asked Questions Can Be Answered With Bots
One of the most positive outcomes of using chatbots is their ability to take the load off from the customer service team. Chatbots can be used to help customers to navigate to simple tasks that are asked on a routine basis.
Lets take an example of an ecommerce store. A customer signs in and makes a purchase. On checkout, the customer decides to modify the billing details. A chatbot, floating at the bottom, pops up and ask the user what they want to do. When the user answers with his query, the chatbot processes the information and takes them to the steps that are needed to change the details, as instructed in the AI software of the bot. Now, these type of tasks is going to happen on a routine basis. Why make the life of a human difficult by engaging them in such tedious tasks? They can work on more important tasks, like updating the embedded commands in the AI software for the bots.
Using Chatbots To Educate Customers
Companies build knowledge bases to help their customers understand and interact with the product or service. Most organizations use tutorials that guide customers through the website or product offering of the organization or to enhance the user experience of the platforms. This is a great step ahead for AI-powered interaction. However, this sort of interaction is mostly canned. The AI-powered software running the chatbot is programmed to react to certain binary responses, or more appropriately, “triggers.”
This paves the way for a huge potential for chatbots. AI powered chatbot can react to customer responses and provide real-time, context-based, responses to the customers. This would make the experience of the interaction feel more human. This could also pave the way for cases where the bot can determine when human intervention is needed to solve a certain issue, much before a customer even asks for the escalated help.
Are Chatbots the future of Customer Service?
This might not seem like the case at the moment, but chatbots and customer service are a match made in heaven. No, chatbots will not be replacing agents anytime soon as users still prefer to have the human touch — just look at how much phone support scales a product reputation. Chatbots will, and are working, as assistants to customer service agents. AI powered chatbots can serve as the first line of contact for customer service requests. Bots can furnish the frequently asked questions along with some contextual based requests.
The real strength of chatbots in customer service would be to filter out the routinely asked generic requests, which do not require a human interaction at first. When more complex issues arrive, the AI-powered bot can escalate the issue to agents. This would greatly increase the efficiency of the agents and help them go up the ladder rather quickly. They can now deal with more complex situations and stop worrying about answering every request from the customers. Because the AI-powered chatbot is covering them.
Yes, there is no denying that chatbots are here to stay. If this would not have been the case, then brands such as Facebook would have never invested so heavily in this technology. On the other hand, B2B businesses like Cloudways, who have deployed the real-time insights provider, CloudwaysBot, would not have adopted this newer technology for improving their managed cloud hosting platform experience. However, brands need to weigh their option carefully before deciding to invest in the AI Chatbot technology. The cost of inducting the technology along with the issue of accuracy need to be taken into account before companies buy into the idea of using chatbots as a customer service tool.
