Customer service is a vital part of any business. Through support services, customers can get help with products or services or obtain necessary information both before and after a purchase. To maintain customer loyalty, companies need to continuously develop their customer service, enhancing its quality and speed. This is where AI chatbots come into play. Let’s take a closer look at how chatbots are transforming the customer experience and what the advantages of using chatbots in customer service are.
What is an AI chatbot?
First, let’s define the terminology. So, what is an AI-powered chatbot? Simply put, it is a software program that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate human conversation. Think of any live chat on a website: as soon as you click the button, a chat window opens with a greeting and a question like “How can I help you?”. In 99% of cases, you are conversing with a text-based chatbot for customer communication.
What if you call the contact center?
Yes, some people find it easier to explain their problem verbally. However, for answering phone calls in contact centers, voicebots are increasingly used. This is the “cousins” of the text-based chatbot, but with a voice interaction interface. It also relies on AI technology, capable of recognizing and interpreting human speech and synthesizing automatic responses.
«Can I speak to a real person?!»
We’ve all felt frustrated when a chatbot responds to us. It might seem like companies are hiding behind soulless robots. However, there’s no need to worry. Both voice and text chatbots can transfer the conversation to a live contact center operator if necessary. In fact, research shows that about 80% of issues can be resolved faster and more efficiently with the help of a virtual assistant.
Thus, it makes sense to discuss the advantages of AI-supported chatbots for companies and, of course, the benefits for us, the customers.
Why Implement a chatbot in your contact center?
The best way to answer this question is with numbers. Research from leading consulting companies shows that:
- Chatbots reduce customer wait time by 40%.
- Using chatbots can increase customer satisfaction by 38%.
- Chatbots can boost sales conversion rates by up to 30%.
- In 2023, the savings from using chatbots in customer service amounted to approximately $8 billion.
- By the end of 2024, 70% of businesses are expected to use text or voice chatbots to improve customer service.
As the saying goes, the numbers speak for themselves. But if they don’t convince you, let’s delve into the benefits of chatbots for business in more detail.
Enhancing customer loyalty: the value of quality service
It’s simple: the higher the quality of service, the longer customers will stay with a company. Conversely, if service quality declines, customers will turn to competitors. What constitutes “quality service,” you may ask? For modern customers, it’s more than just polite consultants and meeting basic requirements. It’s a comprehensive experience that encompasses all aspects of customer interaction with the company:
- speed and availability
- personalization
- empathy and understanding
- efficiency and problem-solving
- convenience and ease of use.
AI-powered chatbots can enhance each of these aspects, thereby maintaining customer loyalty to the business. Consider this: a chatbot can serve hundreds or even thousands of customers simultaneously. Whether it’s checking the status of an order, getting information on account balances, or selecting the best tariff, there’s no waiting time. You ask a question and get an instant response.
Chatbots can integrate with other business systems. For instance, integration with contact center CRM allows for personalized responses by accessing the customer’s profile and their history of interactions with the business.
Additionally, a chatbot can be integrated into any communication channel that is convenient for the customer. Do your customers prefer messengers? Use a chatbot on Telegram or Viber. Is most of your target audience on Facebook? You can create a chatbot for social media. The same applies to online chats on the website or email. Omnichannel support is convenient!
“What about empathy?” you might ask. Equipping a “machine” with empathy is possible through natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis. These technologies help chatbots determine the intentions and mood of the user, understand slang, and even humor.
To meet user demands and stay competitive, many companies will need to implement intelligent chatbots to enhance the quality of customer interactions.
Optimizing costs and enhancing efficiency: the role of chatbots
Cost reduction and rational resource utilization are important parts of modern business strategy. Automating processes with chatbots has become a tool capable of optimizing costs and increasing the efficiency of contact centers. How does this lead to cost savings? Here are the main ways:
Automation of responses to routine requests
Chatbots can handle customer inquiries such as work schedule requests, product or service information, frequently asked questions, and more. This frees contact center agents from monotonous work and allows them to focus on more complex and important tasks.
Improved response time and elimination of queue
Chatbots can work around the clock, responding quickly and without creating queues. This helps improve metrics such as Answer Rate, ASA, FCR, and leads to increased customer satisfaction. Considering that typically around 70% of requests are standard regardless of the business sector, there are grounds to believe that chatbots can replace some contact center operators.
Analytics and improvement of customer experience
Why spend money on marketing research or customer surveys when a chatbot can do it? An AI-powered program can collect data on customer interactions, including types of requests, difficulties in the customer journey, satisfaction with any aspect of the service, Customer Effort Score (CES) and more. This information can then be used to improve products, services, service processes, marketing activities, and so on.
As you can see, AI-powered chatbots offer companies a wide range of benefits that can lead to significant cost savings and overall work efficiency improvement.
It’s worth noting that to achieve maximum effect, chatbots must be properly integrated into the company’s overall customer service strategy and constantly improved. Here we come to another important question…
How will chatbots evolve in the near future?
Text chatbots and voicebots for customer communication have rapidly been changing the landscape of customer service since 2020. It’s fair to say that we are currently witnessing a revolutionary transformation in technology thanks to the use of Artificial Intelligence.
Virtual assistants are already helping to serve and attract new customers in almost every business sector. Recognizing the potential, companies worldwide are investing in chatbots and machine learning technologies. What can we expect from this technology in the near future? At Global Bilgi, we see the following directions for the development of chatbots:
Deep understanding of customer needs
AI-powered chatbots are considered one of the most promising segments of software for contact centers. They are used not only as an alternative to support agents but also for deep analysis of customers’ behavior, intentions, habits, and preferences.
Advancements in natural language understanding (NLU) algorithms will enable chatbots to better comprehend complex requests and customer intents.
Humanizing chatbots
It seems like only yesterday we saw this in science fiction movies, and now we’re already communicating with robots as if they were humans. As chatbot technology becomes more sophisticated, companies are striving to give them a more “human” touch.
The development of machine learning technologies will allow chatbots to provide more personalized and contextual responses, taking into account the history of interactions with each individual customer. The bots will learn based on the exchange of information with customers and will be able to better adapt to linguistic nuances in order to be better prepared for communication.
Expansion of responsibilities
Yes, at the moment chatbots are more about informational and technical support. But soon, text or voice bots will take on more tasks within messaging platforms. For example, advising customers, cross-selling and accepting payments.
In the future, chatbots will also play a key role in enhancing brand recognition. This will be possible through bot personalization, giving them certain characteristic (or visual in the case of video bots) features.
Multilingual chatbots
Developing models that can adapt to different contexts, as well as dialects and speech peculiarities, is an important aspect of developing multilingual chatbots. The ability to localize content and interact with users according to their language and cultural specifics will help businesses reach an international audience, improve the quality of customer service, and expand their capabilities in the global market.
Conclusions
Chatbots with artificial intelligence have become an indispensable tool for many companies, streamlining and automating customer service processes. In contact centers, they provide efficient and accessible support, improve speed and productivity, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction.
However, the development of chatbots in contact centers is not yet complete. Future directions include improving speech recognition and understanding technologies, personalizing interactions with users, developing multilingual capabilities and expanding the range of tasks that can be completed automatically. This will lead to even more effective and intuitive customer support systems.
AI-powered chatbots have the potential to replace contact center staff for many routine tasks and inquiries. However, human understanding and empathy remain an essential part of customer interaction, especially in complex situations. Therefore, despite automation, the human factor in contact centers will remain important, and chatbots will coexist with operators, complementing their work and improving overall productivity.
