In today’s ever connected world, customers are demanding more personalised customer experiences and businesses are being forced to review how they engage with customers and how technology can play a part in closing the gap between what customers want and what the business is able to deliver.
As more and more businesses are looking to improve their customers service and support by introducing chatbots into their customer contact processes. Oracle reports that 80% of decision makers are already using or have plans to use chatbots by 2020 and as chatbot engagement increasingly becomes part of our everyday living we will see sharp increases in the speed at which business deploy chatbot technology.
Well simply put, chatbots are the easiest way solve customer issues, collect customer payments, collect data, and complete forms. When customers expect immediate responses and engagement, chatbots offer just that, fast and efficient responses. And, if you use choose the right technology provider, you can also incorporate blended chatbots and live agent experiences, so agents are only brought into the conversation when needed. That is the ultimate setup. Not convinced yet? Here are some reasons why any business that engages with customers should use chatbots:
The rapid shift to messaging has resulted in messaging apps being customers preferred channel of engagement. It gives them on-demand access to make inquiries or resolve an issues and lets them engage with businesses the same was as they chat with friends and family. With the number of global messaging app users is expected to reach 2.1 Billion by 2020 the ability to reach out and connect with customers on messaging apps is an opportunity that cannot be missed.
How many customers have been kept on hold waiting for an agent or sitting waiting for an agent to come back in a live chat conversation or have to wait until the next day to get any response if it is an out of hours query? Chatbots never take a lunch-break or tire and can engage with customers every minute of every day throughout the year.
Chatbots are fantastic for handling high volume – low urgency queries. Deploy chatbots to manage the repetitive, simple queries that can be answered and resolved quickly. Customers will love you for it and agents can focus on higher value queries.
Not all customer engagements should be handled by a chatbot. There are some that will require a human touch and there is nothing worse if you try to side step this preference to talk with an agent by continuing to push customers down an automated route. Many businesses have a fear about this. But they need not worry. Chatbots can be programmed to seamlessly route conversations to a live-agents, capturing the conversation history on agent screens and letting them take-over the conversation professionally.
Chatbots provide a personal approach to each individual customer that agents just cannot match. They are consistent, access information in milliseconds, never get tired or cranky and have the ability to generate a complete profile of the customer –accessing previous conversation history and creating personalized experiences that improve the quality of customer engagement.
Chatbots are having a direct impact on customer communication and customer service costs. Many businesses are already saving by using chatbots to strengthen customer service, reduce waiting times, solve issues faster and replace low value tasks all impacting costs.
In the 2018 State of Chatbots Report, it was highlighted just how popular chatbots are when customers want to communicate with companies in comparison to apps. Customers believe chatbots to be superior and offer a lot more benefits when communicating with a businesses especially in the areas of 24 Hour service and making a complaint.
The is little doubt that chatbots are here to stay and they are only going to get better as artificial intelligence improves and business gain more experience in how best to utilise them. The benefits of chatbots just cannot be ingnored, they are revolutionising customer engagement and customer experience. So if you haven't started talking about how to utilise them in your businesss, now is the time to get started.
