If the customer is the king, then customer service should be one of the most important things that you can do to grow your business. One HubSpot study revealed that 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases from companies that offer excellent customer service. On the flip side, you can lose business if you offer poor customer experience.
The problem is, investing in good customer service is costly. Fortunately, AI chatbots can help you circumvent this problem. Not only will they save your time, money, and resources, but they are also better than their human counterparts in many respects.
The State of the AI Chatbot
Virtual Customer Assistant (VCA) or chatbot is an artificial intelligence system that is used by businesses to communicate with their customers. It can learn customer requests and provide relevant answers. Through machine learning, it improves the user experience and works autonomously without manual intervention.
You can install AI chatbots on websites, inside general apps, and chat apps like FB Messengers. AI chatbots provide prompt and effective responses, reduce overheads, and increase conversion rates. A study by Gartner says that 25% of customer service operations are expected to use chatbots by 2020. So, let’s take a look at their advantages.
How AI Chatbots Can Be More Effective Than Humans
There are several things that an AI chatbot can do better than human customer support. Let’s take a look at them.
Identify Leads Automatically
You can set AI chatbots to engage with customers automatically the moment they are on your website or app. For example, when they visit your website or app, the chatbot can send a welcome message to them or offer a deal. This will make their whole experience more engaging and push them towards the next step of the sales funnel.
Engage More With Customers
AI chatbots can also engage with multiple customers at the same time. On the other hand, a single person might be able to support 2-3 customers at the same time, but you’ll need more staff to handle hundreds.
Once set up, AI chatbots are available 24/7. They can send product updates and offers regularly, respond instantly to any queries, and work autonomously without any manual effort from your side.
Automate Data Collection
You can also use AI chatbots to gather and analyze customer data. They can collect data by asking questions or use other, more interactive ways of gathering information like quizzes or sets of questions and possible answers.
Save Money
Using AI chatbots also helps you save money. AI chatbot can engage as effectively with one customer as with hundreds. You can’t say similar things with customer service staff. With the help of AI chatbot, you can hire less staff and reserve the agents for more complex queries only.
There is Room for Improvement
As clever as the AI chatbots are, they still lack the human touch. No chatbot can replicate the sense of humor or understand emotions like a customer support agent can. And while you can set it to give correct replies to questions and it can learn to improve its understanding, chatbots still struggle to respond to queries beyond what has been taught to them.
All in all, AI chatbots still can’t replace their human counterparts completely. But they can improve the quality of your customer support while reducing the cost.
If you haven’t started leveraging chatbots yet, you can check the best AI-powered chatbots out there on my blog shanebarker.com.
