Customer service relations is the heart of a successful business. Traditionally, businesses relied on reactive support such as phone and email. The increasing popularity of instant messaging led to live chat that helped businesses to provide real time response.
Deloitte reported that 62% of companies view customer experience delivered by a brand as a competitive differentiator.
Chatbots are the next step of rapid adoption for enhancing customer service by 24×7 assistance for the FAQs. Chatbots and live chat fulfill different functions of your business with different strengths. Understanding the benefits of a chatbot for customer support can help you choose the best solution for your business.
According to Mindbrowser the business functions that will benefit the most from chatbots are customer service (95%), sales/marketing (55%), order processing (48%).
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Different ways to use live chat software and AI chatbots together
There are many important advantages of using live chat software and chatbots for your businesses. The key is how businesses can implement the benefits of both the technologies in the right way to deliver outstanding customer experience.
Here are five ways how to balance your business functions
1. 24×7 real time support
Like you customers also do not like to wait. They expect instant support for their queries. Live chat software empowers your business to connect with customers unlike the reactive channels like phone and email.
The major reason businesses adopting live chat is because maximum customers prefer to chat with a support agent in real-time situations. But if your customers are expecting an immediate response typically in less than 30 seconds, than chatbots are the best fit.
Chatbots engage customers 24×7 with immediate answers to all information-based queries. Being able to deliver great customer service has a positive impact on your customer satisfaction and loyalty.
How do chatbots help?
- Chatbots provide answers that help customers can also direct customers to answers that will genuinely help them, which leads to support ticket deflection and increased customer satisfaction.
- You can train your bot for customer chats by adding general FAQs and answers. Bots will learn the adopt the questions asked by the customers to answer similar queries in the future.
2. Save operational costs
Live chat overcomes the traditional ways of handling customers chats over phone or email and reduce support costs. But the hiring of more number of support agents involves additional costs and time. The costs may be in terms of
- Salaries to be paid to the new agents
- Training costs of the support agents
- Infrastructure costs
Implementing best AI chatbots proves as an investment to your business by saving customer service costs. Chatbots currently account for business cost savings of $20 million globally and that number is expected to rise. Investing in chatbots saves extra costs of adding more agents.
Businesses should not ignore these costs. Chatbots can be scaled during the peak time of business without any extra costs. Thus, chatbot benefits your business drastically to bring down the expenses and bring about a rise in revenue and customer satisfaction.
3. Scale as per business needs
Live chat allows you to connect with your customers instantly. When customers do not have to wait for a longer time, it boosts your brand image and streamlines the support and sales tasks effectivity.
Chatbots are designed to enhance business efficacy and productivity by providing quick answers and solutions to customers. Chatbots can be scaled based on your business requirements. There is no extra cost involved when the scalability increases.
For example, if your business receives more than 900 chat requests in a day it is not possible to handle all of them with limited agents. Chatbots can be scaled to meet thousands of requests without missing any of them.
4. Continuous customer engagement
Ongoing customer engagement is important for every business. Live chat software allows you to connect with your customers in real time by using visual engagement tools such as video chat and co-browsing.
With live tools, you can make the customer engagement process interactive that improves customer service and boosts customer satisfaction.
- You can combine live chat with co-browsing and video chat to engage customers in an interactive manner.
- Live tools reduce the number of touchpoints to get the right solution for the customer problem.
Chatbots empower your business to engage your customers 24×7 in the non-business hours when the support team is not available. Chatbots automate the customer service process with the FAQs and thus reduce the number of support tickets raised by customers.
5. Deliver proactive support to your customers
Many businesses offer reactive customer support via phone and email. What it means is customers reach out to your company only then they respond without initiating a chat from their side.
With the help of chatbots, you can start proactive chat through personalized messages at scale, product recommendation that boosts customer satisfaction and retention. In case the conversation becomes complex it is directed to the live support assistance.
- Chatbots make your customers feel that you care for them by having proactive conversations
- Chatbot solutions improve your brand value in the long run and enhance customer loyalty.
Amazon follows the best proactive approach. What Amazon did?
- Predicts questions on delivery dates and times, notifying customers beforehand of any delays.
- Contact customers via email and SMS, to inform and convey the new delivery date.
Final thoughts
There are so many benefits of live chat software and AI chatbots that can be used in businesses across customer-facing functions, sales, marketing. Following only live chat technology or chatbot solutions will not help businesses to achieve better customer satisfaction.
If you manage your business with chatbots and live support it will help to enhance your customer service. With chatbots engaging customers by responding to their basic questions and the complex ones will be handed over live support agents. Thus, with the hybrid approach of chatbots and live chat you can deliver a better customer experience.
