Customer Service Chatbot — Here Is Why You Must Have a Chatbot For Customer Service
There’s always a new challenge to meet when you’re running a business. Some challenges, however, tend to show up at every step of your way — maintaining customer service quality, for example. For this reason and more, business are creating a website customer service chatbot.
Whether you’ve just started out or are looking to expand to other markets, customer service will be among your topmost priorities. You’ll always need to go the extra mile to ensure that your customers’ issues and queries are addressed in the fastest and most personalized way possible. A variety of technologies exist to help you do this better, but none have proven quite as effective as chatbot development. Here are the main reasons why every modern business needs to create a chatbot for customer service.
1. Customers prefer chat tools.
It wasn’t too long ago when mobile apps were all the rage. It was an accepted fact that any business that planned to stay on its customers’ radar had to build an app to get through to them. But that pattern changed in 2016, when app download rates started to decline. Today, millennial customers have a clear preference for websites over apps. Unlike apps, websites don’t hog space on devices, and when equipped with the right user interface, can make a variety of information a whole lot easier to find. Of late, customer service chatbots have given a major upgrade in terms of user friendliness, allowing visitors to get the information they need by just asking for it.
Say you run an online ticket booking site and a customer has a question about a discount coupon. In the conventional scenario, they’d need to find and open up the discounts page on your website or mobile app, look up the offer they’re interested in, and read its terms and conditions to get their answer. But if your website has a customer service chatbot in place, they can skip all this and just ask a simple question instead.
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Customer: “Is the half-off Wednesdays offer applicable on XYZ credit cards?”
And they’ll get what they need in an instant.
Chatbot: “Yes! XYZ credit cards are eligible for Half-off Wednesdays. For a complete list of payment options you can use to avail this offer, click here.”
It’s easy to see why most customers will prefer this chatbot option over the conventional ‘look-it-up-yourself’ approach.
2. Chatbots help you connect with your customers.
Good customer service needs a personal touch. No matter how thorough you are with your website information and UX design, you’ll need to do what’s needed to reach out and connect with your customers. When your customers feel like their individual requirements and preferences are addressed every time they interact with your business, they’re encouraged to stick with you instead of trying a new service. By building chatbots for customer service, you can connect with each and every customer on a human level. The best chatbots are carefully programmed to understand people’s pain points. They can identify slight inflections in a customer’s tone to get where they’re coming from and present answers in an empathetic way.
For example, when a customer comes in asking for a status update on an order they should have received days ago, the customer service chatbot can identify that they’re upset and help put them at ease.
Customer: “I was supposed to receive this order by Monday but I still haven’t got it.”
Chatbot: “I’m sorry to hear that. Let me find out where your shipment is right now…I can see that the order has reached your nearest delivery hub on Wednesday. It should be delivered by tomorrow at the latest.”
Customer: “What if I don’t get it by tomorrow?”
Chatbot: “I’ll escalate your issue to our deliveries department and someone from our team will personally look into it. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you.”
3. Chatbots help you improve your support process.
Boilerplate responses have very limited use in customer support. To engage your customers and reassure them that you’re prioritizing their needs, you need to consistently improve the service you provide. One of the biggest benefits that you get by building customer service chatbots is the fact that chatbots are a reliable source of information about your customers’ needs and problems. Their chat transcripts help you see where your support is lacking and what you can add to it to make your customers happier. This data will not just help you improve your chatbot’s script, but can go a long way in equipping your human customer support representatives with useful pointers for future conversations with customers. In the process, you get to strengthen your brand image as a customer-oriented business.
4. The lines have blurred between customer support and marketing.
Customer service technologies such as customer service chatbot development don’t just allow you to address your customers’ issues better. They also allow you to market your products or services in an organic fashion. This is an approach that a lot of successful businesses have been adopting. By equipping their customer service chatbots with a mix of good scripts and artificial intelligence, these businesses provide their customers with handy tools that they can use to make the best purchasing decisions.
The best chatbots are able to reassure customers that they have all the data and resources they need in order to buy well. These AI bots can expertly guide customers down the sales funnel by clarifying their doubts about specific products, recommending other products with better features, and pitching discounts on whatever they seem interested in buying. Satisfied with their purchasing decisions, these customers remain loyal to the business in question, and even recommend it to their contacts.
Follow my channel for more informative articles on building chatbots for business. Feel free to contact me with your questions on chatbot development for your business.
About VirtualSpirits
VirtualSpirits is the leading website chatbot platform for businesses. Powering +12,000 chatbots for customer service, lead generation, and sales around the world.
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