Chatbot VS Livechat VS Intelligent Chat
In the current business climate, there is an increase in the use of online chat features to assist clients in the search process. Some companies choose to use a chatbot, other companies prefer a live chat. Both have the same approach: improving customer service, but both have advantages and disadvantages.
Live chat vs Chatbot
What are the main differences between these customer contact methods? The chatbot or also known as a virtual assistant, uses the FAQ to answer questions. Customers can ask limited questions to the chatbot, which will then search for the answer. The question you ask the bot must involve specific keywords for it to understand, otherwise it will not work. The development of chatbots is moving quickly. In the upcoming years chatbots will have an important role in the purchase decisions of customers.
Chatbot
What is a chatbot?
A chatbot is a service that is powered by rules, interacting with your customers via a chat interface. This service can be for fun, but also functional. Currently there are two different kinds of chatbots: a normal chatbot and an intelligent chatbot that works with machine learning and artificial intelligence. I will cover up the intelligent chatbot later, right now we are focusing on the normal chatbot. There are many different kind of chatbots, they can be integrated in: Facebook Messenger, your website, Slack, Telegram, etc.
Benefits of the chatbot
· Chatbots can answer to an unlimited amount of chats at the same time. It’s robotic, therefore you often see this at big companies with a lot of customer traffic.
· It’s way cheaper than a live chat. You will need less employees to answer to all the questions. You have 24/7 support. A chatbot works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
· It has a way faster response time, companies spend a lot of time on the improvement of the response time to their customers. A chatbot replies instantly.
Disadvantages of the chatbot
· Chatbots only work if customers ask specific questions and there aren’t any misspelled words in the sentence. The bot will not know what a customer wants if the question is not specific enough.
· Customers can miss the contact they receive with a human.
Live chat
A live chat is an online customer service software with live support. Companies use this as a single point of contact to manage all their customer service and their online sales activities.
Benefits of live chat
·A human is at both ends of the chat. By being able to show emotions, they can think with the customer.
· The quality of the conversation is better than compared with a chatbot. A chatbot can only find a specific answer, which might not be what the customer wanted to know. A normal chatbot can’t think, humans do. Therefore, a human can help customers better compared with a chatbot.
Disadvantages of live chat
· The live chat can’t work for 24 hours a day, it needs humans to work.
· The response time is way slower than a chatbot.
· Humans do not speak as many languages as a chatbot can.
· Live chat is more expensive than a chatbot. Your team needs to be motivated to give good customer service, and you need available trained people to do the job.
Intelligent chat
A chatbot thinks and learns from your business operations. They do not get a syntax error when receiving too much text or misspelled words. They are more advanced in natural language processing. They work with high end rules of synonyms, ontologies, and spell checker. Similar to human reasoning, it basically works by searching for the meaning of the sentences, and not just seeking for specific keywords.
What is natural language processing?
Natural language processing(NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics and computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. NLP is related to the area of human-computer interactions. It enables a computer to understand the real meaning of human language.
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.¨- Edsger. W. Dijkstra
Benefits of an intelligent chatbot
· Does not get distracted by misspelled words
· Understands the true meaning of a sentence, it does not just look to keywords
· Understands synonyms and ontologies
· You don’t need a real-time support team
· Multilingual (most of them)
Disadvantages of an intelligent chatbot
· Needs training, which takes time
· Although the bot can show compassion, it misses a human touch
Adequacy, speed and friendliness are important in customer service. Live chats are very adequate but the respondstime is way slower than a chatbot. A normal chatbot works fast but they do not have the possibility to think with the customer and is only able to be functional if you say the right keywords. In addition, engaging and helping your customers will be way faster compared with the use of no chatbot or a live chat.
In my opinion, intelligent chatbots are the future. Companies can automate their support up to 90% and will only need to assist the bot. It will be an addition to your customer service because your customer service employees will have more time doing other things rather than awnsering all the FAQ’s.
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