Chat Now Or Keep Telling Your Customers — Sorry Come Back Later
GEN Y & GEN Z act promptly and today’s most interfaces of big enterprises are not able to cope with these generations. Is there any way they can be served? Yes, chatbots are emerging as virtual friend cum assistant which is really changing the way people communicate with businesses.
Presently, as applications focusing on business to consumer (B2C) niche are already popular, the chatbots are further revolutionising the business to enterprises (B2E) and business to business (B2B) organisational scenarios.
According to Gartner, by the year 2020, customers will manage 85 percent of their relationship with the businesses without the need of human interaction.
And how it will happen? Below story can make you understand better.
Why Do I Need Chatbot And Not Live Chat At First Place?
Remember last time you visited a website that has a live chat box on the landing page?
Did you get the answer immediately or were you asked to come back later or drop your email address to be contacted afterwards by customer executive? More than likely, you were asked to drop your email address.
The smartphone generation of today needs instant answers to their queries. It’s very annoying when you are in dire need of an instant reply, but you aren’t able to get it. Here chatbots comes into the picture. A chatbots is a computer program with or without AI allowing the visitor to interact with the brand or business through chat interface. Hence, no need for actual live service agent to solve customer queries who may not be available at that time.
How Chatbots Are Different From Live Chats?
Chatbots have been invented to bridge the gap of human limitations. Chatbots and live chat have different strengths with different functionalities. Understanding the advantages of a chatbot can help you choose the best solution out of the two. Let’s understand this better through following pointers.
Chatbots Can Do Conversation At Length
One of the biggest benefits of deploying chatbots is their ability to converse with the customers at length, without any human intervention. This automatically saves resources and energy of businesses. And this is so vital as the amount of time a human spent on the PC or laptop answering queries, the same time can be utilised in other valuable tasks. And sometimes it becomes frustrating to answer the same set of queries again and again.
Chatbots Understand Common Case Scenarios
Customer support executives have to deal with same basic repetitive tasks on a daily basis. Here chatbots can prove to be of great help. They are automated computer programs, so they can easily handle common case scenarios or monotonous tasks as they can chat with unlimited number of people. This sheds off a lot of load from the workforce and gives them enough time to think on other valuable strategies.
Built Trust For The Brand
Chatbots act as a brand ambassador of a business. They are the mouthpiece of your business, they converse with the customers and build trust for your brand. Their diverse roles include customer service, marketing and distributing content across various channels.
According to Markets and Markets, the demand for chatbots around the world is expected to escalate to US$ 3,172 million by 2021 from US$ 703 million in 2016.
Further, the businesses are using chatbots to extent their organic market reach by automating marketing. This can be a tiresome experience for companies having live chat as their primary customer support.
Chatbots Are Available 24x7
The screen obsessed generation of today is restless and busy. They don’t like waiting and want their queries solved instantly and on the spot. This is a sheer difference between a chatbot and a live chat.
The 24x7 availability of chatbots makes them super humans. They never need a coffee break, never sleeps, never sick and never take a vacation.
A fine example can be seen in applications like e-commerce where chatbots serves thousands of customers simultaneously, making their shopping easy at any given point of time.
Chatbots Can Take Decisions Autonomously
Chatbots which are powered by artificial intelligence are equipped with machine learning abilities. This empowers them and makes them capable of keeping an eagle’s eye on customer behaviour such as buying preferences, budget, buying decisions, items purchased, etc. Based on these insights, the chatbot can take decisions autonomously without any human intervention.
Chatbots Helps The Customer Reach The Right Place Or Service
Many websites have tons of information stored and it makes almost impossible for visitors, especially the new ones, to navigate to the right place, product or service. Instead of interacting with a live chat which may or may not be available for response, chatbot in no time navigate the user to the right product or service he is looking for.
This is especially important when it comes to navigation in mobiles where the sifting is too quick and the user is often in a hurry. For example, if a user is searching for a particular cardiologist in New Delhi, he does not have to click multiple pages or filter them out to get the information of that doctor. Instead, he will say ‘I am looking for a cardiologist in New Delhi’ and the chatbot instantly derive the information stored in its database.
Chatbots Save Money On Live Agents By Bringing More Automation
Every business strives hard to save maximum resources. Instead of recruiting, training and paying multiple agents for the customer support, chatbots which are once deployed can minimise the human intervention. They bring more automation to the overall process and improve productivity.
Rule Based Chatbots Vs AI Powered Chatbots Vs Hybrid Ones
Chatbots can come in different varieties to serve different purpose. If you are looking for easy set-up, then rule based or retrieval-based chatbots are the best bet. All they need is some prior knowledge of the customer behaviour. The rules can be simple to very complex depending on what pattern it has been trained on.
However, these bots have some limitations such as they are not primarily designed to carry out multi-turn conversations or carry forward context from one dialogue to the subsequent.
On the contrary, chatbots based on deep attention neural network models keep track of context thereby enabling multi-turn conversations. These are difficult to setup and need tremendous amount of data for learning and touch points to figure out common conversational patterns. Then there is hybrid approach which offers the best of both the worlds. The hybrid version combines both the robotic and human elements i.e. chatbot and the live chat.
Should I Try To Build One Or Look For Enterprise Solution?
Building chatbot on your own is not a piece of cake unless you know how to mimic conversation programmatically, understand utterances and training the responses accordingly. It’s not like that we deploy the chatbot once and it will keep up and running on its own.
It’s a full time job to maintain the chatbot with improved content and developed technology. Both time and money is required especially given its adoption. It’s better to go for an enterprise chatbot platform that would fulfil all your requirements.
Why To Use Enterprise Chatbot Platform?
Many a times using out of the box solution works better in terms of saving resources, especially time as you can immediately try out the product and understand customer or visitor’s behaviour. This gradually and eventually reduces customer care turn-around time.
Secondly, companies providing platform keep adding new features so you will remain up to date in terms of technology. Platform providers also keep a tab on the method of conversation prevalent in the industry. They only use best trusted interactions and methods which are applicable for the wider population, covering the most common case scenarios.
If the current solutions aren’t sufficient enough to serve your needs, then you must talk to these companies for customisation. They will relatively do it in a better way catering to your specific needs.
Biggest Takeaway…
So crux of the story is that chatbots have become mature enough to automate businesses as well as streamlining their internal and external operations. So, look out for the right chatbot platform. If the companies are offering customised solution which you have never come across, then this would be the best bet.
If you have small business, adopt an already build chatbot, making a new one from scratch might exhaust you and keep you off the track from your actual business. Remember, live chat doesn’t always help, it can a very expensive affair for most businesses. If you can already automate most common cases, why you should need agents for that? Agent involvement is only needed in complex cases where chatbots isn’t able to understand what the user is saying or when chatbots have qualified the leads and they are ready to act upon.
Learned something? Click the 👏 to say “thanks!” and help others find this article. Follow us to read more about conversational science, automation, chatbots & lot more …
