Goodbye Queues, Hello Chatbots — Harnessing AI & People Power to Deliver Instant Support
As the Internet has grown and become more and more deeply woven in our lives, so too has our connectivity to each other and the businesses we interact with on a daily basis. The Age of Data has set a precedent by introducing us to an unrivalled level of immediacy; we have grown accustomed to and expect information to be available immediately, regardless of where we are, and customer services are no exception to this. Social media has prevailed as a platform for customers to reach out to businesses for more direct and rapid responses, and it now falls to businesses to keep up with this demand for business presence on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Many businesses are now seeking the best ways to deliver this new standard of personalised, instantaneous customer service: chatbots have quickly become one of the most popular answers, using artificial intelligence (AI) to offer useful support to customers in an instant, without the need for a customer support person to be available. They also work well alongside human input to provide the best experience. Let’s take a look at how chatbots can provide instant support for your customers.
Chatbots Provide a Time-saving First Response
One of the key benefits of chatbots is that they’re able to answer a request for support immediately, at any time. They don’t have any needs, and they can deal with a limitless amount of people at any one time. They’re ready to provide support whenever it’s requested, helping to save live customer support agents a lot of time.
Chatbots might not be feasible to use for all customer service interactions, but they do provide useful support in most situations. They’re excellent to use for getting a conversation started. The first interaction with a customer often involves asking them the same standard questions to get basic information. A chatbot can easily take care of this, collecting some important answers, ready for when a human can take over. Having chatbots take care of these interactions allows your human customer support agents to get on with other things, saving a lot of time while customers receive quicker support.
Offer Automated Answers to Common Questions
Chatbots are ideal for providing stock answers to frequently asked questions. Not only is it time-consuming for your customer service agents to answer the same questions again and again, but it’s boring for them too. A chatbot can take this work off their hands, so they have more time to deal with more important matters. If your employees have too much work on their plates, it can result in wait times getting longer and instant support going out the window.
Using chatbots allows companies to offer support on key questions 24/7. The demand for 24/7 service is growing, but providing live support agents at all times is costly. It’s not particularly efficient because live support agents have human needs, not to mention the fact they can only deal with a few customers efficiently at any one time.
Organise Your Customer Service Requests
One of the most frustrating issues for customers is being passed between different people in the attempt to solve an issue. If you want to provide top customer service, you need to route any inbound messages to the right person as soon as possible. One of the functions that chatbots perform is to ensure the best person to resolve an issue is chosen. They automate the routing of inquiries the increase the likelihood of getting the right person to deal with them.
Chatbots can ask all the basic questions that help to categorise an issue and send it to the right place. The chatbot can collect all necessary information to determine which person to pass the query to, or perhaps even whether another chatbot should be the next step. It means that live agents all receive issues that they are best-placed to deal with, rather than having to pass the problem to someone else or fetch a manager for answers they don’t have.
Chatbots will undeniably play a huge role in automating the process of dealing with customer services and complaints, but no fully-automated service can handle every possible issue. Sometimes, nothing can replace that human touch. That’s why Natter.ai has developed a system called HAI (Human Artificial Intelligence) that enables human customer service teams to monitor and work with chatbots, allowing businesses to utilise the strongest benefits of both people and AI in collaboration. Human operators can moderate and train their chatbots, ensuring the right answers are given whilst benefiting from the time-saving perks of chatbots. HAI is built around the idea that the greatest gains to businesses and their customers will come from those that utilise the strongest benefits of both people and AI in collaboration.
Originally published at Natter.ai.
