Coronavirus — Chatbots help maintain customer support
How Chatbots help companies to stay in contact with their clients — even in difficult times like the this.
During the current Corona Crisis many Ecommerce Companies reduce their Customer Support working hours, while some even completely terminate all support activities. For health reasons this makes completely sense but reducing the service drastically for their customers could also mean losing business in the long run.
I want to talk about one possible win-win solution for this problem: Chatbots.
I. Chatbots can help answering 40–80% of all customer questions
Chatbots can help to reduce the workload for your Customer Service significantly. Customers want 1. immediate response to their questions, 2. prefer not to change the medium (that means i.e. telephone hotline is often second choice) and 3. want somebody on the other side that provides the right high quality answers.
- Immediate response is pretty obvious one of the benefits of a chatbot because there is no faster way of interacting with your customers.
- Not changing the communication channel makes a lot of sense too, because customers hate to switch the medium. That means nobody likes to be on your website, having a question and than switching to Email, Telephone or even worse a hidden Contact Forms. Having an all in one Chatbot Window makes 100% sense here.
- Right answers and solutions to a problem: Well, customers want the right answers to their questions. And this is the point where we still need human interaction. Interestingly modern chatbots can answer 40–80% of all customer questions in the support area. The key is to take track of the most Frequently Asked Questions and to feed the chatbot with the right answers in advance.
The Chatbot will be able to answer most questions but probably not all of them. The rest will have to be forewarded to an actual human being.
Never the less cost reduction could be arround 30% of total customer service costs.
II. Chatbot types
Chatbots appear on your website in a seperate window and help guide the user to a sale or to the answer to his question.
In general there are two different types of Chatbots. Multiple Choice (also called Menu-based) Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence Chatbots.
- Menu-based Chatbots:
Menu-based Chatbots provide users with a definite number of choices. That means you give your customer the possibility to search between one or more clearly defined options. It is also possible to implement a decision tree, that leads your customer to the specific point that he wants to know.
We have very good experiences with these kind of chatbots because they are easy to use, easy to program and not very hard to be maintained.
In our experience these bots are good enough for answering 80% of support questions, the other 20% will be forewarded to a human.
Of course they can be connected to other data sources and APIs.
2. Artificial Intelligence Chatbots
Artificial Intelligence Chatbots do not have multiple choice like in the Menu-based version. The customer types in his question, the bot understands the context and returns the answer. Sounds cool right?
Problem is that before this works there is a lot of training necessary. There will always be sentences that the bot does not understand. This means he has to be educated by a human.
In our experience this is definitely the more expensive but not always the best solution.
Also we experienced that users sometimes tend to play around with those bots like “tell me a joke”, “how is the weather” and so on. This is not good for getting the customer where you want him to be. This is why we are fans of Menu-based Chatbots so you can guide your customer much better to his goal. But there are also cases of course where Artificial Intelligence Chatbots make perfectly sense.
Though we strongly recommend Multiple-choice bots for beginners.
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III. Chatbot Use Cases
There are many Use Cases for Chatbots — be it HR, Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, Production and so on.
I want to focus on the two most classical Use Cases for Chatbots: Lead Generation and Customer Support
- Lead Generation
Lead Generation means the Chatbot is installed on your website and generates Leads for you. Our Experience show that Customers using a chatbot create extraordinary Conversion Rates. Maybe because it is fun to talk to a Chatbot and it is not a break between two different types of communication medium (like Email, Phone, Contact Form, etc.). Think about it as a virtual Sales Consultant. Purpose of this bot is to get Data of interested customers, make appointments or even finalize the sale.
Also reviews can be collected by Chatbots.
The Target is Revenue Maximization.
2. Customer Support
Especially during the Corona Crisis many companies have to downgrade their service level, because they do not have enough service personnel to operate their support sufficiently. Chatbots for Customer Support are made for answering the most frequently asked questions. The target here is to reduce Support Costs and improve Service Level. No waiting-queues, no long response times — a chatbot is a very fast and accurate tool (if you set it up right).
IV. Costs of a Chatbot
The costs of Chatbots very between a few hunded Euros untill several thousand Euros — depending on the complexity.
Botoni has a monthly subscription model that can be terminated at any time.
Chatbots start at 79 EUR per Month.
V. How to set up a Chatbot?
A Chatbot can be set up 100% remote. That means there is a structured talk about what your future chatbot has to be capable of — and the implimentation phase.
At Botoni Implementation is a matter of a few days — depending on the complexity of course. Like I said it is better to start with a simple and easy solution and if it is not enough — make it more professional and complex.
VI. Who is Botoni?
We are a Düsseldorf based Chatbot-Company called Botoni.
Our focus lies on Lead-generating and Customer Support Chatbots for small and middle-sized companies.
If you are interested you are welcome to get a free demonstration of our Chatbots and we can talk about your needs and requirements.
Thank you so much for reading.
Stay healthy!
