“Chatbots” A New Frontier in Customer Support

In the beginning, customers needed to walk into a store to get any kind of support for their products. The scenario changed when telephones were invented in the ’80s. Later, telephones were used in call centers, which are still being used to this day. But the increasing number of industries, products, and services has, in turn increased the number of customers.

Your customer support needs to scale in proportion to the number of customers you have. But scaling customer support is an expensive and at times, impossible, affair, especially if you operate in SMB margins. But Without customer support, your products won’t be received well by your audience. If you don’t have a robust team handling support, you’ll find unhappy customers will write bad reviews, voicing their dissatisfaction with your product and worse, find better alternatives.

Thankfully, there are some available solutions.

Telephone: Creating as Many Problems as They Solve

Telephones eventually evolved into the handheld powerhouses we call smartphones. But they are not customer support machines. They’re great for customers, since they can call you any time. But telephones aren’t necessarily your solution. If you have a million customers, you’re going to need a proportional amount of phones and representatives to handle customers who call these phones.

Some companies solve this by outsourcing it to BPO and KPO companies. But that’s not exactly cost effective for SMBs.

There’s also IVR, where some questions can be answered using a computerised voice. But this isn’t a complete solution for support.

The Internet Mayhem

In 2002, the Internet entered the fray and took customer engagement to a whole new level. Websites, Social media, and forums all came together to help the customer to get the service they needed. Soon, support tickets started flying on channels like Twitter and Facebook, giving quite a bit of visibility to customer problems, ultimately tarnishing a company’s brand name.

Hey! I’m Live Chat!

A decade later, live chat came into play. Customers and agents could now communicate via chat-enabled apps and websites. It also brought some serious business to companies since live chat also evolved as a website visitor engagement tool. However, live chat isn’t a complete solution. Although a single person could engage with multiple customers at any given time, it still needed the human component, making scaling difficult.

Live chat agents can’t maintain response rate while handling multiple chats simultaneously. Additionally, operating live chat 24/7 requires an office setup and agents in multiple shifts to cover a 24 hour period.

Chatbots to the Rescue!

Advancements in AI and market gap for automation gave us chatbots, which is proving to be a game changer.

In the initial days, chatbots function as a user-defined flow. They were also used on a lookup basis. But recently, companies have seen the demand for chatbots. But what are chatbots?

Chatbots are automated pieces of software that emulate human conversation when engaged with a human user. They are being developed with machine learning and deep learning models in such a way that it can answer user queries by understanding the context behind every query.

With companies everywhere offering their own take on chatbot solutions, they’re fast becoming an option to provide scalable and useful customer support solutions.

Though chatbots seemed to have solved the customer engagement scenario, they aren’t perfect replacements to live chats. Chatbots have their own limitations, such as their engagement levels being limited to the intents we add. Anything other than these intents will provide an annoying answer like “information you are looking for is currently not available”.

Conclusion

But I’d say this is just a temporary setback to chatbots to replace live chats. Chatbots are becoming better day-by-day with voice, omnichannel integration and much more. At the moment, chatbots are an add-on solution to existing customer support solutions. But over time, they have the potential to be complete replacements.