Automating Customer Support with Chatbots

With the digitalization of businesses and their services becoming “instant”, the attention span of customers has shrunk considerably over the past few years. Customers today expect instant support for their queries; most customers expect their queries to be addressed and/ or resolved within an hour or a matter of minutes, even. Instant customer support has become so crucial today that businesses are no longer just competing to sell their products or services, but also to delight with the customer support.

The Urgent Need for Automation

Automating your customer support processes and systems can make a world of difference to your brand and in maintaining your brand image. With the entire world relying more on remote and digital ways of communication, managing such humongous amounts of customer queries manually is a non-starter. The good news is that, most of these queries are repetitive, and automation will help your business provide instant service while saving time and money! 

Chatbots are a great way to automate your customer service since they can easily answer customer questions from your knowledge bank, route the user queries internally, offer personalization, and connect them to a human agent if the query gets too complicated. Chatbots can also identify patterns and detect frequent queries from customers, which can then be analyzed and automated to enhance their efficiency. Gartner had predicted back in 2019 that business will spend more per annum on Chatbots in 2021 than on developing mobile apps. That is an eye-popping insight!

Why Chatbots Are An Indispensible Business Tool For You

There are multiple reasons why you should opt for deploying a Chatbot as your first line of customer support. Chatbots are a great way to answer customer FAQs – this can save you tons of manual hours. People prefer to text over a call these days, and that’s where Chatbots help you capitalize. Chatbots can easily handle numerous queries that take up hundreds of hours of manual effort today, including appointment scheduling, tracking delivery orders, scheduling refunds, booking tickets, transactions, collections, and last but not the least, complaint handling.

All businesses want to know and connect with their customers better – but that’s easier said than done. This is where Chatbots can be of tremendous value and have some surprising benefits – they are designed to reduce talk time and deliver solutions faster. By adding a “personality” to the Chatbot, businesses can even offer a personalized experience to their customers. Such Chatbots can also send images and use humor to sound more like humans. This can go a long way in increasing your brand awareness.

Suggested read: How Chatbots are Transforming the Customer Experience Landscape

Benefits of Using Customer Service Chatbots

Now that we’ve established the importance of using Chatbots for delivering customer support, let’s look at the benefits it gives to your business:

Benefits of using Chatbots for Customer Support

“Always-on”

Unlike humans, Chatbots provide round-the-clock assistance to your customers. This is beneficial if you have customers from different geographies and time zones. What’s more important is that Chatbots can handle multiple customers at the same time. This gives your business the ability to deliver equally good customer support to all your customers simultaneously – there are no wait times. Where a call center typically takes up to three minutes to connect to an agent, Chatbots are available instantly to every single customer at the same time.

Consistent Performance

Chatbots are programs that deliver the same output every single time – which means that the Chatbot’s performance over time will remain the same – and will in fact improve if managed well. They eliminate human errors. Chatbots also do not require “training” from time to time, unlike human agents.

Improved Efficiency

Automating customer support with Chatbots doesn’t mean end-to-end automation – customer service Chatbots can re-route the customer queries to human agents if need be. This proves to be highly effective if you’re using a transactional Chatbot. And if your customer support is already automated with Chatbots, you can allocate most of your human resources to focus on critical tasks that require human intervention. 

Customer Feedback

One of the most important aspects of customer support is to get customer feedback – this helps businesses understand what their customers think about their products/ services. This feedback provides a great insight into where your business should focus on. Chatbots can be an excellent customer touchpoint since they can ask for customer feedback every time they interact with the customers.

Analytics

A Chatbot’s conversations with the customers provide a great insight into your product/ service performance. It helps businesses understand and analyze customer request trends and find new opportunities to enhance customer support. Such analytics are critical for businesses of all sizes.

ROI

From a business perspective, Chatbots help you automate and elevate your customer support and reduce the need for human agents, which results in a significantly higher return on investment. Even though Chatbots are increasingly becoming the most preferred choice by businesses worldwide, we’re still a long way from replacing humans completely, as far as customer support is concerned.

Automation is a critical aspect of the digital transformation wave. If you’re looking for ways to get a competitive edge in the market, then enhancing your customer experience is critical.. Chatbots prove to be a holistic solution for all your customer support needs. Talk to us today to learn more about how we can help you deploy a customer service Chatbot.