How a chatbot enhances customer experiences
While the benefits for the company that uses chatbots include reducing costs (your live chat support staff bill will be much lower), the real winner will be your customers. Here’s how a chatbot enhances customer experiences.
Here are the eight ways a chatbot can improve your customer experience.
1. Seamless live chat
Customers can engage with a chatbot in much the same way they would in an online conversation with live customer support employees, so the learning curve for customers to engage with chatbots is practically nonexistent. Since many chatbots use natural language processing methods, they can analyze the customer’s question and deliver a response that meets the customer’s needs.
(Drift’s conversational chatbot)
Most chatbots can also be seamlessly integrated into the company’s website or smartphone apps, which saves the customer the time and trouble of searching the company’s online resources for the answers they need. Or, customers can talk to your brand at any time without leaving their favorite messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. In Facebook’s recent F8 2018 keynote, for example, it was revealed that over 8 million messages have been exchanges between Facebook users and businesses that are using Facebook’s chatbot live chat since it’s inception but less than 1% of companies that have a Facebook profile are actually using the technology.
2. 24/7 customer service
Your live chat support staff need sleep — but your chatbot doesn’t.
Customers’ needs often arise outside of business hours, so they need a way seek out answers to vital questions at times when customers service staff members are unavailable. Chatbots offer customers the opportunity to get answers to their questions at any time, so they don’t have to wait for a response from a voicemail or email message. The best chatbots can also offer the customer the feeling of conversing with a live operator at any time.
(Using a chatbot allows you to offer a 24-hour service | Source)
3. Endless queries, zero chance of sass
Although some chatbots are designed to simulate human intelligence, other systems have been developed around the idea of letting computers do the things that they were built to do: handle dull or repetitive tasks, such as calculations or database searches. David Cancel, CEO of chatbot development firm Drift, wrote that the goal of a chatbot should not be to create a perfect simulation of a human conversation but to satisfy the customer’s needs.
“A brand shouldn’t try to build a human-like chatbot,” Cancel told us, “a great chatbot should be able to take actions that maximize their chances of success toward achieving particular goals.”
And if a customer’s goal happens to involve asking to have their password rest for the fourth time in a week — your chatbot won’t mind!
4. A smoother journey
To ease the purchasing process for the customer, your chatbot can pop up on any product page to offer additional information, video content or even a discount code. Chatbots can also help customers with the process of gathering information, such as the item they wish to purchase, the method they want to use for purchasing the item, and how they want it shipped. Who knows, maybe even those dreaded shopping cart abandonment rates will finally drop, too.
5. Less stress
A recent survey by chatbot developer Helpshift found that 94% of the 2,000+ respondents “dread contacting customer support.” The current methods of handling customer support calls, from overseas operators to automated telephone menus, have done little to ease a customer’s dread at reaching out to a vendor’s customer service branch.
The survey also found that customers would welcome the use of chatbots to satisfy specific needs. At least 70% of the respondents answered that they would use chatbots if they could accomplish much-needed tasks, such as resolving issues with the need to contact customer support, reduce the time needed to resolve issues, reduce the time to get a customer service representative on the phone, and streamline the entire customer service process.
6. Goodbye, IVR
One of the biggest complaints that customers have about the customer service process is the use of interactive voice response (IVR) systems during phone calls to customer support. These systems ask the customer questions and route the customer’s call based on their voice responses. IVR systems are highly structured, routing the customer through each response until it reaches the pre-programmed destination.
A chatbot, on the other hand, can be used in a similar way, but with less IVR-induced frustration. The customer feels like their voice is being heard and understood, while the chatbot can try to lead them towards either an answer based on previous situations or to a human representative.
7. Personify your brand
The flexibility of chatbots allows them the chance to engage with customers on many different levels. They can act as the customer’s primary resource for technical support, account management, or sales information. Chatbots can also be programmed with different types of conversational styles, from precise and technical to friendly and helpful to snarky and humorous. The various types of “personalities” available with chatbots will keep customers coming back and re-engaging with the brand.
8. Reinvent your forms
If you want your customer’s information, you give them a form to fill in. But they’re boring, and often far too long. If the customer decides to fill it in anyway, they’ll do so reluctantly.
A chatbot, on the other hand, spruces the situation up.
“Chatbots can get the same information that any form can — but without the friction and cognitive load that you get when you’re staring down a form with 11 required fields, which, if you can believe it, is the industry average”, David Cancel of Drift told us.
