The Future of Customer Support will Belong to Chatbots Tiles are cards are chatbot elements that help a user make a quick decision without asking too many questions
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
Last year, around this time Facebook launched chatbots for its pages. That flagged off a mad rush to developing and deploying chatbots for various industrial uses. Within a month, almost 30,000 bots were launched, constituting part of the digital ecosystem.
Today, they are everywhere and have come to revolutionize businesses once and for all. ECommerce, marketing, weather prediction, manufacturing, virtual assistance are some classic examples. Chatbots are primarily used for auto-responding answers to frequently asked questions. But, that is not the end of the road for their capabilities. The tech community is constantly adding muscle to the capabilities of chatbots.
In fact, we even have chatbots that can negotiate and plan ahead like an intelligent human. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are at work here. AI, machine learning, and Natural Language Processing will make chatbots smarter than humans. They will become a major ingredient for successful businesses that have to deal with human customers.
Chatbots for Customer Service - A Perfect Match
Chatbots have the secret sauce to engage the audience to a brand's communication channel. Agility, flexibility, and adaptability make them a perfect fit for customer service Moreover, they could easily be integrated with a business' live chat support, social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or even an enterprise communication system like Slack, Skype, etc. for assisting customers.
Why Do They Prove Successful in Customer Service? Chatbots attend to that innate feeling what every user craves for — a sense of urgency. That makes them best fit for customer service. Chatbots can be rightly called the future of customer support.
Some more reasons which establish the prowess of chatbots in customer service:
Real-time Accurate Responses
In customer service, two things matter the most — i) Immediate response ii) Accurate information. Customers are impatient to know why a product is not working, how to use something, the extent of their warrant period, and so on. These are typical questions which a customer service personnel has to confront on a daily basis.
The processes followed to resolve this is manual and often takes a long period of time, so long that it often irritates the customer. But, a bot can remove the system dependency of the customer service personnel. Why it can even replace the personnel and act as an assistant that delivers prompt information to the customer.
With backend integration to databases where customer information is stored and ingrained with machine learning to adapt and converse like a human, they are the best possible offering for customer service.
Tiles and Cards
Tiles are cards are chatbot elements that help a user make a quick decision without asking too many questions. They cut short the number of steps that lead to the final stage — giving what the user wants. Tiles are cards come in the form of thumbnails of products, options, buttons, etc.
They reduce the errors and inconsistency that is often experienced while communicating with customers. By reducing the errors, chatbots add more efficiency in resolving issues making them champions in customer service.
Cost of Economy
According to CX Social, a single call center interaction costs approximately $6. This could shoot up easily since a large majority customer care calls do not get resolved quickly. The volley of information exchanges combined with the time taken by the personnel to fetch relevant information from internal sources will inflate the cost even higher.
Chatbots, on the other hand, can bring down this cost to a fraction. Artificial Intelligence enables them to speculate most frequently asked questions and prepare for answers. Secondly, they are already fed with canned responses which are dynamically changed to serve the demands of users. Quick resolution of queries leads to the cost of economy. Do we have reasons to complain?
The Road Ahead
Chatbots cannot replace humans entirely but can deliver superior experiences that will excite customers. They will add muscle to the customer service efforts of brands that are grappling under the pressure of rising costs and inefficient customer service.
Furthermore, chatbots can be deployed across websites, mobile apps, and social media channels. They are not separate software solutions or apps, but plug-and-play systems that have no negative impact on the existing way of doing things, in fact, they only make it better.
