A few years ago, automated intelligence was a scarce concept in the business landscape.
When you needed to contact a company, you could either call them or send an email. There was no option to load an instant chat function and speak to a bot. However, as customers have become increasingly drawn to the idea of “self-service,” chatbots have emerged as a standard part of the CX landscape.
Chatbots allow brands to appear more proactive when it comes to addressing potential challenges and customer questions. While they’re limited in their intelligence, these systems can make it much easier for consumers to solve their own problems without the help of a human agent. Many chatbots can rapidly locate relevant information for a customer, using keywords to streamline their search for answers.
However, chatbots have their down sides too. They lack human empathy, are prone to mistakes, and can only understand so much. The question for contact centres in the midst of a digital transformation is, do chatbots work for CX, or are they just more hard work?
The Benefits of Chatbots for the Contact Centre
Today, companies of all sizes are working hard to transform their customer service strategies. After all, customer experience is the most important thing a business can focus on. Your business can only thrive if you ensure that your audience is continuously satisfied.
Chatbots have the power to improve your chances of delivering a satisfactory experience, by ensuring that you’re always there for your customers. A bot is a great way to clear away simple questions that your customers have, so your agents can focus on more complex queries. Chatbots deliver:
- Quick response times: You can answer your customer’s questions immediately, rather than asking them to wait in a queue, growing increasingly more frustrated
- Unlimited number of chats: Your chatbot can focus on countless conversations at the same time
- Language conversion: Some intelligent chatbots can even translate and respond to people who speak different languages to your agents
- Cost efficiency: Chatbots are far less expensive to create and maintain than hiring a new employee or series of staff members to handle repetitive questions
- Better employee experience: Chatbots can reduce the risk of your agents spending all their time on monotonous tasks
Chatbots Have Their Challenges Too
Importantly, despite the promise that chatbots can transform the world, they’re only as good as they’re programmed to be. Most chatbot solutions are fundamental in the contact centre. They don’t always come with artificial intelligence and machine learning that allows them to learn from their mistakes over time. That means something as simple as a misspelled word in a customer query could stop your chatbot from surfacing the right information.
Even with artificial intelligence baked in, there’s still a long way to go before chatbots are faultless. In various cases, your chatbot could end up presenting the wrong information to a customer, which could mean that by the time your client calls your team, they’re even more upset and frustrated. Chatbots in the contact centre come with various growing pains. They’re limited in what they can understand, and they also have no ability to deliver empathy.
When a customer is already upset or angry, a chatbot can’t carefully respond to them and put their mind at ease like a human would. The limitations of chatbots are why it’s so essential for companies embracing this technology to remember that chatbots aren’t a replacement for human agents. Bots are meant to supplement the human adviser, not replace them.
Chatbots Are Getting Better
Despite some initial growing pains, its unlikely that chatbots will disappear any time soon. These tools can respond quickly and seamlessly to online queries, speeding up the time to resolution for customers. As technology evolves, chatbots can also grow increasingly more sophisticated and adept.
Chatbots in the contact centre will become even more valuable as they’re combined more consistently with artificial intelligence. The more advanced these bots become, the more they’ll be able to transform the customer experience. For instance, Estee Lauder has a chatbot in Facebook messenger that can recognise skin tone and recommend the right shade of foundation.
The path to success with chatbots is filled with hurdles to overcome, but these tools do have the power to make a positive difference. For companies, the key is finding a way to use chatbots to enhance, empower and supplement your existing customer service strategy.
