Chatbots are having a huge impact on the way companies interact with customers. A high-quality chatbot leads to a better brand reputation, improved sales opportunities, and stronger customer service. Indeed, the chatbot market size is set to reach around $2,485.7 million by 2028, with a growth rate of around 24.9%, as more people invest in AI CX support.
Though they haven’t always had the best reputation, chatbots can bring numerous benefits to your business. A well-made bot provides real-time customer support, opens the door to self-service, and makes it easier to capture valuable information.
Today, we’re going to examine how companies can keep more clients happy with chatbots.
1. Seamless Omni-channel Experiences
A chatbot isn’t just a solution that sits on your website anymore.
Bots can work with a host of the apps and services that your customers already access, from mobile apps to messaging tools like WhatsApp. With chatbots, you can give your customers access to information on the channel that suits them. Plus, most solutions come with the option to easily escalate a chat to live agents when necessary.
The great thing about intelligent bots is they don’t just enable omni-channel interactions; they maintain their context. A chatbot can easily pass information about a customer’s queries from one location to another and even update an agent before they answer a call. The result is a more seamless, aligned customer experience for clients, on the channels they like most.
2. 24/7 Service, without the Sass
Your live chat support needs to rest. They can’t work at all hours of the day unless you have a worldwide team capable of managing shifts around the clock. Even if you could have a human agent available at all times, many would begin to feel overwhelmed and dissatisfied by dealing with the same questions or difficult customers all the time.
A chatbot can respond to as many repetitive questions as it needs to, without ever losing patience. With chatbots, you can remove the repetitive tasks from your employees and deliver faster outcomes to your customers – at the time that suits them. Because bots are dealing with repetitive issues, this also frees up more agents to deal with creative problems, meaning less time spent on hold for clients.
3. Stress-Free Self-Service
Waiting on the phone for someone to answer a call, listening to endless on-hold music, and even explaining your issue to several different employees is a stressful experience. Customers are increasingly turning to self-service solutions to replace this stress with simplicity. According to Helpshift, 94% of respondents say they dread contact customer support.
Yet, a significant number of customers say they’d welcome the use of chatbots to overcome specific problems. For instance, around 70% of clients said they’d use chatbots to resolve issues without having to contact customer support. Self-service also reduces the number of issues your agents have to deal with, allowing for better resource management.
4. More Intuitive Conversations
Intelligent bots can instantly access huge stores of information to immediately respond to problems and offer creative solutions to clients. Although your agents can also find the same information, it often takes longer for them to track details down. A chatbot can pull information from multiple locations at once to make conversations more intuitive, then send customers to the agent most likely to solve their problem when discussions escalate.
The same bot can support agents by providing contextual information taken from that and previous conversations, as well as CRM systems, service tickets, and historical business data. Chatbots further reduce the risk that your customers will ever get inaccurate responses to their questions.
5. Deliver Memorable Experiences
As bots become more conversational and intelligent, through natural language processing and understanding, they’re growing increasingly capable of delivering meaningful experiences to customers. With chatbots, you can give your clients 24/7 access to valuable information, making them feel as though they have their own personal branded assistant.
Chatbots can reduce the headaches of filling out forms by making the question-and-answer process feel more natural and organic. They can collect information about each customer, and use that data to collect details about sentiment for better experiences in the future.
Chatbots aren’t just a quick way to respond to customer queries anymore. These tools can be a valuable part of the customer experience, from start to finish. From answering client questions to solving problems, you can use bots to keep clients happy.
