While they aren’t a new business tool, chatbots have gained momentum over the last few years. With today’s natural language processing, a chatbot on a company’s website increases engagement and boosts customer satisfaction without hiring extra people.
But the questions then become: How do bots save time and create a better customer experience for both businesses and customers? In our white paper, “Bots for Business” by Sutherland VP of Innovation, Philip Say, digs into these questions and more.
But chatbots aren’t just a means for streamlining customer engagement, communications, success and sales. Increasingly, chatbots are providing effective support for both consumers and businesses alike.
One way to stay competitive in modern business is to automate as many of your processes as possible. Think the rise of self-checkout at grocery stores and ordering kiosks at restaurants. The value in chatbots, therefore, comes from their ability to automate conversations throughout your organization and improve customer experience.
Let’s consider these 5 Big Benefits offered by today’s chatbots…
Big Benefit 1: Save Time and Money
Automating conversations that would otherwise require an employee to answer, organizations save time and money that can then be allocated to other work.
Big Benefit 2: Generate Leads and Revenue
Chatbots use machine learning and direct messages to gather information necessary to provide effective support. Asking users why they’re visiting your page, for example, is one popular question that is likely asked in every customer engagement. Automating this initial interaction allows users to share the information needed for live agents to better serve them without requiring a human to ask for it.
Big Benefit 3: Guide Users to Better Outcomes
Customers don’t always know where to go to find the information they’re interested in. In fact, your customers may not even know what it is they’re interested in. Maybe they just heard your brand name in passing and decided to explore. By asking a series of qualifying questions, you route users to the best place for them to find the information they want.
Big Benefit 4: Provide After Hours Support
The most popular use of chatbots is to provide quick answers in an emergency. However, organizations that don’t offer 24-hour support won’t provide answers when the office is closed. By using robust customer services chatbots when your business is closed, customers still gain access to the information they need, efficiently. This is increasingly important as studies continue to show that while customers expect a response between 0-4 hours, brands typically take 10 hours to respond. Customer service chatbots help you significantly decrease the average response time, bringing you closer to your customers’ expectations.
Big Benefit 5: Engage Users in A Unique Way
Traditionally, customer questions were routed to businesses via email or the telephone, which made user experiences standard and non-customized. But chatbots offer a new, fun and interactive way to engage with brands. Think Domino’s Pizza Twitter.
As artificial intelligence evolves, live chat solutions are being solved with companies using chatbots instead of a real person. With machine learning, bots are understanding natural language to engage in conversational AI with customers. This ability to offer around-the-clock live chat customer service chatbots increases customer satisfaction and is a great way for companies to satisfy their customer’s expectations.
