More and more websites are featuring chatbots as a tool to help with customer support, but what exactly does customer support mean in relation to a chatbot? As the technology becomes more streamlined and bugs are fixed, companies are finding they can hand off more tasks to chatbots, creating a more efficient customer support environment that customers actually enjoy using. Read on to learn about what kind of support the best chatbot platforms can provide.
24/7 Support
Having a 24/7 support team likely isn’t feasible for a lot of small businesses, and this is where chatbots come in. Chatbots are capable of answering questions and providing assistance for basic problems (you’ll want to program your bot to walk people through common issues). If the chatbot isn’t able to answer a customer’s questions, it will automatically log the conversation for you to come back to later, typically asking the potential customer to provide an email address or phone number for you to contact them directly.
No Wait Time
Everyone has spent hours on the phone or in a chat waiting for a customer service agent to help them with an issue. By the time they finally reach the agent, they’re understandably flustered after a long wait time and may not return to your business as a customer. Chatbots can connect with millions of people at once, allowing each one to have a personalized customer service experience at the same time. This means companies can avoid having too few (or too many) customer service agents being chatbots can help most people resolve an issue. However, in those cases where chatbots aren’t able to help a customer, they can easily connect the customer to an agent who can take over the customer experience by seeing what the chatbot attempted to do to help, meaning a faster experience for both the customer and the agent.
Improved Self-Service
More and more people prefer to interact with a chatbot rather than an actual person, especially when it comes to millennials. Many younger individuals are willing to work with a chatbot, even if they experience a technical issue, before asking for assistance from a customer support agent, meaning they can walk themselves through the support experience and free up agents for more important or pressing issues.
Consistent Experience
Chatbots deliver the same experience every single time, meaning customers who use them know exactly what to expect when they utilize the bot. This also means that there are no “Oops!” moments when using the bot either, being you program the bot on exactly what to say and how to handle a variety of experiences they may encounter.
While chatbots are incapable of replacing customer service agents completely, they can quickly become a valuable tool for those looking to streamline their customer support. With a variety of chatbot platforms available, it’s important to choose the right one for your business, so be on the lookout for bots that can fulfill your customer service needs.
