For any business, putting in efforts to develop, market and sell a good product or service is only half the battle won. You could have the most innovative marketing campaign, an amazing product experience but if you fail to provide strong customer service, you have lost a potential customer.
Why is customer service important?
Customer service represents your brand ethics. For a customer, the key ways to truly understand a brand would be through social media, advertising, content, and other external marketing channels. The customer service team can control this perception as they are a direct means of communication with potential customers. In fact, 73% of the customers say that they are loyal to the brand because of a reliable customer service team.
As the business grows, the need to be on top of the game with customer service also becomes a priority. How do you scale support on a massive scale? The exorbitant cost involved in hiring, expanding, and training customer service teams slows down the efficiency of the support teams.
Picture using a Chatbot powered by Artificial Intelligence to support customer service teams.
Customer care bot by Botspice, is an AI-powered chat interface that answers customer FAQs and dynamically resolves customer concerns via smart interactive conversations. Breakthroughs in technology have completely changed the way businesses communicate with their customers. Organizations are under tremendous pressure to drive customer interactions effectively and respond to their query in minimal time.
Gartner reports that virtual assistant usage in the workplace will climb to 25 percent by the end of 2021.
Not yet convinced that your customer service support needs a chatbot?
Here are 10 reasons why you should consider chatbots for customer support service
- Improve customer service efficiency.
Artificial Intelligence capabilities in chatbots allow it to resolve queries like a skilled agent. When customers reach out to the company for service, they expect instant responses to their problems. However, a customer care provider can only cater to a certain number of cases at a time. With AI-powered chatbots, businesses can bring synergy between sales, insights and service thus improve overall efficiency.
- Gather customer behaviour patterns through insights.
A customer leaves behind a lot of information once it engages with a chatbot. This data can be used to analyze customer behaviour and also the context of returning customers. Customer Analytics gains insights into customer attitudes and preferences to predict future behaviour to deliver a 360-degree view of the customer lifecycle. Combined with Artificial Intelligence, this analysis can be key performance indicators and predictors to improve customer support and service.
- Drive revenue through cross-selling and up-selling.
Workbots can be programmed to track your customer’s behaviours and choices based on their purchase decisions and the questions they ask. Upselling and cross-selling can increase revenue up to 43% thereby improving customer retention This can help organizations generate up-sell opportunities and entice customers, thus driving revenue increase.
Steve Jobs was right when he said: ‘People don’t know what they want until you show them what they need’. Upselling and cross-selling through chatbots can help find customers more value than what they were expecting.
- Reduce operational costs.
E-commerce statistics show that businesses spend around $1.3 trillion on customer requests every year.
With chatbots, customer service costs can be significantly reduced. It can be exceptionally expensive to keep up and scale support with ever-increasing customer service demands. This is especially so when one thinks of the manpower involved. Recruiting, training and retraining agents can be expensive especially as the organization grows. Artificial Intelligence-powered chatbots will be a smart solution for development and integration. Once deployed, it can help a business scale up service and sales interactions across multiple channels and enrich customer journey touchpoints.
- Strengthen brand loyalty.
Brand loyalty is one of the most important factors that define a successful product or service. With so many similar products available in the market brand loyalty could be a strong differentiator point when it comes to a customer choosing your product or service.
Here are some research-based insights.
More than half of the surveyed customers have less trust for brands than in the years before.
Over 60 percent of consumers don’t trust the information they receive from an organization’s communications or PR department.
Chatbots can help restore faith in customers about the brands by being available round-the-clock sales facilitators that are reliable and guaranteed to resolve their queries.
- Retain customers through engaging conversations
A 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%
Chatbots can resolve queries and provide services through engaging conversations. This helps in building an amazing relationship with your customers. Customer retention is all about providing value to customers while they trust you with their resources, chatbots can help build that trust among customers.
- Improve consistency and accuracy.
Agents can be often overloaded with the volume of calls they attend. Sometimes calls cannot be delivered with 100% service consistency while catering to the calls. Apart from this, agents sometimes take days off. But chatbots are available round the clock and they never take leave! Being available just makes chatbots more efficient and accurate.
- Minimize agent turnover
A successful customer service chatbot will minimize the number of agents needed at a given period and provide consistent service with increased productivity. Often customers hesitate to call the customer service agents simply because they have to repeat themselves over and over again. By using friendly and approachable AI-powered chatbots, businesses can ensure that customers can have their queries understood and addressed via a simple text request.
57% of customers would instead contact companies via digital media than voice-based customer support, as per Ameyo’s research.
Forrester says, nearly 1/3 of customers send a mobile/SMS message to the company requesting assistance.
- Provide consistency in answers
Consistency implies achieving sameness, uniformity and fairness in the delivery of answers. If a customer asks a question and the customer representative fails to answer the questions, he is likely to hang up and recall again expecting a better response from another representative. Chatbots are likely to give a correct answer every time, thus improving the customer service quality.
- Edge over competitors
AI-powered chatbots improve customer experience and productivity.
According to Gartner, by 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human.
Chatbots are always active and available patiently waiting to talk with a customer to make a pitch at the right time. Is there a better bait than a chatbot for customer service? Deploying chatbots can unquestionably provide a competitive edge over competitors.
Over to you!
Naturally, technology is a way up for any business and chatbot is the best AI-powered technology available to streamline business processes and optimize time and resources. When used correctly, they enhance the user experience, improve engagement and provide customers with actionable solutions. Ultimately it comes down to creating a perfect bot strategy for your customer service. If you are looking for ways to improve your customer service department, it is time you consider chatbots. If you are still confused and rethinking whether your business needs a chatbot, request a demo with us and we will be able to help you with creating a chatbot customized exclusively for your business.