Customer expectations of customer service are higher than ever and time is of the essence. 90% of consumers report that they expect an immediate response when approaching a company with questions or issues. While the average response time to a customer is 12 hours and 10 minutes — consumers define an immediate response as one that they receive within 10 minutes. That’s quite a gap! Luckily, AI chatbots can step in to provide round-the-clock instant support to your customers and site visitors. In this post, we will explore the benefits of AI chatbots for customer service. Let’s take a look!
AI-powered chatbots are a form of conversational AI that are gaining popularity with brands across sectors. They use a combination of automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning to identify user intent. AI chatbots keep learning in order to best respond to customer problems and complaints. These capabilities enable chatbots to emulate human responses —creating a supportive, engaging conversation between your customers and your AI.
Although chatbots have been here for some time now, we need to understand that we’re still in the early days of really intelligent and powerful usage for broad audiences. That building great experiences with AI chatbots is not so easy became very clear recently. Meta’s AI Blenderbot had a hard time learning that it wasn’t supposed to keep bashing Facebook. Nonetheless, there’s a gigantic potential!
Although it’s tough to create intelligent and powerful experiences with AI-fueled bots, you can still use conversational AI to support your customer service and overall business goals. Let’s dive into the 3 top business benefits of AI chatbots.
As we highlighted in our intro, AI chatbots can help provide the immediate responses that your customers are looking for when they reach out to your customer service team.
Most brands don’t operate 24/7 — with most members of the team working between 9-6pm and taking regular holidays. Conversational AI can help fill the gap, directing your site visitors to helpful resources, such as FAQ pages, or fulfilling basic tasks like taking customer payments or extending a subscription.
Burnout is common within the customer service industry — from working day in, day out with frustrated customers to having to deal with a backlog of customer emails every Monday morning. Researchers at Cornell University found that 87% of call centre workers felt “high” or “very high” stress levels in their job.
Beyond the high stress levels, 19% of customer service professionals said they felt bored every day at work. 21% said they felt this way because they found their daily tasks repetitive. Luckily, AI chatbots are perfect for handling repetitive customer questions and problems.
You can use conversational AI to handle a considerable percentage of inbound conversations. In doing so, your reps have more time to focus on more complex and interesting tasks – boosting their productivity, improving job satisfaction, and reducing stress.
From the costs of infrastructure to the expense of hiring and training new customer service professionals — you can reduce your business expenses by meeting customer needs with AI. Costs per query decrease whenever your customers choose to interact with a chatbot.
You can boost cost efficiency and workforce productivity by adding AI chatbots to handle repetitive customer queries and tasks such as processing password change requests.