Among a gazillion other trends, 2020 also dramatically accelerated automation. Before the pandemic, many business owners and consumers thought they were not ready for automation yet. As we now know, most of them were wrong. Over a year into the pandemic, you can spot automation of one kind or another virtually everywhere. And conversational bots, or chatbots, are, perhaps, the most widespread façade of business automation. Let’s talk about them!
Conversational AI services bots are software programs that interact with users like humans. By simulating human-like conversations, you offer customers an immersive experience every time they visit your website or use your app. With a dizzying evolution in chatbot development, you could create a deeply personalized conversational bot for your business. As building chatbots gets easier and more affordable, small, mid-sized, and large enterprises alike are adopting them for automating customer service. Here’s how conversational bots are reshaping the automation landscape.
An overview of AI chatbots for customer service automation
AI is everywhere and its impact on the industries is quite significant. Its growing evidence is seen in every aspect of industries. So, AI-powered chatbots work as a great messenger tool for interactive conversations. The use of NLP to understand the customer service automation to respond to their questions easily. Also, it powers up the conversations to boost the business success. It not only benefits the firm but also helps the user’s intentions. So, AI chatbots can help analyze user behavior, and questions, and guess answers. The AI bots can easily answer the relevant answers with data.
The key advantage you get from these AI-integrated chatbots is accuracy. And helps to address the user interaction easily. These help to gain the right information with its trained recognition. And responds with accurate responses and feeds them multiple FAQs to satisfy them. Or get a digital transformation company for more assistance. Plus, it enables AI bots to recognize the question with faster support.
With the new advancements in play, AI-driven bots are learning and growing. These AI-driven chatbots keep the customer service automation going and offer smart suggestions. As the AI chatbots keep going forward to inquire about the accuracy with few conversations. Just AI bots can offer automatic suggestions in real-time for customers.
A look at the statistics
- As per reports, almost 62% of customers would use a chatbot rather than talk to a human agent.
- Over 63% of retail companies use AI to improve customer service.
- As many as 64% of business owners believe AI will improve customer relationships
- By 2025, AI will power 95% of customer interactions
- About 28% of business leaders have used AI to cut their company’s costs.
Benefits of chatbots for customer service
You can decide to implement chatbots for customer service automation in different ways. It could be a live chat on the website, engagement on social media, or email communications.
Access to cutting-edge AI
Chatbot development is one of the most dynamic areas in the software industry. It relies on a set of rapidly evolving technologies. That means, when you adopt custom AI solutions for your conversational bot, you get the latest breed of artificial intelligence. Using smart AI capabilities, chatbots can predict what customers may want to buy based on their purchase history. Chatbots’ growing popularity across the web and on social media platforms make them compelling.
Cost-efficient development
Chatbots are not just wildly popular these days. They are also becoming increasingly cost-effective. With the significant evolution in the chatbot development platforms, it has become easier than ever to build a custom chatbot. And with the increasing availability of chatbot development services, costs are declining remarkably. Besides, there are a slew of tools and technologies to test chatbots and check their usability.
Automated customer service operations
Customer service bots equipped with advanced capabilities can help you identify customers’ intent. They also enable you to analyze their experience and deliver insights-driven customer service. You could deploy a bot to ask, “How may I help you?” for generalized responses before you send any valuable human time. It would make the customer’s initial journey seamless while saving your time and money.
Chatbots are getting increasingly popular in digital transactions. For example, you could use a bot to fetch and store customers’ account information during online transactions. This is particularly useful for providing customers frequently sought info like the date of subscription expiry, payment due dates, etc. Small and big companies alike are deploying chatbots for this kind of next-gen automated customer service activity.
Augmented customer service team
Customer service teams often work under immense pressure. Things got even worse during the pandemic. With call centers and offices shutting down, customer service became more challenging in the pandemic era. But many tech-savvy business leaders promptly managed those challenges. Chatbot deployment was the answer. Conversational bots enable your organization to significantly augment the team’s capabilities. From automating frequently resolved queries to creating a step-by-step communication process, chatbots help you in many ways.
Tips to optimize your chatbot and avoid common mistakes
Here are some pointers you must know about chatbot optimization:
- You must define your goals and objectives for your chatbots. It gets aligned with the overall business strategy. And will help to measure the success by aligning with the business strategy.
- Start with keeping small bases as per your business. After you have created a full-featured chatbot with the basic features. And you will get to know the features that work for your business.
- Ensure your chatbot is comprehensive and integrated with your business. With straightforward and concise language for customer service automation. And you can easily keep jargon away from your applications.
- Easily test your chatbot before launching your application. And you can iterate the tests to gather accurate feedback. It will help you identify the loopholes and fix bugs to ensure chatbot accuracy for user experience.
- You can monitor the chatbot’s performance to employ the information to make adjustments. So, this includes tracking user engagement, monitoring the updations, and user lifetime value.
- You can incorporate the AI and ML algorithms and techniques. Or get an AI software development company It helps to make your chatbot easily understand the natural language and respond as per user requirements.
- Keep a keen eye for details and business improvements. This will help you understand that working pattern and offer you support for the chatbot strategy.
Overall, these are some tips and best practices to ensure your chatbot offers the best customer service automation. And to get the best engagement you must optimize performance and remove mistakes.
Real-life use cases of successful chatbot implementation
Here are some real-life examples of using chatbots for customer service automation.
Starbucks
The giant beverage company Starbucks launched a chatbot for customer service automation services. It is popularly known as ‘My Starbucks Barista’. This chatbot helps the users to easily place orders with text and voice commands. Also, the users can easily set their location, beverage, and other customizations. This chatbot integration not only helped to reach a wider audience. This made it easier to earn through the loyalty program and offered easy communication. Moreover, it streamlined ordering processes and redeemed the rewards easily.
H&M
One of the popular retail giants is H&M, and it integrated a chatbot to help you, users. It is named as Kik. This chatbot helps as the personal stylist to offer the right fashion choices. Also, it streamlines the styling tips by helping users and offers options from the H&M inventory. Plus, this will offer an interactive and personalized approach to shopping.
Uber
It simply implemented a chatbot for customer service automation on Facebook. It allows users to book a ride, track the driver, and get real-time updates. This keeps a streamlined transparency between the users and drivers. Moreover, it reduces the switch between apps.
Duolingo
Duolingo is another learning platform to incorporate features called ‘Duolingo Bots’. And these chatbots engage with users seamlessly to build interactive conversations. These are trained bots to simulate real-life conversations for instant feedback. Moreover, these chatbots can interact in multilingual for engaging conversations.
The future of chatbots for customer service automation
Here are some of the future trends to notice in the integration of AI chatbots.
Advanced AI and ML algorithms
The advanced AI and ML integration in the chatbots can help to grow. These technologies help to evolve and chatbots can become smarter. And it can manage complex user interactions. The integration of advanced AI algorithms to enable chatbots to understand the sentiments. Plus, it helps to detect the accurate emotions of the users and respond correctly. You can get contact center solutions for more assistance. This enhances the overall user experience of the shopping and other activities.
Voice-based chatbots & assistants
The voice-powered chatbots made the user experience even more interactive. And with the rise of voice command-controlled devices and user interactions. With smart speakers, users can easily command and query using voice. Plus, the customer service automation chatbots offered convenience for interaction. It removes the barriers to communication between the technology and users.
Emotional intelligence in chatbots
Chatbots hold a potential future with the increasing needs. So, this chatbot integration with algorithms helps to recognize emotions. And offering the correct support and empathy to the users. Even these advancements will help the chatbots handle the situation easily. Moreover, it keeps the conversation ongoing and builds a human connection with users.
Benefits beyond customer service automation
While you improve the organization’s customer care capabilities, chatbots also bring a set of other advantages. Relying less on your staff —especially the customer service team —means your operating costs reduce. You would now need to spend less on training and managing people for meeting customer service demands. Besides, using suitable AI-powered tools, you could also automated lead generation and other sales-related tasks. Chatbots can also respond to answer sales calls seeking info about your offerings.
Wrapping up
How you deploy conversational bots needs to be determined by your specific business requirements. For instance, you could use chatbots to quickly answer customer service automation, resolve complaints, get info about your business, or just create a better communication process for your business. Due to an extensive array of benefits, a growing number of businesses across industries are deploying chatbots. However, some industries are using them more than others.
For instance, the banking and food delivery industries are widely implementing chatbots to automate customer service. From giving you information about your bank account to telling the location of your meal, chatbots are redefining customer service. At OrangeMantra, we help you build incredibly customer-friendly chatbots for your business. Connect with an AI chatbot development company to discuss your customer service automation strategy.
FAQs
What is the future of artificial intelligence in customer service?
Conversational AI increases agent efficiency and effectiveness while also increasing the customer experience. Gartner predicts that one in every ten agent contacts will be automated by 2026, up from an estimated 1.6% of interactions currently that are automated by AI.
How may artificial intelligence be utilized to improve customer success?
AI in customer success can scan massive amounts of data to uncover trends, patterns, and insights. This data can assist customer success teams in better understanding their customers’ behavior, preferences, and problem spots, allowing them to modify their efforts accordingly.
What is one way AI may enhance the consumer experience?
AI-powered chatbots can give instant support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, decreasing the need for human customer service professionals and saving money. Predictive analytics can help you anticipate your customers’ requirements and preferences, resulting in higher customer happiness and retention.
How much does AI customer service cost?
Ongoing AI services, such as consulting, are typically less expensive and based on the consultant’s hourly rate. Most AI consultants charge between $200 and $350 per hour. If your organization employs third-party AI software, such as a pre-built chatbot, anticipate paying up to $40,000 per year.
How does AI help with client retention?
AI can deliver actionable retention insight by combining consumer interaction data, sentiment analysis, and advanced machine learning. One of the most important components of AI-driven retention tactics is the generation of risk scores based on customer-level predictions.