AI: The Right Customer Service Chatbot Solution

Some companies approach customer service chatbots as though they can completely replace the human staff handling these conversations. Advances in natural language processing improve the chatbot experience, but it’s best to look at this tool as a way of augmenting your team’s capabilities.

Reducing Chat Volume

How much time do your employees spend answering routine inquiries from customers? Every minute that they spend on this part of customer service takes them away from complex issues that require specialized skills and judgment calls.
The chatbot helps your company screen each inquiry to determine whether it needs human attention. The AI addresses basic questions and points customers towards self-service resources. If someone insists on talking to a person or needs assistance that a trained professional can provide, the bot collects basic information about what’s going on and passes it along to the staff members.

Providing Important Customer Details

Sometimes customers have long case histories involving multiple purchases, returns, complaints, and other information. When your workers deal with hundreds or thousands of people every day, they aren’t going to remember everyone. The chatbot, on the other hand, can quickly retrieve all relevant information so the staff members can assist them as efficiently as possible.
This augmentation of existing capabilities makes the AI chatbot a complementary tool for your customer service team. The bot goes through all potential data sources far faster than they can, and it works well for ad hoc requests that may fall outside of typical customer reports.

Improving the Customer Experience

Your customers end up having a better experience when you know how to use chatbots and your staff together effectively. One of the biggest advantages of having a chatbot on hand is that it can address customer inquiries quickly. You don’t need to have a massive call center waiting to answer these chats. Instead, the bot lets the customer know that you received their message and started the process.
Customers can get a response day or night, so it doesn’t matter when they reach out to you for help. As the AI bot learns more about your customers, it can offer more assistance as the front-line responder.

Identifying Common Customer Concerns

Another thing that AI bots do really well is parse massive data sets and look for patterns and useful data. When they analyze your previous customer communications, the solution can help your business create templated responses and valuable content that addresses these areas.
You may end up identifying trends that change how you address pre and post-sales conversations, especially when it comes to putting together content to support these parts of the buyer’s journey. You can also emphasize common problems and empower customer service representatives with the tools and policies they need to manage buyer complaints.
This data may serve to give you notice about a manufacturing defect or another problem in your products. For example, if a recent software update caused a major error in the application and dozens of people contacted customer support about it, the AI bot could send a notification to the relevant department so they can take a proactive approach in fixing the issue.
AI chatbots are a must-have tool for organizations that want to get more out of their customer service resources. When you look at these bots as a way of enhancing your human staff’s capabilities and productivity, you end up with a well-oiled customer support machine that’s ready to help everyone.