At a glance — these are the 5 most important benefits of chatbots in customer service:
1. Chatbots in customer service speed up and optimize processes
Automated processes show the potential of AI chatbots particularly obvious in customer service. With the help of bots, you can significantly increase efficiency in your company. For example, incoming customer inquiries can be selected in advance. The self-learning chatbot quickly recognizes what the customer wants and reacts accordingly. He either answers the request himself or passes it on to a customer service employee.
Technical background: More and more processes are taking place online and this is exactly where the mechanism of self-learning artificial intelligence with deep learning comes in. By collecting many data sets and practical examples, the software can guide itself and adapt its behavior in responding to customer inquiries. The technical methods for processing of natural language, NLP (Natural Language Processing) for short, at. Using rules and algorithms, these techniques attempt to capture and further process written language in its complexity and ambiguity. Here too, the aim is to improve communication between humans and computers.
In addition, chatbots in customer service can also Insights Identify early on: Which and how many customer inquiries are received and when? Are there any deviations from the norm? Can (potential) problems be identified at an early stage and appropriate countermeasures taken? Login problems are just as much a part of such notifications as increased inquiries depending on season and weather. But the chatbot can also identify and report new user inquiries or previously unknown product weaknesses.
2. Chatbots in customer service relieve employees
The digital assistant That's just that — an assistant. It helps with repetitive tasks that can quickly be tiring and time-consuming. Chatbots in customer service support employees in their daily work and create capacities for new challenges. Chatbots don't have to deal with overload in customer service. Even an above-average number of inquiries are no problem for him. If the dialog system does not forward the content, it forwards the request to the appropriate department and informs the customer about it. Here, you benefit from the individual knowledge of the employee, whose role in personal support remains important.
3. Chatbots in customer service increase customer satisfaction
Service quality is an important factor for customer satisfaction. Nowadays, companies in many industries can no longer effectively stand out from the competition with products or services alone. Users want to find optimal solutions quickly and easily without a long search. The focus is therefore on excellent and timely support and answering customer inquiries. That is exactly what chatbots that work with artificial intelligence can do.
Self-learning chatbots prevent dissatisfied customers from moving away and increase customer loyalty through a service that is not only satisfying but also pleasantly surprising. Chatbots provide quick customer service solutions because they are available to users around the clock. The processing time of inquiries is a major influencing factor for subsequent customer reviews. You should therefore pay particular attention to this.
However, individual communication and support is not lost with AI chatbots. Even if they don't have a quick solution ready and forward them to customer service, this has a positive effect on the user experience. Feedback to the customer that their request is being accepted and is now being addressed is better than no signal at all.
4. Chatbots in customer service as an aid for quality management
Quality management also benefits downstream from the tasks of the chatbot in customer service. Finally, the registered data and the resulting analyses are used to improve products and services. The self-learning chatbot asks for feedback both for complaints and general inquiries at the end of the conversation. It processes this data within a big data analysis into valuable statistics and overviews for in-house quality management.
5. Chatbots in customer service are cost-effective sure-fire
The initial investment costs A chatbot in customer service pays off after just one year. It is then already cheaper than an employee with similar tasks over a comparable period of time — even if they remain irreplaceable. At the same time, you benefit from the advantages of the AI chatbot in customer service right from the start: It works efficiently, provides reliable services, generates new knowledge and is available 24 hours a day. Although individual technical improvements are possible, the chatbot is constantly improving its performance all by itself thanks to artificial intelligence.
Now that we've clarified the obvious benefits, we should address other, equally important questions about chatbots in customer service.
One question that is frequently asked is about the importance of chatbots in customer service:
Why is chatbot technology so relevant right now?
There are several reasons for the steadily increasing relevance of chatbots in customer service. One of the main reasons is related to increased customer expectations.
While it used to be perfectly okay to wait several minutes in a company's customer service queue, most customers today want to be able to ask their questions 24/7 via various channels and expect a response within a few minutes.
This in turn means that customers are frustrated much more quickly than before and are also much more likely to switch to a competitor and then buy the product or use the service there.
On the other hand, the pressure on customer service has never been higher than it is today. Often, a higher volume of support should be handled with exactly the same resource and cost structure. At the same time, however, employees must ensure a high quality of service even during peak times, even though they often have to manage many different channels with a variety of inquiries.
In the end, employees are often overworked and customers are still dissatisfied. Overall, 84% of all customers therefore rate their digital service experience with companies negatively.
Another reason is shown in 2 international studies on preferred and desired customer communication with companies:
According to an international study by Hubspot from 2018, telephone and email channels are still preferred by most customers. Excitingly, however, the live chat and messenger chat channels already account for a large share in 2018. This illustrates the customer's need for innovative contact options.
Since this is an international study, it serves as a very good forecast for the next few years in Germany. This means that even in Germany, people will develop very quickly in the direction that it is completely normal for customers to reach a company via chat.
This also reflects a Study from Facebook against. This shows that 55% of all users would much rather chat with a company than call or send an email.
The reason for this is in particular everyday habits such as chatting with family or friends via WhatsApp. But even in the professional environment, more and more people communicate with colleagues via channels such as Slack. These expectations are reflected both in the type of channels and in the response time to communication with a company.
What prevents a company from opening a chat channel?
The simple answer: Every request costs a company money. An average of 42.45€ when a customer service request is answered by an external call center.
At the same time, however, around 80% of all service inquiries to companies are repetitive and waste valuable working time by employees by answering recurring inquiries over the phone, by e-mail with “copy paste” or using a text template.
Based on this tension between user perspective and company perspective, we have developed a 3-part solution formula.
- The first element of the solution formula covers customer expectations. Customers expect to be able to ask their questions around the clock in a chat channel and get an answer and their concerns resolved quickly.
- that The second element covers the company perspectivewho want to avoid an explosion in costs and therefore automate these recurring requests.
- At the same time, employees should be used profitably, and this is exactly what results in the third element: A system for targeted use of employees for qualified inquiries.
The result of the formula?
I'm sure some of you have already figured it out — it's the technology AI chatbot.
Chatting & chatbots — differences at a glance
There are basically three different ways that companies can choose to chat with customers and prospects:
1. Live chat
Live chat means that a user can ask their question directly in the chat via free text and an employee sits on the other side who receives this question and answers it manually. The challenge here is the manual component. There is no automation and a lot of employees are needed who should respond very quickly to inquiries. For this reason, live chat is often associated with a high level of resources and costs if this channel is served in a really high-quality manner.
2. Rule-based chatbot (guided dialogue system)
With this chat channel, the user is offered various clickable multiple choice options. The user can then select one of the buttons, quick replies or points, whereupon an answer is played out. It is disadvantageous that only a limited degree of automation can be achieved in this case. Since only a certain number of options can be made available, a guided dialog system does not achieve the percentage of automation required to sufficiently automate these recurring requests. As a result, additional employees and additional resources are often needed to map the channel in a meaningful way. Click bots are therefore less suitable for fully automating repetitive questions. On the other hand, they are ideal for entertaining and simpler marketing campaigns.
3. Artificially intelligent chatbots
With an artificially intelligent chatbot (or even AI chatbot), just like in live chat, a user can ask their question via free text in the chat. On the other hand, however, there is no employee, but an AI that understands this request based on natural language processing (NLP) and automatically answers it with the stored answer. A major advantage of this is that a high level of automation is possible, as the AI chatbot can automate all recurring requests on a case-by-case basis.
Here you can find various providers that offer these types of chatbots:
Conclusion: Why integrate a chatbot into customer service right now?
In summary, there are two very good reasons to address the chatbot issue at the moment:
- If you now integrate a chatbot into your customer service, you can still have a decisive competitive advantage work out. Many companies are already thinking about chatbots, but this is often only on the agenda for next year. This means that anyone who is already familiar with chatbot technology can gain experience and is already a big step ahead of other companies.
- Quick optimization in customer service: An AI chatbot directly reduces the number of recurring inquiries. Your company's employees are immediately relieved and costs can be reduced. So if there is currently a lot of pressure in customer service, but costs are being reduced there at the same time and in the short term and the burden on employees needs to be relieved, then an AI chatbot is the ideal solution for a direct effect to achieve.
A glimpse into practice
In the Fressnapf case study, find out how Fressnapf successfully uses an AI chatbot in first-level support and automatically answers 86% of incoming chat requests.
