Chatbot for support: What can a chatbot do in support?
The classic type of customer support, usually via email or telephone, no longer meets the changing expectations of customers. Companies must find new ways to offer their customers a better experience at every step of the customer journey. This is where AI-powered chatbots come into play. Chatbots are increasingly being used in customer support to improve its functions automate and to expand. By using it in support, processes can be optimized and customers receive faster support. An AI chatbot in customer support uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP)to process human language, interpret customer inquiries and provide meaningful answers. They work best when interacting with unique, recurring customer questions. A chatbot can access a knowledge database to answer frequently asked questions. Chatbots can also provide contextual and personalized answers if they have access to company and customer data. By integrating a chatbot into the support strategy, the service team is relieved of day-to-day tasks. A chatbot is therefore a type of “AI productivity enhancer” that can contribute to balanced support services.
Benefits of a chatbot in support
Because chatbots offer a wide range of benefits, more and more companies are choosing to use them as an integral part of their customer support. The 9 most important benefits are listed below.
1. Holistic service
The use of chatbots enables companies to process support requests seamlessly and consistently along the customer journey. Customer inquiries can be classified, categorized and, if questions can be standardized, answered in advance and without contacting an agent. When forwarded to agents, no information is lost thanks to the support of an AI chatbot, meaning that the customer does not have to describe the situation or concern again.
2. Customer support 24/7 in real time
Long waiting times and lack of immediate response can quickly lead to frustration and result in customer churn. Responding quickly and resolving a problem from the first contact is a decisive factor when it comes to retaining customers. Support, which is available around the clock, also allows customers to use it at their preferred time — which can lead to higher satisfaction and loyalty. Especially when a company receives more recurring inquiries, implementing chatbots can be a useful way to offer customers immediate support without making them wait.
3. Provide a better customer experience
High-quality dialogue support is one of the most important aspects of customer experience. By using an AI chatbot in support and responding to inquiries in real time, a customer will become more open to the company. For a better Customer Experience The urgency of a problem must always be identified and, if necessary, directed to the right department or agent. A chatbot can also help with this.
4. Minimize errors
During spikes in service volumes, call centers often experience stressful situations in which people are led to make mistakes. When it comes to support, digital solutions such as AI chatbots have the advantage of ensuring consistent quality of answers and rapid response time in real time. Even specific, not always trivial inquiries can be identified and processed with a minimum of human interaction.
5. Achieve scalable support
The ability to scale support is a priority for many customer-focused companies. There are times when a sudden surge in support volume is unavoidable, such as during the holiday season. The use of chatbots in customer support can help ensure scalability to handle conversations in real time. In addition, this is easy and economical, as the costs for chatbots are quickly amortized (feel free to use our return on investments for an individual calculation of your return on investments) Ticket calculator). In addition, customer service chatbots can also help increase your company's productivity without additional costs and resources. Simple requests are managed by the bot, while complex requests are passed on to human support (Human Takeover). Bots can have endless conversations regardless of time and volume, driving both business growth and customer satisfaction promotes.
6. Stay crisis-proof
Especially in the initial phase of the COVID 19 crisis, there was a significant increase in customer inquiries in many areas. In these times of crisis, such peaks will continue to pose a risk to many companies in the future. Short-term availability and efficient support are therefore crucial for securing the customer relationship. With digital assistants such as AI chatbots are companies able to identify and answer frequently asked questions in real time in order to successfully process them as quickly as possible and without personal customer contact.
7. Minimize support costs
Chatbots can help reduce support costs without sacrificing service quality. Thanks to bots, a company can save costs that would be incurred when providing support training, hiring more support staff, or maintaining a robust support infrastructure. Furthermore, the use of an AI chatbot for customer support can help to conduct numerous conversations at the same time and to handle an increased volume of customer inquiries without increasing costs — keyword scalability. Peak times for companies can be estimated and chatbots can be used to manage costs. Especially when the costs per chat are high, it makes sense to implement a support chatbot to efficiently handle conversations without additional investments.
8. Get real-time feedback
Feedback is important for every company because it helps to find out how satisfied customers are with your products and services. However, it is not always easy for companies to get customers to fill out feedback forms or answer questionnaires. Implementing chatbots can counteract this problem. Chatbot templates can help make the process interactive and easy by helping to get real-time feedback at every stage of the customer journey, whether at the end of the chat conversation or when buying a product. The feedback provided by the bots can help you identify the areas where you need to improve your products, services, or chatbot flow for better interaction. In addition, this leads to improved customer loyalty, as it signals to the customer that their opinion is important for the company.
9. Strengthen customer loyalty
Excellent customer support is and remains a success factor for customer loyalty. Changing customer expectations require streamlined, highly automated ad-hoc support. Customer requirements such as immediate availability of personalized information, availability around the clock 365 days a year and always having the latest changes available can hardly be reflected by traditional human support. The use of chatbots can meet these customer expectations and thus contributes to an increase in customer loyalty at.
What should be considered when using a chatbot in support?
People and chatbots should complement each other and be a good team. Chatbots are particularly effective when used in customer support to assist agents. By using a chatbot, companies provide their employees with a new team member. As soon as people have their strengths and weaknesses, they also have chatbots. It is therefore important in support that benefits to combine both sides to get the best out of it. The efficient use of chatbots reduces the number of inquiries in the contact center, which means that customer service agents can spend more time dealing with complex and emotional customer issues. Chatbots are also able to do the groundwork for support agents, for example by asking for a customer's order number or address before a support agent picks up the call. In order to be able to successfully offer support via chatbot, it is important to find out how chatbots and support staff can work together. As a result, the quality of support and employee and customer satisfaction increases.
Use a chatbot where it makes sense. Just in First-level support The use of chatbots is very popular. It is the first point of contact when users have difficulties with orders, software or hardware and need support. With first-level support, support requests are recorded and processed as a first step. The aim is to differentiate serious problems from simple questions that can be resolved quickly. This is where the use of chatbots comes into play — they can be used as a first point of contact, provide users with immediate feedback and, in most cases, even provide a suitable answer or assistance.
Don't make the chatbot appear human, but clearly communicate that it is a chatbot. The clear communication that the digital assistant is not a human prevents incorrect expectations from being set up among the end user. This can be done with a suitable welcome message, but also with a suitable “non-human” name and an image that does not represent a person but an avatar, etc. In the same way, a Human Takeover, i.e. redirection to a person in the form of a live chat or an e-mail.
Chatbots in Support: Case Studies
Fressnapf's AI chatbot is used to provide customers with fast and excellent customer service. The chatbot is a real example of best practice that shows how AI-based automation can be successfully implemented via chat. The customer support chatbot demonstrates this more successfully than almost anyone else. Among other things, Fressnapf makes it whole Automatically answer 86% of incoming chat requests.
Motor insurance company AdmiralDirekt is also demonstrating the successful use of an AI chatbot in customer support. With the help of the chatbot, AdmiralDirekt succeeds in Reduce call volume by as much as 12% and to provide its customers with 24/7 problem solutions.
Chatbots in technical support
Chatbots are also increasingly being used in technical support. Technical support is considered one of the most complex online tasks that a company has to complete. With the multitude of digital processes, users are increasingly confronted with technical difficulties. From computer startup issues to loss of passwords or other hardware and software issues, technical issues can take all forms. For IT staff, customer support is almost entirely tasked with resolving these issues. The advent of chatbots for technical support has simplified this process in many ways.
%2520(1).png)
Chatbots save customers time. Quick problem resolution is extremely important, especially when it comes to technical problems. Customers are reluctant to wait a long time for an answer from an IT representative. Thanks to chatbots, technical support has become much easier and faster. A chatbot in technical support enables IT companies to respond directly and simultaneously to a large number of customer inquiries. In addition, most of these requests for a specific product or service are repetitive — password or printer problems, for example. For this reason, it makes even more sense to automate answers using a chatbot.
Chatbots help you formulate concerns. Especially for laymen, it is often difficult to describe a technical problem in detail. Buying new software or a product also often raises several questions. When IT companies use a chatbot for technical support on their website, they simplify the search for answers from their customers or can even proactively suggest topics in the chatbot. Chatbots provide direct suggestions for common problems in simple menus and help customers understand their concerns and get appropriate answers. The aim is for the customer to be able to solve their problems independently without the need for direct contact with an IT employee by being guided through system troubleshooting processes by a chatbot.
Chatbots lower customer support costs. Chatbots work more efficiently than human support agents, especially when it comes to simple, repetitive issues. By using chatbots in technical support, IT companies offer customers 24/7 service 365 days a year. In addition, chatbots are considered virtual support agents that can answer thousands of queries simultaneously without making human mistakes or getting tired. Essentially, developing a chatbot for technical support enables customer service to be automated, which is an efficient and cost-saving tool.
conclusion
More and more companies are choosing chatbots as an integral part of their support to improve response time and save operating costs. Because bots can solve simple questions quickly, the human support team has more time to process complex requests. Chatbots for support are promising when used at the right time. It is also important to make it clear to the end user that it is a digital assistant. When used intelligently and taking these aspects into account, chatbots have the ability to relieve support in the long term and optimize it at the same time.
