Top 7 Areas Where Chatbots Complement Live Chat

Customer relationship is the focal point of a successful business. Whether you are a small business or an enterprise, delivering great customer service is the lifeline of your business. Hence it becomes vital to implement the latest technologies to enhance your business communication with your customers.

So, how do you respond to your customer needs and meet their requests 24×7?

Gone are those days when businesses completely relied on customer support agents who used reactive channels such as phone and email. With the boom of instant messaging, live chat software empowers agents to connect with customers to offer real time support.

Outgrow says when communicating with companies, people prefer to use chatbots rather than an app.

With the growing importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI), businesses are rapidly implementing chatbots to automate their sales, support, and marketing processes.

Chatbots and live chat are complementary to each other. You need to evaluate the strengths of both live chat software and chatbots to choose the best one for your business.

7 main areas where chatbots complement live chat

Understanding the benefits of AI chatbots will help you as the best solution in the seven major business areas. With the hybrid approach, you can balance the use of chatbots and live chat to deliver superior customer service experience.

Here are the seven main areas you should know.

1. Instant response

Customers expect to get answers for their queries or to find the information in the blink of an eye. When they are not able to find it, they get frustrated and this results in losing a sale or a potential customer forever.

Live chat delivers real time response to the customers. But for those customers who do not like to be on hold for less than 25 seconds, chatbots can solve the purpose.

In simpler terms, chatbots respond faster to incoming chat requests as compared to live chat champions. An agent can handle a limited number of chats at the same time and end up with longer queue time.

Chatbots do not have such restrictions.

The State of Chatbots Report says 55% of respondents say they would most enjoy getting an instant response and answers to simple questions from a chatbot.

As the customers are provided instant answers and assistance by chatbots, it helps to enhance the customer experience.

2. Cost efficiency

Chatbots are programmed to deal with common FAQs or information based queries instantly, hence it can be used to perform the basic frontline support tasks.

According to invesp, chatbots can save up to 30% in customer support costs.

Let me explain with an example, when customers approach with common queries related to shipping or delivery. A chatbot can easily understand the context and provide an FAQ answer or description explaining your shipping/delivery policies. For international order status also bots can provide quick answers.

Moreover, if the customer has further queries that are complex, a chatbot can easily escalate the request to your support team. Such conversational marketing techniques can be time taking for your staff to answer even if standardized answers are set.

Implementing a conversational bot to take over such frontline support questions and concerns, you can significantly reduce the number of resources that save operational costs of your business.

3. Scalability

If your business is limited to live chat it becomes quite difficult to handle when there is an unexpected rise in the traffic. It is difficult to hire more agents in a short time and it is expensive too as it covers:

• Salary expenses
• Training costs
• Infrastructure costs

Chatbots are best applicable in this scenario.

Implementing AI chatbots is a one-time investment but can be easily scaled to handle thousands of chat requests and reduce the number of support tickets raised by customers. They are ready to engage customers 24×7 by providing quick and accurate answers.

Chatbots improve your business productivity by giving instant response and can be easily scaled based on your business needs. As live chat involves an extra cost to be scaled, chatbot saves that cost and improves customer engagement.

4. Multitasking

Live chat software empowers your support agents to handle a maximum of 5 to 6 customer conversations at the same time. Chatbots can be easily scaled to handle conversations without any upper limit.

Suppose your business receives 100 chat requests in a day and you have only two live chat representatives on hand.

What will happen in that case?

At the end of the day, you will have disgruntled customers who were frustrated with being on hold ad finally decline to risk you to your competitors.

A happy or satisfied customer will advocate your brand by talking about their good experience with a positive word of mouth to their friends and colleagues.

5. No human involvement

Chatbots are simply the best way to answer simple tier 1 questions. Being well programmed with the predefined answers to FAQs, chatbots can engage customers without any help from a human agent. It also helps businesses to cut down on support costs.

Implementing chatbots saves a good amount of business time and money that can be used by your support agents tend to focus on more crucial areas of business and other support channels like social media, phone, and email.

It is also quite monotonous and annoying for the support agents to answer repetitive questions, unlike the bots that are always ready to answer the same queries.

6. Availability

Businesses who look for offering 24×7 live chat support to their customers have to hire more agents and work in shifts. If you are a small business hiring of more agents means more operational costs in infrastructure, training, and salaries.

Here chatbots take over live chat.

Chatbot functions 24×7 to engage customers by instantly answering to their common queries in the non-business hours. With chatbots, you do not have the risk of losing your customers to your competitors.

According to Kapow, 68% of customers switch to a competitor if they don’t think you care about them. Offering real time support when the support agents are not available makes customers feel valued, which improves customer retention.

7. Multilingual ability

Using a chatbot solution is considered best for the businesses that have extended its wings worldwide. Hiring customer support agents for the languages your customers speak is difficult as well as costly.

Chatbots can be easily programmed to chat with your customers in several languages. It improves your brand value as well as customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

Chatbots empower customer support agents, do not replace them. Speed, adequacy, and accuracy are the main ingredients of customer service, so is the human touch. So, it is suggested to use both, live chat and chatbot in the right place and the right way so that you can deliver your customers the best experience of both worlds.