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Chatbots are changing the customer service industry by opening up a new channel of communication. Gartner even found that implementing chatbot technology has helped organizations reduce enquiries through other channels by 70%. This helps customer care agents dedicate more time and energy to their respective cases, ensuring a better customer experience.
In fact, organizations who implemented this technology experienced an increased customer satisfaction rate and saved 33% for every voice engagement. But aside from allowing customer care agents to dedicate more time to their assigned customers, chatbots can also have a direct influence on customer experience.
Now we have AI-powered chatbots which can learn through every interaction and provide more accurate, more human responses. This personalizes customer experience so customers don’t feel like they’re just talking to a machine.
In this post, you’ll discover some of the best ways in which these chatbots can improve customer experience.
What Differentiates AI-Powered Chatbots From Simple Ones?
First, let’s try to understand the difference between the two kinds of chatbots so that you can better understand why AI-powered chatbots are more impactful.
Simple chatbots work by delivering answers that are pre-programmed into them. They scan keywords in the questions to identify which answer the customer needs.
But AI-powered chatbots use natural language processing, which enables them to deliver more complex responses. They can deliver accurate responses even when they get messages that they weren’t programmed to receive.
They can also gain instant access to your CRM and use customer information to personalize conversations. This significantly takes away the robotic element in chatbot interactions, which leads to a better customer experience.
Related article: How to Improve Customer Experience: 6 of the Best Ways
How AI-Powered Chatbots Improve Customer Experience
Now that you have a better sense of how AI-powered chatbots differ from the simple ones, let’s take a look at a few ways in which they can enhance customer experience:
#1: Personalize Conversations
While chatbots can be extremely efficient in guiding and educating your customers, a lot of people may be dissuaded by the robotic, non-human responses. At the end of the day, people still prefer interacting with other humans over machines.
A Usabilla study even found that one out of five customers always prefers to interact with humans when they engage with brands. And 46% of the survey respondents would rather interact with humans over chatbots. So even if they can get the service they require through simple chatbots, their overall experience may not be too pleasant or memorable.
You need to leverage AI-powered chatbots to deliver more natural and personalized interactions. Using natural language processing, they can deliver highly accurate responses to customer queries, even if those queries are different from the ones they were programmed to receive.
In addition to this, they can actively learn from conversations in real time. Combined with the ability to instantly access relevant customer data, they can deliver experiences that are personalized according to the unique needs of each customer. So they’re no longer limited to giving predefined answers to very specific questions.
#2: Increase Efficiency and Reduce Response Time
Responsiveness is a major factor that influences customer service experience. According to a study conducted by Zendesk, 69% of people had a good customer service experience because they got a quick resolution. So if you want to ensure that people have a better experience interacting with your brand, you have to be more efficient and responsive.
54% of respondents in the Usabilla study cited earlier also said that they would always choose a chatbot over a human customer service agent if it means saving 10 minutes. This suggests that speed and efficiency are the major factors that influence customer experience.
Since AI-powered chatbots can instantly sift through mountains of data within seconds, they are much quicker than humans in pulling up the most relevant information. They can deliver the right answers and information in an instant, so customers don’t have to wait too long for a resolution.
In the case of Siglo 21, the Aivo AgentBot helped maintain an average support time of 46 seconds while retaining 96% of leads. This is the perfect example of delivering quicker, more accurate responses via bots.
Plus, diverting a huge fraction of your customer support enquiries to chatbots also frees up time for your agents to focus on more complex tasks. They can dedicate more time on each customer, which further enhances the experiences of those customers.
If you have chatbots filtering conversations before they get directed to a live agent, your agents can be more efficient with their responses because they can directly start tackling the issue at hand. They no longer have to spend time collecting customer information or enquiring about the issue.
As you can see in the screenshot below, the customer talks about their issue and expresses their desire to talk to a person. Not only does the chatbot transfer the conversation to a relevant live chat agent, it also relays the customer’s issue so the agent can instantly lead with that.
So you can see the direct and indirect impacts of using AI-powered chatbots. With their faster data processing time, they can reduce response time, which directly impacts customer experience.
And since they divert a ton of customer support enquiries from other channels, they free up more time for human agents. This allows live chat and phone support agents to become more efficient and focused with their respective customers. That’s how chatbots indirectly impact customer experience.
Related article: What Is Artificial Intelligence and why is it useful for Customer Service?
#3: Provide 24X7 Support
As your company grows, your audience base is going to grow exponentially. This also means that their needs and demands are going to become a lot more diverse. You’ll start getting customer support enquiries at all hours of the day because you’ll have customers from all walks of life.
And if your company isn’t prepared to meet those demands, you may inadvertently ruin the customer experience and lose out on prospects.
Even if you have human support agents for live chat and phone support, it costs a lot to have them working at all hours of the day. Having an AI-powered chatbot to cover for them during out-of-office hours is a great way to be present for your customers whenever they need you.
You can leverage them to deliver personalized, close-to-human experiences for customers who need you when human agents are unavailable.
For example, ADT used Aivo’s AgentBot,Olivia, to provide accurate and up-to-date information immediately. This helped them triple the amount of consumer interactions from 300 to 10K monthly conversations.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are tons of ways in which AI-powered chatbots can enhance customer experience. Most of their impact may be direct, but their indirect influence is just as impressive.
They enable you to be more efficient, organized, and responsive with your customer service. And the best part is that their responses are much more accurate and humanized than those by the simple ones.
Considering all of these benefits of using AI-powered chatbots to improve customer experience, it’s about time you start investing in them. Learn more about how you can implement the Aivo AgentBot to enhance customer experience.
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