How Chatbots Can Help Improve Your Customer Experience

Chatbots or customized software can converse with humans through a chat interface. Be it a brand’s website or a mobile app, chatbots can be integrated anywhere to gather useful information and facilitate sales. Platforms like Skype, Facebook Messenger, and Whats App also use chatbots for building reputation and improving customer experience. 

A chatbots app development company can integrate either simple or sophisticated software. Sophisticated and advanced chatbots are based on AI and ML (Machine Learning) to deal with more complex responses and lengthy conversations. AI-powered chatbots are way more flexible and they can continuously learn from the conversations. 

How Chatbot Integration can Enhance Customer Experience

Apart from reducing costs for customer support executives, the chatbots can enhance the customer experience in a big way.

Let’s go through eight aspects through which the customer experience can be improved using chatbots.

1. Live Chat

A chatbot can successfully replace manual customer support. Customers can easily interact and engage with chatbots. Most chatbots use NLP (Natural Language Processing) methods. They can analyze the customer’s question and come up with an answer that suits the customer’s needs.

What’s more, the chatbots app development company can integrate the chatbot into the company’s website and mobile apps to save the customer’s time. Your customers can get answers instantly while getting rid of going through your company’s online resources. Chatbots make it possible to make your brand visible at any time. Without leaving FB Messenger or Whats App, customers can talk to your company.

Interestingly, Facebook’s chatbot live chat has transmitted over 8 million messages since inception between Facebook users and various brands, however, less than 1% of companies that are on Facebook use this technology.

2. 24/7 Availability

Can any of your live chat employees remain accessible on a 24/7 basis? Well, here chatbot wins. The chatbot can easily handle the customer’s queries, especially during the off-hours when they have maximum questions to ask. Here, the customer service staff is unavailable and chatbots can serve customers more effectively.

Chatbot integration enables customers to get their answers any time and instantly. There is no need to wait for their turn. The AI-based chatbot can provide a feeling of conversing with a live operator irrespective of time and place.

When it comes to customer experience, the 24/7 availability of support executives matters the most. Chatbots can effectively address this requirement and enhance the customer experience as well as engagement ratio.

3. More fulfillment

What is the main function of a chatbot- perfect simulation of a human conversation? No. The chatbots are designed to satisfy the customer’s requirements. Chatbots are designed to handle repetitive tasks like calculations and searching from databases. However, AI-based chatbots can simulate human intelligence for fulfilling the customer’s needs efficiently.

Here, the fulfillment of the customer’s needs is more important than functioning like humans. Chatbots not only answer queries of visitors but also manage some non-critical tasks. They can successfully reduce human intervention. In a way, customer engagement is increased.

4. Reduce time

When customers can find something they want with ease, they feel happy. Think of the customer’s journey on a website or a mobile app. The chatbot can facilitate customers or visitors to purchase products. When the customer visits a product page, the chatbot can pop up automatically to offer additional information like product details, videos, or discount code.

Customers can readily gather information without changing websites or going out of apps. It helps them get rid of switching sites or apps. The chatbot can also assist customers to get the product of their choice and help them choose the way of shipping. Simply put, chatbots can reduce the time and effort of the customers. The chatbot ensures a smoother customer journey. It can improve the customer experience and reduce shopping cart abandonment rate significantly.

5. Decrease stress

As per an official survey conducted by a Chatbot developer, 94% of the respondents feel nervous before contacting customer support executives. Be it a call center or an automated phone call system, both these methods have little room to ease the anxiety or dread of the customers when they reach out to the vendor’s customer support branch.

Chatbots can work wonders in handling customer queries by enabling the customers to get rid of waiting for their turn and get support on a 24/7 basis. Chatbots can streamline the entire process of customer support and facilitate the customers to resolve their issues in a short time. Also, the use of chatbots can reduce the customer’s stress or dread significantly.

6. More interaction

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is also a robust automated communication technique. However, it proves cumbersome on many occasions and the customers keep on complaining about the overall process when it is handled by IVR during phone calls. The IVR system asks the customers various questions and shifts their call to the specific department on the basis of the customer’s voice responses. IVR systems are highly structured and one-dimensional.

The IVR system routing the customers through their responses to take them to the pre-programmed destination. It is a bit monotonous and the customers can lose interest soon.

A chatbot is used in a similar way but it is free from IVR-related issues. The customer feels like their voice command is understood, while the chatbot tries to lead them either toward an answer or a human representative. The chatbot is free from any monotony and it is indeed a more interactive option than IVR.

7. Personalized approach

Chatbots are flexible and customization to provide a personal touch to the customers. They can engage customers on various levels. Chatbots can provide technical assistance, account or sales-related information, and other necessary details in a personalized way. It can act as a primary resource for customers.

Chatbots can be programmed with different types of styles for conversation. For example, the chatbot can initiate and continue the chat in a technical or friendly way. It can communicate with the customers in a helpful or humorous way. The chatbot can provide a personalized approach to people with different types of personalities. It engages customers and keeps them revisiting the app.

Along with this, chatbots can personify your brand and make it popular in a short time by offering a personalized experience to your customers.

8. Reinvention of forms

Form filling is a tedious task because usually, the form is too long and your customers just do not find it convenient. Therefore, they fill it with great reluctance. A chatbot, on the other hand, can easily handle this situation. It is easy to get all the necessary information about the customer or visitors through a chatbot. Customers also share their details willingly with the chatbot. There is no instance of friction or cognitive load when it comes to getting information through a chatbot. As many as eleven necessary fields can be covered by using the chatbot.

Also, the chatbot eliminates the possibility of human errors while gathering the information of customers. It is possible that the customer support executive may record the wrong information, but the chatbot cannot do so.

What’s more, AI-powered chatbots can also be integrated with the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform to strengthen the brand’s online presence and provide more interactive experience. Customers can also get more information and the engagement level remains high.

Concluding Notes

Chatbots can improve customer services in different ways. They are here to stay for enhancing customer engagement. Vendors can grab more opportunities to remain connected with customers. Chatbots can also contribute to fulfilling the vendor’s goals more effectively. Chatbots are capable of providing a human-like, personalized experience to the users, and meet the communication needs of modern enterprises.

(Disclaimer: The author works here, a chatbot development company)