7 Reasons to Invest in a Customer Support Chatbot

Customer support has never been the same since the introduction of chatbots.

67% of consumers interacted with a chatbot to get online support in the past couple of years, which shows how much customer support has benefited from this technology.

And this is good news for companies.

Because elevating customer experience through support has never been easier.

Chatbots in customer support is aiding with a lot of functions — be it helping agents with automating simple answers for simple queries or providing round-the-clock assistance.

So there are not one but many reasons why businesses should draw their attention to chatbots if they want to ace their customer support.

Let’s take a look at these reasons in detail as to why you consider implementing a customer support chatbot.

Reasons to Invest in a Chatbot in Customer Support 

1. Boost Real-time Engagement

Time has always been a constraint in providing a good customer experience. A customer faced an issue, raised the issue via email, and got a reply three days later. In those three days, a lot can happen. Either the customer is indifferent or starts negatively perceiving the brand. And you don’t want either of these things to happen.

We strive for real-time again and again. Because as brands, how often do we wish that we can reach out to every single of our customers, on their preferred platform, at the time they put up a query?

All the time, isn’t it?

And chatbots for customer support offer just that. When you provide instant support, that very support turns into engagement. Customers feel heard and important, especially when they have a medium to interact on a Sunday afternoon or at midnight when they least expect a reply. 64% of customers feel that 24/7 availability is one of the biggest advantages of a chatbot.

Customers also prefer different ways of contacting you and with chatbots, they get the same quality of service regardless of the platforms. This boosts your omnichannel engagement. Your website may be a convenient medium for you to communicate with your customers. But it isn’t enough.

You need to be proactive, and increase your presence at places where your customers already are. If you deploy enterprise chatbots on all these platforms, you can be assured that your customers have always had a way to get in touch, at any point in time.

2. Combine Live Chat + Chatbot Support

The idea of chatbots stems from the need of assisting agents that provide support. Hence, it’s necessary to bust the myth that chatbots are here to steal jobs. They’re not. Instead, they’re here to relieve some responsibilities off the shoulders of the live agents. 

So just because you’re integrating a chatbot, doesn’t mean you disregard live chat. Because 73% of customers still consider live chat as the most satisfactory form of communication with a company.

A hybrid chatbot is a solution where the bot starts the chat and along the way, if the customer needs help from the human then an agent can take over the rest of the conversation.

Watch the video below where we have explained how to build a customer support chatbot

The motive of a combined form of support is to increase the productivity of agents who are infiltrated with mundane queries every day. Hybrid support allows agents to automate answers to these queries and use their skills for complex queries that can’t be resolved by a bot.

You can deploy a chatbot where you can club all the frequently asked questions and add them as buttons on the bot builder. You filter all the level one support queries that can be automated and keep a ‘talk to an agent’ option within the chatbot. This way your live agents only take over the reins only when needed.

With WotNot, the best part is that the agents don’t require any additional software training to use WotNot’s live chat. They can continue using their existing live chat system and WotNot’s bot will connect with them in case the conversation needs to be handed over to agents.

Hybrid support will overall improve the productivity of your agents and encourage a positive outlook toward providing quality customer care.

3. Optimize Operational Costs 

Which business doesn’t ultimately want to cut down on expenses? If given a chance, wouldn’t you always want to implement cost-saving methods of offering support?

Chatbots solve all the basic custom problems without any aid. Consequently, this leads to optimization of operational costs.

The most amazing benefit of a customer support chatbot is that it doesn’t just cut down operational costs but also has the ability to transform customer support from a cost center to a profit center.

Firstly, it reduces the dependency on live agents to be available 24/7. This cuts down your costs on salaries and office maintenance to run the office all day.

Secondly, chatbots generate great ROI. Considering the chatbot pricing, you’re availing a lot in return in terms of automating: 

• Your lead generation process generates additional business value. 

• Your first-level support that cuts down on operating costs. 

• Your internal processes and streamlining operations that improve employee productivity and generate higher revenue for the company.

4. Reduce Support Tickets with Self-help 

Satisfactory customer support doesn’t always mean you have someone to assist the customers. As counterintuitive as it may sound, customers are more than happy to get things done by themselves.

Studies show that 89% of customers expect to solve their issues by themselves before reaching out to a customer service representative.

A suggestion?

Let them.

No customer wants to raise a support ticket for a simple problem like changing a password. These are things you can easily automate via a chatbot in a way that the customers find the answers by themselves.

Self-service offers brands an appealing opportunity to drastically reduce spending. If you compare the cost of a do-it-yourself transaction on a chatbot to that with a live service interaction, the latter costs $7 more for a B2C company and $13 more for a B2B company.

That’s a lot of savings. With a customer support chatbot, a customer will raise a support ticket only if the bot is not able to solve the problem. This will significantly reduce the number of support tickets in your portal.

For example, Amazon deployed a chatbot for customer support that automated their first-level support which considerably reduced their dependency on live chat. The user can either select from a variety of common queries or explain a more in-depth issue in the chat.

Most importantly, the support ticket portal will filter all the needless tickets and retain the ones that are complex and require immediate attention from agents. It’s a win-win situation for both the brand and the customer. 

5. Enhance Customer Engagement

Brands are struggling to catch attention. Research shows that an average consumer has an attention span of 8 seconds. That’s a small window to even introduce the brand let alone convince the customer to make a purchase. 

To make the most of these 8 seconds, you need to do something that completely mesmerizes the customer and keeps them glued. For example, how about a conversational AI that initiates the conversation in the customer’s native language? Or even an AI chatbot that recognizes the customer's background and addresses the customer by their names, their company, or based on their number of visits? 

The level of chatbot personalization decides the customer engagement on the website. And what better way to achieve personalization than removing the language barrier? In the limited time frame, you get to make it about the customer more than about the brand. Even if you’re striving for self-help as we discussed, it would bear amazing results if you could provide that in the local language. 

Expanding your support to a global market also necessitates a company’s ability to provide support to regional customers and multilingual support chatbot help with this transition. 

This is a great alternative investment as compared to training the current employees to learn the local language and even hiring a new team that speaks the language. And more so, it brings you closer to your customers and fosters customer loyalty. 

6. Track Customer Satisfaction

Tracking customer support progress often gets overlooked because of the lack of time and resources. The manual process of addressing queries fails to give a breather to agents where they can look back and check how well they’re doing.

But tracking this progress paves the way for the future of customer service as it's the only way you can retain dissatisfied customers. Not every customer will file a complaint. They will move on in a blink of an eye.

A chatbot will ensure that customers input their feedback and that feedback is monitored accordingly. Let’s take a look at some top ways that a chatbot for customer support will help you track your progress.

• Evaluating Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

In general, it is quite challenging to involve customers in the feedback process. But a quick CSAT rating doesn’t hurt their time and encourages them to close the conversation without any additional questions for feedback. 

After every chatbot or live chat conversation, you can integrate a CSAT rating that allows the customers to rate the conversation. This is one of the most straightforward survey methodologies where you ask customers a question and they answer on a scale of 1-10 or 1-5. This can help companies learn how their bots are faring. 

• Monitoring Using Analytics

Almost every chatbot vendor provides real-time chatbot analytics. The analytics dashboard gives you a detailed reflection of how many conversations are happening on the bot, where the users are coming from, what is the average length of the conversation, at what point are users abandoning the chat, etc. This provides the groundwork for bot modifications and makes the bot capable enough to better solve customer problems. 

• Revisiting the Flow

Since every KPI on analytics gives you insights, it gives direction as to where you can implement the feedback. If the user is not reaching the end of the conversation, it means you need to find out where they abandon the chat and make that specific part engaging. You might have to make use of rich media files like images and GIFs to keep them glued to the conversation. 

Similarly, if there is a huge disparity between site visits and the number of conversations, you may have to include a pop-up that drives people to converse with the bot. Each metric will help you figure out how to make the most of your customer support chatbot. 

7. Faster Turnaround Time

In recent years, the acceptable waiting time in customer support has significantly reduced. A study in 2014 found customers were willing to wait for 13 minutes on a call, and that number was reduced to 46 seconds in 2021. A faster turnaround time is the need of the hour.

Calls and emails both struggle with a slow turnaround time in solving customer issues. On calls, agents first have to take the customer’s order details, validate them and then fetch the same information from the system.

All this while the customer is put on hold while they get in touch with the required department. Not only is this a cumbersome process but it can lead to a very unpleasant experience for the customer.

Enter chatbots and they seamlessly automate this process.

How?

You can simply integrate your chatbot with the internal systems. So when the customer inputs their order details, a chatbot can quickly fetch the details from the internal systems and your customer gets the response in no time. 

Conclusion

Customer support chatbots have become an essential part of the overall buying journey. Their immense popularity and wide use in customer support prove that. And while the customer support department will always be infiltrated with the neverending customer problems, it can always take a breather with a little automation.

If you want to get started with automating your support, feel free to contact us and we’ll help you set up a virtual support center that elevates your customer brand experience.