Chatbots have played a significant role in the rise of the importance of customer service, and have made large contributions to user support and the “modern service desk”. As customers and employees began to demand interactive, real-time, and tailored omnichannel engagement, enterprises needed sophisticated tools to meet their growing needs. Enter: the chatbot.
What are Chatbots?
Conversational artificial intelligence, better known as chatbots, is a combination of advanced technologies that process written and spoken inputs and respond in a natural, human-like manner, including NLP, natural language understanding (NLU), machine learning, and speech recognition.
Conversational AI bots can extract entities and understand linguistic idiosyncrasies such as syntax, slang, and canonical word forms. Furthermore, they are taught to recognize the type and degree of a user’s emotion and respond appropriately. And, as the technology powering chatbots progresses, it will eventually become impossible to distinguish between a human-powered, and artificial intelligence-driven response in service desk and customer service roles.
Benefits of Chatbots
1. Increase Customer Engagement – Chatbots can assist organizations in taking client engagement to the next level. Because engagement is driven by user data, the experience can oftentimes be more engaging by deploying conversational AI chatbots. Additionally, bots can provide consistent responses, which helps avoid feeding customers useless information. Customers will stay longer on your site, continuing the conversation when provided meaningful and timely responses.
2. Improve Lead Generation – Bots have grown to the point where they can engage clients with customized messaging throughout their experience. In fact, your company can employ chatbots to generate leads by assisting clients in making quick decisions. AI bots can employ a pre-programmed quiz to entice users to fill out a form and generate leads, resulting in higher conversion rates.
3. Monitor Consumer Data to Gain Insights – By monitoring user data, chatbots are an effective tool for tracking purchasing trends and analyzing consumer behavior. This information can assist businesses in marketing their products in new ways and expanding their reach. Bots can also be used to collect feedback via simple questions in order to improve products or optimize your site.
4. Enhance Customer Support – Modern customer service demands either an immediate response or the option to find assistance without the need for extensive interaction. That’s a tall order for companies who aren’t able to invest in a service team that requires time and resources to manage properly. In addition to alleviating the burden of having to have dedicated resources to provide top-notch customer service, companies oftentimes leverage chatbots to streamline their internal and external operations.
Kaity Ayuso, Big Drop’s Business Development Manager, stated the following:
We know that providing consistently strong customer service is key to driving loyalty. With conversational chatbots becoming more adept at handling customer needs and resolving issues, companies are no longer confined to engaging with customers during standard business hours or allocating additional resources to deliver consistently high-quality, engaging interactions in response to increasing demand. Embracing AI through the use of chatbots introduces a new layer of competitive advantage to help businesses scale more effectively while bypassing some of the growing pains that can arise during rapid business growth.
Final Thoughts
It’s expected that businesses will continue to invest in conversational AI as they recover from the pandemic. Businesses can look to AI to open up new revenue, cost-cutting, and company-growth opportunities, as well as to foster innovation and make the adoption of new business models easier. Conversational AI enables businesses to keep and grow their user and customer bases at a minimal cost, engage people in a new business model, and compete fiercely.
Chatbots are being used in a variety of consumer and employee use cases and processes, including information technology and security management, marketing, human resources, insurance, retail, banking, financial services, and healthcare. On a recent project with the Richardson Sales Performance team, Big Drop implemented conversational AI. Laura Morrison, Richardson’s Digital Marketing Manager, says:
We decided to implement a chatbot to make sure that our customers with immediate questions or needs had a way to engage with us. Traditional contact forms are great if the customer wants to set up a meeting for the future, but there are times when they want information now – that’s where the chatbot comes in.
Chatbots can be designed and deployed in a matter of weeks, with low coding needs and a visual interface; supporting several languages and managing both simple and sophisticated discussions.
Get in touch with the Big Drop team to fulfill your customer service needs by setting up a chatbot.