Customer Experience 
Customer support chatbots help customers resolve their issues without needing assistance from human agents.
They can use modern technology like artificial intelligence (AI), natural language understanding, and machine learning (ML) to mimic human interactions while offering support. These technologies allow the AI bot to perform simple tasks like fetching order details, updating meeting schedules, and answering customers’ questions.
When integrated with larger customer experience platforms, chatbots use the context of the customer journey to make service delivery more effective. Let’s look at how these chatbots can support your business.
Using Chatbots for Customer Care
Customer service chatbots support human agents in offering delightful and memorable customer service experiences whenever your audience interacts with them. They provide support through:
Answering FAQs conversationally
You probably get several questions in a day that are too repetitive or monotonous to invest time in. These might be the usual queries like “how to change a user ID” or “how to track a payment status.”
Customer support chatbots can take over such customer queries and free up your time and mind space to address critical issues. When people come with burning questions, your prompt help and support show them you care.
According to a study by HubSpot, consumers prioritize response time greatly, with 90% of them defining an immediate response as being under 10 minutes, which is very important when they have a customer service question.
With more time available for helping customers with real pain points, you start improving customer satisfaction at the support team level. Chatbots take care of the FAQs while you invest your intent and actions in resolving complex inquiries.
Ensuring 24/7 availability
Chatbots are ready to address customers’ concerns at any time. When you have downtime, chatbots keep your support channels open to customer inquiries.
The chatbot’s availability doesn’t discriminate based on the time of day. Instead, it keeps you active in all your customers’ time zones. Chatbots help answer customers’ queries immediately while capturing their contact information so that human agents can reach out later, especially when queries become more complex. This 24/7 customer support translates into good customer service and builds positive word of mouth.
Enabling self-service options
You might already have a knowledge base of guides, tutorials, and FAQs to assist customers. However, it can be tricky for customers to find relevant information among different resources, especially when their queries include several “ifs” and “buts.” A customer service chatbot makes this information easy to find.
Modern chatbots use AI and natural language processing (NLP) to understand customer needs. They’re trained on the website and existing knowledge base. Based on what the customers want, the bot responds to their queries and provides links to documentation that can help.
This helps customers solve their issues independently and get a faster resolution.
Related: Chatbots for Customer Service: Strategies & Tips to Grow Customer Satisfaction
Automating routine tasks while offering personalized experiences
Using a chatbot, you can automate simple customer service processes that don’t need expertise. For example, if someone wants to reset their password, you don’t need to take them through the lengths of your support channel. The chatbot can easily automate such workflows whenever customers reach out.
The chatbot can also quickly explore historical conversations to make communication even more effective. For example, if someone wants to understand how much they spent on food-ordering services in the last two months, the bot can quickly pick context from the customer’s data and give accurate answers.
It can also compare the two, helping you discover anomalies without involving a human agent.
Collecting customer feedback
After offering relevant customer support and service, a bot can take feedback from customers at any point along the digital customer journey. This feedback is essential for the chatbot to learn and improve. It also helps the customer support and success team find their champion users and those who need support as a priority.
A strong net promoter score in this feedback indicates that customers will likely refer your product to others, helping you expand revenue. A lower score means you’ll need to make a few tweaks to deliver a better customer experience.
Chatbots can easily initiate these surveys to request customer feedback and gain valuable insights.
Related: 6 Best Practices for Implementing a Call Center Chatbot
Types of Customer Support Chatbots
You’ll normally come across two types of chatbots: rule-based chatbots and AI-powered chatbots.
Rule-based chatbots
These chatbots rely on keywords and rules to operate. You’ll find that they interact in a structured manner while following a specific flow. Rule-based chatbots are comparatively easier to implement and manage when handling simple and repetitive tasks.
However, these chatbots have some limitations:
- Predefined rules sometimes restrict the bot from understanding the actual context of queries.
- Complex queries make it difficult for a rule-based chatbot to understand or respond.
AI-powered chatbots
AI customer service chatbots interact using NLP and ML. Conversational AI mimics human communication, helping the chatbot get to the intent behind user questions.
Although these chatbots need rigorous training, they offer great flexibility in handling complex inquiries. They learn and improve over time and become better at comprehending context and nuances.
These chatbots come with features like:
- Live agent chat: When the chatbot encounters a complicated issue, it seamlessly moves the conversation to a human agent who can address it.
- Omnichannel experience: Your customers can reach out to the bot from anywhere. Whether they use a website, social media, Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, or other service channels, the chatbot brings communications from all messaging platforms into one.
Benefits of Customer Chatbots
Below are a few notable benefits of a customer support chatbot.
Increases customer satisfaction: As the response time nosedives and customers get a prompt resolution, their satisfaction score rises. This leads to happier customers, who will gradually become advocates of your brand.
The 24/7 customer support availability and self-service options provide more reasons for your champions to be fully satisfied with your service availability and quality.
Enhances efficiency and reduces costs: Chatbots deflect simple customer questions so agents can deal with more complex issues. When chatbots handle repetitive and more straightforward queries, you can cater to a growing pool of customers with a lean team of support agents.
This will lead to significant cost savings in the long run while giving ample space for your customer service teams to be more productive and efficient.
Improves overall customer experience: Chatbots capture customers’ actual needs and wants. When integrated with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, these chatbots make it easier to find specific triggers associated with events you care about. Suppose a customer asks to extend their car’s warranty by two years. That’s a good signal for you to reach out and see if they’re interested in extending the maintenance package too.
Such a signal helps you proactively listen for and predict what a customer might need. This proactiveness quickly transforms the customer’s experience into a positive one. It adds more context to overall communication with the customer while keeping your teams updated in real time.
Exploring one of the most helpful things that chatbots do
They answer quickly. It seems simple, but offering prompt support becomes a trick instead of a task as you scale. You juggle multiple inquiries, so prioritizing and routing the ones where you must provide human support becomes challenging.
Chatbots quickly engage the customer with relevant questions to better understand the nature of their inquiries. They solve more straightforward issues and connect complex inquiries to human support reps for quick and relevant assistance.
The ability to answer questions quickly and effectively offers a positive customer experience. The stats below prove it: More than 60% of people feel that getting quick answers made their experience positive while chatting with a customer service bot.
Related: The Newbie’s Guide to Conversational AI Chatbots
Considerations When Choosing a Chatbot for Customer Support
The definition of the best customer support chatbot will change depending on the use case, budget constraints, and customer preferences. It’s advisable to do some basic checks when you’re considering options.
Implementation costs
The cost of implementation will depend on whether you choose a subscription or a pay-as-you-go model. On a subscription model, Nextiva’s chatbot functionality starts at $20 per user monthly.
The subscription model will help you forecast costs and maintain the required budgets. Developing an in-house chatbot can cost more than $40,000.
Make a list of requirements and work with the vendor to get an estimate. This will help narrow down your list to a few options that fit your budget.
Workflow complexity
The level of customization you need is directly proportional to the cost and complexity of your team’s workflows. Simple chatbot solutions can be obtained at minimal cost or even for free, but they might not meet the needs of your contact center.
As you list your needs, identify the must-haves and nice-to-haves. This will help you narrow down the list further to the products that fit your requirements.
Integration with existing systems
Check how effectively the chatbot integrates with your systems. Explore integrations with your CRM, your knowledge base, and other relevant tools in your business. Ideally, you should have one platform to manage all customer interactions and communications.
Having an all-in-one communication platform will help you streamline the entire customer journey. When chatbots integrate with customer chats, you can sync them with the system, keeping communications in one place and helping your teams have effective conversations.
Intuitive user experience
To avoid frustrating your customers, prioritize a user-friendly and intuitive chatbot experience. The chatbot should be easy to use and respond accurately to simple questions from customers.
If you’re onboarding an AI bot, it’s essential to train it well on the dos and don’ts of having conversations like humans. Ensure they add a human touch, but make it perfectly clear in a short disclaimer that customers are chatting with a bot. It’s best if you offer them an option to talk to a human agent.
How you provide these options depends on you. You can give them at the beginning of conversations or allow human intervention as the interaction becomes complex. The idea is to have a clear path for escalating complicated issues to human agents.
Scale Customer Support With Nextiva
Customer support chatbots provide a way to scale your support function at reasonable costs. As you grow from a few customers to many, these chatbots take over the simpler issues, enabling your team to focus on support cases that need priority and customized assistance.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one chatbot that integrates with your CRM and customer data, choose Nextiva. It scales with your team easily and doesn’t require significant upfront investment to get started.
