Chatbots are empowering employees to schedule meetings and reminders, and answer simple questions without interrupting their workflow, to name just a few use cases. Gartner predicts that by 2020, the average person will have more conversations with chatbots than with their spouse.

Driven by the promise of 24/7 intelligent digital support, more companies are adopting chatbots to interact with customers alongside now-classic phone, email, and social media channels.

But what exactly is a chatbot?

Derived from “chat robot,” a chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation, either through voice or text communication.

You can find chatbots communicating through smart speakers, smart home devices, and popular chat and messaging platforms like SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and LINE.

How is it changing for customers?

In addition to having a conversation with a person (like a sales representative or a support agent, for example), people can interact with software that helps find answers quickly. Whether typing or speaking, a chatbot can connect with a customer. More importantly, it can influence the customer relationship by responding to requests faster and meeting expectations.

Excerpt from “State of Service,” Salesforce Research, March 2019

Chatbots can also free up customer service teams to apply their emotional intelligence to more complex inquiries.

The business impacts can include reducing costs by enabling self-service in simple scenarios, delivering relevant information faster, and improving the customer experience.

The Evolution of a Chatbot

More recently, chatbot systems have become much more sophisticated, thanks to significant advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). By leveraging vast amounts of data and cheaper processing power, AI and related technologies like machine learning are helping to dramatically improve the quality of chatbots’ understanding and decision-making.

“64% of agents with AI chatbots can spend most of their time solving complex problems, compared to 50% of agents without AI chatbots.”

<cite>“State of Service,” Salesforce Research, March 2019</cite>

When chatbots are connected to technologies like NLU, they can learn more complex ways to simulate human conversation, such as maintaining context, managing a dialogue, and adjusting responses based on what arises in the conversation.

Digital disruption is rapidly raising customer expectations.

Today’s consumers and business buyers are more informed and less loyal than their predecessors. They are looking for differentiated experiences based on trust and understanding, and they will compare prices to find them.

When chatbots are connected to technologies like NLU, they can learn more complex ways to simulate human conversation, such as maintaining context, managing a dialogue, and adjusting responses based on what arises in the conversation.

An AI-powered chatbot can also be trained to actively learn from any interaction with a customer to improve performance during the next interaction. For example, such systems can be trained to recognize customer frustration and hand over any more complex interaction or issue to a human at the company’s support center.

The Benefits of Chatbots

While chatbots cannot replace humans, they can complement the support chat experience, providing employees or customers with a friendly greeting and direct ways to get what they need, quickly.

• Reduced customer wait time. Chatbots can reduce the time customers spend waiting in line. People get immediate answers to common questions (about order status, store hours, or locations, for example) in a chat window rather than waiting for an email, phone call, or response from another channel.
• Support case resolution. Bots can also be a company’s ally in the race to resolve support cases quickly. This is because they can immediately answer simple questions to customers to make them happier, and they can do it over and over again. Consequently, fewer cases are registered for support agents to resolve.
• Efficient management of redirects for customer inquiries. This is another strength of AI chatbots: bots can instantly welcome customers with a branded greeting in a chat window, for example, and quickly direct them to the resources they need.
• Reduce customer wait time. Chatbots can reduce the time customers spend waiting in line. People get immediate answers to common questions (about order status, store hours, or locations, for example) in a chat window rather than waiting for an email, phone call, or response from another channel.
• Provide leads to agents. By handling initial support interactions with a customer or prospect, AI chatbots can help open conversations that human agents can follow up on. A bot could ask a series of relevant questions, for example, and collect an email address, thus delivering a more qualified lead to a sales representative, who can then use this information to personalize future customer interactions.

AI and chatbot technology will continue to evolve, ushering in a new era of text- and voice-enabled user experiences that reshape the customer experience.

As research shows, high-performing service teams are often ahead of the curve in developing AI chatbots to augment their human agents and provide customer service support. In an era where service speed is more important than ever, chatbots are helping businesses stay ahead of the game.

To learn how you can leverage chatbots, AI, and other customer engagement technologies, contact us.