AI-Powered Chatbots: Enhancing Customer Experience and Support

AI Chatbots are AI-based computer programs that are used by organizations to cater to customer queries. These AI chatbots are backed by AI technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, robotic process automation, etc that makes them versatile for different use cases. Use cases that belong to different industries and cater to different requirements.

With the uprisal of chatbots, organizations have had a higher adoption rate for the technology. The reason being that chatbots were able to address requirements that were stringent in the business. 

Therefore, to explain to you in detail the impact of chatbots in terms of enhancing customer experience and support, we have written this article.

Reasons behind using AI-Powered Chatbots – Enhancing Experience for Businesses and End-User

Here are some of the ways via which AI-powered chatbots are enhancing customer experience and support for both businesses and end-users.

Conversational Tone

Chatbots have evolved a lot since they were introduced in the market. Previously, the chatbots were trained on a limited set of data. However the chatbots that are developed using language learning models (LLM) like GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) have a conversational tone. This is the reason GPT is a popular topic amongst AI development companies. This increases the customer experience and trust on the brand as they get responses just like a human operator might do. 

24*7 Customer Support

In a Statista report of 2022 that compares the top 50 countries' globalization index, the maximum was for Switzerland (90.61)  and minimum for Mexico (71.21). This proves that organizations around the world want to trade globally. This points toward their requirement to be operational 24*7 for customer service.

It won't be a large problem for huge organizations, as they have capital and resources to implement 24*7 customer service. However with small organizations, this is not always the case. Therefore, it becomes important to use chatbots as they allow its users the comfort of running 24*7. 

These chatbots will respond to the majority of customer queries and would escalate queries to human operators for manually handling it. This creates an ecosystem where the organizations are only required to hire a limited number of resources for customer service. For the remaining, they have chatbots as the first respondent. Also with AI backing these chatbots, customers get a perception of being entertained by a human respondent. 

Helps in reducing Cost

One of Juniper Research suggested that consumers and businesses (from retail, banking, and healthcare) will save $11 billion annually by 2023. Adding to it, they will be capable of saving $2.5 billion by saving service hours. 

An AI based chatbot primarily helps in reducing cost in two ways which are:

• Less requirement of human resources: With chatbots on the front catering to the incoming customers, organizations can avoid hiring new employees as resources to support the operations.
• Time saved: Chatbots respond almost instantaneously. This decreases the time required to cater a request and helps chatbot cater more customers in less amount of time. 

With AI technology backing these chatbots, these chatbots also provided multi-faceted answers at a really fast speed.

Can Integrate Easily with Social Media

Social media platforms are a great way of engaging with the customer. On one hand where social platforms have messengers to connect with the customer directly. On the other hand, these platforms also allow installation of chatbots for automated responses. 

Below are some reasons for which chatbots can be used on social media platforms such as:

• Building relationships with the customer.
• Save time, streamline operations, and improve the overall efficiency.
• Automation of social media marketing.
• Providing multilingual chat support.
• Responding in a human-like manner (via chatbots based GPT model)

With the added benefit of AI, these chatbots also mimic the user's behavior and vocabulary, and respond in a manner that is convincing. For instance, the chatbot can be configured to respond to different customer profiles such as Gen Z, Millennials, Generation X, etc.

Personalized Responses

It is a well-stated fact that customers respond well to personalized responses. This increases their overall experience that aids in turning them into repeat customers. This is especially the case when they are connected to a versatile CRM (customer relationship management) software. Adding to it, these AI chatbots are capable of learning the vocabulary of the customer and guide them towards new personalized services and products. 

Aggregating Leads

A survey by Statista states about 26% of US-based businesses that were using chatbots gained around 10% to 20% more B2B leads.

Lead generation is an important operation that companies have to cater to. Lead generation basically means gathering new business prospects. Prospects that may be interested in buying your services or products.

In order to generate leads, chatbots utilize a conversational language. This increases confidence in the customers, and helps them trust the brand with their personal information. 

Reducing Customer Wait Time

A report by Tidio states that 62% of customers would prefer to use a chatbot instead of using a human operator. This is the case considering the fact that chatbots exceptionally reduce customer wait time. It means that customers get quick responses which is ideal for enhanced customer experience.

A chatbot can respond to a customer almost instantaneously as mentioned earlier. Adding to it, there are several benefits of reducing customer wait time such as:

• It increases customer satisfaction.
• It enhances the brand reputation in the market.
• It provides higher operational efficiency.
• It has the capacity to increase sales and revenue.
• It provides competitive advantage to its users.

Resolve Different Use Cases

Chatbots are used for communication purposes. However, they have the capacity to resolve multiple use cases too. Chatbots that are used for a particular industry are often trained using similar data. This makes them amicable to respond to industry-specific queries and use cases. Below are some of the use cases for which chatbots can be used such as:

• Sales and marketing: For sales and marketing, an AI chatbot allows it to set customer marketing and sales goals. Adding to it, the user can also customize the tonality and verbal style of the chatbot for better throughput. By doing so the prospect of acquiring more customers can be turned into reality.

• Booking and reservation: Chatbots are programmable with RPA (robotic process automation) that can be directly connected to any CMS, CRM, ERP system, etc. Using this, organizations can provide several options to choose from based on the profile of the customers using AI technology. The same can be done for booking reservations where the customer can select it as an option. After that the chatbot allows the user to input their credentials to make bookings or reservations. 

• Order tracking and delivery updates: Chatbots can be programmed to fetch order tracking and delivery updates. For instance, a user can open their preferred delivery platform. After that they open the chatbot and ask the chatbot for order updates. The chatbot will ask them to provide the order number and other associated details. Based on that, the chatbot can provide relevant information.

• Onboarding and training: Customer onboarding and training is another important operation. For onboarding customers and training, chatbots can provide steps that can be used by the customer. Also by collaborating the chatbot with an RPA, chatbots are capable of taking inputs from the user, and complete the onboarding process there itself.

• Accounts payable: Accounts payable is an important use case in multiple industries especially that deals with daily transactions. It can help in operations such as invoice processing, vendor management, payment processing, etc. The chatbots are capable of taking inputs from the user such as invoice number, order details, vendor identity, tracking time, etc. This helps in automating this process end-to-end.

• Troubleshooting: Chatbots are heavily involved in solving customer troubleshooting requirements. For instance, if there is a user who is unable to login to their banking account. Chatbots can be trained to tell the user the exact steps of retrieving the password. In fact in some cases chatbots can be used to initiate the process via RPA.

Wrapping Up!

Chatbots have proved to be a dependable technology in terms of providing better experience and support to the customer. The only thing that they lagged previously was the conversational tone. However with the inclusion of AI in chatbots and multiple AI and ML development services backing these projects, this gap has also been bridged. The AI chatbot solutions of today are complete considering they provide ROIs similar to a chatbot and converse like a human.

—————————————————————————————-

Author Bio –

Xavier Lewis is a Senior Content Writer at MobileAppDaily, a leading tech news portal that covers all the latest happenings in the digital world. He loves to write articles in the niche of technology and companies associated with it. He also works as a freelancer providing valuable content to multiple clients across different domains.