With the rise of the internet and the availability of information consumers do not want to wait for their questions to be answered or problems to be fixed. Messaging applications have already more than 1,2 billion users, who are used to the fast and easy use of text messaging (1). Why would you still call to a customer service department as your question can easily be answered by sending a message? More and more people are making use of this message option for asking questions or help from a company. The rising amount of questions by consumers and also their high expectation of fast response time make it difficult for companies to meet this demand without losing quality(2). The expected solution or partial solution for this problem is the Chatbot. The Chatbot can be described as a virtual assistant that communicates with users through text messages in natural language(1). Artificial intelligence (AI) software ensures that the Chatbot can understand the question of a user and ensures that the question will be answered in the same way as a client service executive would.
The biggest advantage of the Chatbot is that consumers can communicate on every time of the day with the company, as robots will never get tired. Consumers also never have to wait in line as they can help as many people as necessary at the same time. They also stay always friendly as they do not feel frustrated or tired. All these advantages will lead to higher customer satisfaction. Besides higher customer satisfaction it also has operational advantages as you need less employees for the client service department (3). All the advantages of the Chatbot can only be realised by using a Chatbot correctly. It is very important that the Chatbot does not feel impersonal and that it suits the brand image. Also the way of answering questions should not be to vague, but the Bot should also not use to many words. Another aspect is which tasks the Chatbot should perform and which tasks will be forwarded to a human client service executive. These are all aspects to keep in mind by creating a Chatbot (4).
In my opinion the use of Chatbots will rise enormously, as it takes less time to send a message and it is also very easy. But I think it is important for companies to hire specialists in building Chatbots, as you will have no advantages as your Chatbot does not feel like a person (4). Chatbots can also develop further and have use different approaches to different consumers, in that way the customer journey will be even more improved. Conclusively, I think Chatbot is really the future of client service, it only needs more fine tuning and specialists that can build correctly operating Chatbots.
Sources:
1:https://medium.com/swlh/what-is-a-chatbot-and-how-to-use-it-for-your-business-976ec2e0a99f
2:https://www.meltwater.com/blog/11-social-media-trends-to-watch-out-for-in-2018/
3:https://www.marutitech.com/benefits-chatbot/
Thanks for your contribution, Renee, very interesting read. I do agree with you that we will move towards an online field where most human interaction will be replaced with chatbots. However, I’m interested in your view in the retail section. Do you think that salesman in the long run will also be replaced by bots? Where will we draw the line of automation? Very curious about how you think about this