In the digital era, where customers demand increasingly better service and products, customer service has become one of the most important activities of companies nowadays. The corporate image depends quite heavily on the customer service that is being offered. A great customer experience leads to more satisfied customers, and therefore a larger retention rate of these customers.
One way of achieving better customer service is the implementation of chatbots, which have multiple advantages. Usage of chatbots leads to faster answers, which is crucial for responding to impatient customers. Secondly, chatbots can answer frequently asked questions automatically so that customer service employees can spend their time on more complex questions. Thirdly, chatbots are proactive: they start the conversation by asking “Can I help you?” or likewise. Other advantages are fewer errors, increased customer engagement and they can even perform simple tasks such as transferring money.
However, there are some disadvantages too. One of them is the fact that only a small part of the population uses them: over sixty percent of users of chatbots are teenagers. This indicates that people older than that are reluctant to use them. When planning on implementing chatbots, companies should keep the customer segment they target in mind. Secondly, chatbots are unable to improvise when they do not have the required knowledge that a certain question demands. Using a chat bot is therefore not appropriate for very complex questions. Lastly, they do make mistakes, which is important to realise. For example, chatbots don’t get sarcasm.
Would you implement a chatbot in your future business?
Sources:
https://www.livechatinc.com/blog/chatbots-improve-customer-service/
Hi Manon,
Nice article, chatbots can certainly enhance the customer experience like you described. However, I would not implement them in my business (if I had one).
Chatbots in their current state are very limited in their use. Like you already said: They can say ‘Hi’, give answer to only very basic questions and or even make mistakes. All this would make the customer experience a little bit worse and more frustrating for customer who expects real answers.
However, if technology advances and chatbots could actually communicate with customers and give advice based on what the customers says, chatbots would be a welcome addition in any business.
Hey there, thanks for your blogpost!
To answer your question about if I would implement it I’d have to say yes, but potentially not yet. In my opinion I feel that chatbots are still quite underdeveloped. In my personal encountering with them, they actually annoy me more than make me feel better served. On the other hand, I realise that chatbots do increase the efficiency of engaging your customers considerably faster. In this one article I read it shows that without them, it can take businesses 5 days (55% of the ones surveyed) to respond to customers. Personally what I would do is to invest in chatbots for the trivial decisions and customer questions, I think a lot more investment is still required in them to properly create competitive advantages. I would invest to increase the development of the chatbot – as to not annoy my customers.
The biggest reason I would invest in chatbots would be to utilise my human resources on more value added activities, but only to the point where the chatbots are almost as good as a human response.
Michiel
Hi Manon,
First of all, very interesting topic! Chatbots are indeed very useful for companies dealing with their customers. This technology is also being used more and more, while they could handle frequently asked questions greatly as you mentioned in your blog post.
Personally, I think that chatbots can be very handy in determining consumer preferences for example as apparel company H&M showed (see link below). Shoppers of H&M can with the help of the chatbot, determine what style the shopper has. In this way, H&M can personalize products shown to the consumer. H&M is already experiencing the benefits of this technology within their app.
What are your predictions for the future? Will chatbots replace customer service (partly), or not?
https://www.techemergence.com/7-chatbot-use-cases-that-actually-work/
Hi Manon, Interesting article on the chatbot, you do have a valid point, that older people refuse to use them like that, however, my opinion is that AI can improve these kind of chatbots so much, that it (almost) feels like you’re talking to a human person. An example is already there, it is not even a chatbot, but more of a voice assistant, in this video you can check out this Google assistant making an appointment at a barber store. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM
Hi Manon, Great article! I would implement chatbot in my business. Although it is true that their functionality is rather limited, I still believe that there is some benefit in using them. Answering basic questions on availability of certain products and such in real time will improve the customer experience. Furthermore, using AI, one could train the chatbot to improve over time. This works best when you allow the chatbot to gather as much data over a long period of time. One major downside I can think of however, in using AI to train the chatbot, is what happened to Microsoft’s chatbot that ended up saying messed up things. The risk of this happening is, in my opinion, quite small which is why I would use a chatbot in my business.
Hi Manon, I would definitely implement a chatbot in my business. Sure their functionality is not yet perfect, but they have come a long way. Easier questions can often be answered quickly and effectively by chatbots, and at a low cost too. Human customer support is expensive and dealing with rather simple questions is not very cost efficient, and as Michiel stated often very slow too. Personally, I’m excited to see how far chatbots will develop in the future, maybe all customer support could eventually be shifted to chatbots relying on AI?