In the past, when consumers wanted to interact with a company, they had limited options. They could choose between emailing the business, phoning them, or even trying to speak to a rep in person. Now, we're finding new ways for enterprises and their customers to interact. Sometimes, this also means passing conversations over to a robot, for them to handle.
Capable of mimicking human conversations, chatbots have soared in popularity over recent years as organisations have invested in better ways to quickly serve their customers. With a chatbot, your company can be online and ready to answer questions whenever your client needs you. What's more, you won't have to spend as much on human employees either.
While chatbots aren't intended to eliminate the human worker, they can be an excellent supplement to the workforce for many ventures. From saving time to reducing repetitive tasks, there's a lot that a chatbot can do.
What are Chatbots?
In basic terms, a chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate human conversation. It communicates with people through text messages or online messaging and integrates with your website or CRM system. Chatbots give businesses a way to consistently serve and support their customers, without having to hire endless staff members from around the world.
Used correctly, an effective chatbot can help with everything from getting rid of routine tasks, to processing simultaneous requests within an enterprise. What's more, their processing speed means that they can solve issues for clients quickly, earning customer loyalty. Since customer experience is the biggest differentiator for modern companies, chatbots can be a great way to build your strategy. Around 83% of online shoppers say they need support throughout their buyer journey. Chatbots can help by providing guidance, suggestions and more.
Chatbots can also contribute to cost-savings for today's businesses. After all, it's much cheaper to create a chatbot than hire a new team of staff. What's more, cross-channel bots mean that you can handle multiple queries at once. Chatbots can even reduce human error, which may be one of the reasons why they're set to control about 85% of our interactions by next year (2020).
When paired with artificial intelligence, chatbots also give enterprises a way to improve their knowledge about their target customers. With a bot, you can collect insights and gather useful information about your products and services. In the future, we'll continue to see the development of smarter bots that not only communicate through text but through natural language processing and voice too.
Chatbot Trends
According to The State of Chatbots report, 64% of users consider 24-hour service to be the best feature of chatbots. What's more, over 50% of consumers expect businesses to be available to answer their questions all of the time. Chatbots can help to transform the customer service industry as we know it. Here are some of the biggest trends in the sector.
1. The Rise of Voice
Chatbots are no longer regulated to the realm of text anymore. In recent years, customers have become increasingly enthralled by the rise of voice bots and digital assistants like Siri and Amazon Alexa. Billions of voice-enabled devices have been sold around the world, and people are starting to feel more comfortable using their voice to make requests. In the years ahead, we'll begin to see more natural language programming and understanding solutions in voice-enabled chatbots.
Chatbots with IVR capabilities may even be able to take over the introductory conversations that customers have with a business when they call a contact centre.