What is a customer service chatbot (and why do you need one)?

Businesses use AI chatbots and keyword chatbots to automate elements of their customer service, driving efficiencies and boosting customer satisfaction. Here we look at how chatbots improve customer service, the benefits of having a customer service chatbot, and how to get started.

Pairing a customer service chatbot with human contact center agents optimizes your contact center by offloading more repetitive tasks onto your chatbot. This frees up your human agents to deal with more challenging and gratifying support tasks.

Doing this improves contact center quality by offering immediate first contact resolution for more common enquiries, and more helpful assistance for complex customer service needs.

We took a quick look at some of the key chatbot business benefits in another post. Let’s now look specifically at the business benefits of using chatbots to automate aspects of your customer service:

Customer service chatbots work around the clock, so that whenever a customer needs you, you can be there for them. In some cases, your customer’s specific issue may be so complex that it requires the attention of a human agent. There are ways a chatbot can help in this sort of situation, too.

The Brazilian remittance company CambioReal set up a chatbot that helps customers contacting them outside office hours to schedule a text or call with an agent.

Sometimes all your customer wants is a bit of simple information. When they can get this information quickly, it instantly resolves whatever issue they may have had. This leaves you with a satisfied customer.

Chatbots can be programmed to provide this simple information that keeps your customers informed and satisfied.

Chatbots collect valuable information from interactions with your customers, and when this is paired with a contact center solution that can present this information to your agents, it gives your business the ability to provide contextual customer service.

Several benefits are tied to this – from faster resolution and improved agent productivity, to higher agent job satisfaction and increased revenue from cross and upsell opportunities that come from having a full contextual view.

Both AI chatbots and simple keyword chatbots have a range of use cases in automated customer service to help you achieve the business benefits we just explored.

The main difference between rule-based and intent-based chatbots is in how customers interact with them.

A rule-based, keyword chatbot provides a list of options that a user can choose from to progress their enquiry. Intent-based AI chatbots, on the other hand, create a conversational interaction with users by interpreting user intents and sentiment.

Customer service chatbots that interact with customers using pre-defined rules can assist with simpler customer service queries.

Users are presented with a list of options the rule-based keyword chatbots are programmed to assist with, after which they choose the right option for them by entering the corresponding keyword.

Rule-based, keyword chatbots aren’t limited to only providing information, but can help customers to find and send precisely what customers are looking for.

Customers can have perfectly natural conversations with an intent-based AI chatbot. The artificial intelligence that powers this experience recognizes customer intent and provides customer service in a way that seamlessly mimics the experience of conversing with a human agent.

How to train an AI chatbot is best started by mapping the simplest and most frequent customer service enquiries.

It is recommended to train intent-based AI chatbots with at least fifty variable phrases for every possible customer query. Because this is a large task, companies who provide chatbots will often offer either templates or professionals to help provide phrasing covering most common customer questions.

The benefits far outweigh the challenges of development, however. Training an AI chatbot that speaks your branded tone of voice creates a consistent brand experience with a positive impact on CX.

Nowadays there are plenty of solutions that make it easy for businesses to set up their own chatbots. Infobip Answers simplifies the process into a few steps with its drag-and-drop interface that requires no coding experience.

You can simulate chatbot interactions to test how users see your messages – helping you make the appropriate changes before it goes live. And with the wide variety of channels, you can set up chatbots on all your customers’ preferred channels including WhatsApp and Viber.

We hope you enjoyed this look at customer service chatbot benefits and examples. Be sure to check out our related posts on: