How to Improve Customer Service With AI-Powered Chatbots

Modern customers have a lot of expectations from your business. Are you equipped to fulfil them? If not, then you need to consider building  AI-powered chatbots.

It’s becoming more difficult to satisfy your customers. For example, three-quarters of all customers demand a consistent cross-channel service experience, while two-thirds of millennials anticipate real-time customer service. 

Furthermore, hiring highly qualified staff to provide excellent customer service isn’t a practical solution, since cost pressures are increasing at a rate that is at least equal to the rise in service requirements.

However, do AI-powered chatbots genuinely enhance the customer experience?

According to recent statistics, the satisfaction rate of AI-driven chatbots is approximately 69%. This is a promising indicator that building AI-powered chatbots for customer service can raise their satisfaction levels considerably.

To clear all your doubts and explore the role of AI-powered chatbots in customer service improvement, we have compiled this blog post so you can make the right choice.

Are Chatbots Replacing Human Agents?

So this is the biggest concern of everybody right now. The emergence of AI-powered chatbots has provoked conversations regarding their effects on the human workforce across several sectors.

88% of customers interacted with an AI-powered chatbot at least once in 2023. It is reasonable to suppose that their popularity has been rising quickly as a result. 

Despite this, AI-driven chatbots aren’t here to replace humans in customer service. Conversely, they are an excellent complement to customer service teams, augmenting existing capabilities and enabling staff members and clients to gain from this technology upgrade.

Here’s how building chatbots powered by AI can help your customer service team:

• Handling repetitive tasks: Chatbots allow human agents to work on more difficult, high-value activities by answering commonly requested queries automatically and offering immediate assistance.
• Handling a large number of queries: Chatbots can take over during periods of high volume or unplanned spikes in customer messages without sacrificing quality or overtaxing customer support staff. 
• Compiling client information: Chatbots can handle first conversations and subsequently escalate them to human agents, giving customer support teams a much-needed context about a query. 

Difference Between Traditional Rule-based Chatbots and Generative AI-powered Chatbots

A chatbot is a tool that can mimic human dialogue to varied degrees of complexity. However, many don’t know that different kinds of chatbots exist. 

Conventional rule-based chatbots sometimes referred to as decision-tree bots, operate according to predetermined rules that are established following the situation or issue they are trained to solve. The majority of these conventional chatbots use if/then statements and generate output mostly through keyword detection. They are built on the theory of expert systems, which was popular in the 1980s. 

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are a subset of conversational AI systems that are capable of carrying on human-like dialogues. They create their responses by using Large Language Models (LLMs) that have been trained on enormous datasets.

Traditional chatbots provide a less flexible conversational flow as they are rule-based and follow a script. They lack language interpretation and are less complicated than chatbots powered by generative AI. Conversely, generative AI-powered chatbots use deep learning and natural language processing to emulate human conversation. They are adaptable and can learn from past interactions. They can also conduct sentiment analysis, recognize behaviour patterns, and offer customized experiences. 

Although generative AI-powered chatbots may provide wrong responses and biases, there are several developments and advancements taking place in the field that make these bots superior to what they are now. These bots can be used for many different tasks, such as creating content for various sectors and providing customer service. 

Benefits of AI-Powered Chatbots for Customer Service

There are many advantages that chatbots offer to both businesses and consumers. Discover how building chatbots powered by AI is improving your customer service:

Cut Down on Wait Times

In a recent Zendesk CX Trends research, 71% of customers said AI and chatbots enable them to receive responses more quickly. By serving as your consumers’ initial point of contact, AI-powered chatbots can cut down on wait times when integrated into your customer support system. 

If the problem is complicated, the bot may switch over to a human representative. Since customer support teams would only have to handle complex jobs, they would be less burdened. This happens as AI-driven chatbots address routine and trivial inquiries that would often be handled by human agents.

Offer a Customized Experience

According to a McKinsey survey, 71% of consumers want personalized experiences from brands, and 76% of respondents said they become irritated when brands fall short of their expectations. This demonstrates the significance of customisation in the consumer journey. It’s also critical to realize that personalization entails more than just using the customer’s first name. It entails giving clients customized experiences, tailored goods and services, help and support, and even customization in the manner and tone of communications. 

AI-powered chatbots can develop a data-driven customization strategy by analyzing user data and interactions to customize the bot’s interactions to each user’s unique demands

Meeting the Customer Demand

When a customer connects with a business, they expect personalization, immediate attention, and solutions. And regardless of the communication method used, they anticipate those answers. Furthermore, customers of today demand that the brands they deal with understand their wants and take the initiative to address their problems.

As businesses expand, human agents always find it difficult to provide keep up with the increasing workload. The expansion of the company and the ability to scale customer service are equally important, and both growth strategies must coexist. AI-powered chatbots for customer support can help with that.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots can answer any question that your customer-facing support workers are asked regularly. They not only reply to them quickly, but they also do so reliably, which is something that human agents rarely manage to achieve. Not only do customers appreciate the speed and reliability, but customer care agents also gain from it.

Instead of wasting time answering the same questions over and over again, human agents may now conduct conversations with clients whose demands are more complex and require human interaction.

24/7 Support

It can be difficult for a scaling business to keep up with the increasing volume of brand-to-customer contacts. Customers have access to more sources than ever before for communication, including WhatsApp messaging and social media comments. It can be expensive to have the necessary resources to manage the increasing number of contact channels. 

No matter the time of day, customers who are willing to purchase a product but have questions deserve answers. Thus, the only workable option—unless you can provide conversations around the clock—is to use AI-powered chatbots. When customers need them, they always have the answers they need, are quick to respond, and are always available.

Even if it is unable to respond to a particularly complex query, an AI-powered chatbot can provide an “out of office” response and request email addresses. When your human customer support staff returns to work the following day, they can take over the process from there. Even if it takes some time, the consumer is considerably more likely to have a positive experience. 

AI-powered Chatbots are Self-Improving

AI-powered chatbots for customer service do more than merely respond to queries using AI. Additionally, they use it as a learning tool to automatically raise the standard of future service provided. For instance, a chatbot that can respond to queries such as “How do I find x product?” will be able to identify that “Where do I find x product?” has the same meaning. Its knowledge base will immediately be updated with that same phrasing so that similar questions can be asked in the future.

Naturally, not all learning needs to be done with AI. Your bots can also be trained to give more insightful responses. You can fine-tune your bot’s response by using questions that your consumers have asked—or that you anticipate they will ask.

Multilingual Support

Over 58% of small firms deal with foreign clients. Therefore, it’s likely that customers are communicating with your chat support teams in a variety of languages and nations. 

Since AI-powered chatbots can translate languages in real time, you can offer multilingual chat help. Language barriers should no longer be an excuse to abandon inquiries in other languages. 

AI-powered chatbots can process many languages thanks to sophisticated Natural Language Processing (NLP), which enables them to interact with a wide range of customers.

With the help of this functionality, you can provide self-service assistance in many languages without hiring bilingual workers with specific training. As a result, customers can communicate with enterprises in their preferred language, improving communication accuracy and broadening the scope of your offerings. 

Identify Leads for the Business

AI-powered chatbots provide first customer or prospect support encounters, opening up conversations for service agents to follow up on. For instance, a chatbot may ask a series of crucial questions and transfer the responses to a qualified person to convert the lead. They can then utilize this data to tailor their interactions with customers in the future.

Deflecting high-volume, low-complexity encounters is the biggest motivation behind building chatbots powered by AI. AI-powered chatbots have a ton of promise for growing personalization-focused industries. As businesses grow to know their customers and utilize AI to forecast their next move, personalization becomes even more effective.

Efficient Feedback Mechanism

In today’s corporate world, customer reviews are quite important. According to reports, 92.4% of consumers are more inclined to buy a good or service after reading good reviews about it. 

It can be difficult to get customers to submit reviews on their own, though. AI-driven chatbots can effectively ask customers for feedback after a purchase, as 71% of them are willing to provide a review if asked.

Some clients may find it more enticing to get feedback requests from your chatbot via email rather than receiving it instantly. You can even link your chatbot to email.

Turning Visitors into Clients

Everybody has encountered a chatbot that actively greets them upon visiting a website. 

This goes beyond simple camaraderie.

By assisting a visitor before even asks for it, proactive chatbots can successfully convert visitors into qualified leads. 

This strategy is particularly helpful for companies that provide software as a service (SaaS), as potential customers may be reluctant to raise inquiries and often lengthy onboarding is necessary.

You can create sensible chatbot conversation flows with proactive chat to improve the customer experience at every point of the customer journey. A quick and easy-to-use chat experience can be achieved by streamlining the interaction with elements like clickable answer buttons in the chat window.

In addition to helping to quickly respond to visitor inquiries, this increases client engagement and overall satisfaction levels.

Extending Customer Services to Social Media

Social media is being used by over 5.07 billion individuals worldwide, many of whom are perhaps your clients.  You can no longer afford to ignore social media if you want to successfully communicate with your audience. 

Your social media pages integrated with AI-powered chatbots can revolutionize your customer experience and sales strategy. Customers can get their questions answered by chatbots on your social media platforms immediately, saving them from having to leave their favorite channels. Chatbots guarantee a smooth and effective client experience by responding to inquiries about products, assisting customers with the purchase process, and offering post-purchase assistance.

Wrapping Up

Artificial Intelligence is at the forefront of this ongoing technological revolution. AI-driven chatbots are revolutionizing customer service, changing everything from how we live to how we purchase and sell. Whether it’s a product recommendation or a simple question answered, better, faster help can be provided by organizations. In addition to saving your human agents time, it guarantees that customer satisfaction and engagement. 

Get in contact with the Technocrats team right now if you’re prepared to rethink what it means to provide more proactive and interesting customer service. With empowered communications tools, give your customer service staff the superpowers they need to continuously provide the best possible customer assistance. By building chatbots powered by AI, Technocrats can help your business grow without running into conventional CX problems. Get in touch with our team right now to discuss your needs.