If you’ve ever had a problem and needed to contact customer service or customer support, then chances are you had a very slow and often frustrating experience. Most likely because the agent responsible for helping you is looking through a whole range of different tools and platforms, which means they have a lot of information that is either time consuming to access or sometimes even inaccessible.
Step forward the chatbot, defined as a program that uses instant messaging as an application interface. If this is something new to you and you think you’ve never spoken to a chatbot before, chances are you’re wrong. It’s used by Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Facebook, and many of the other big tech giants.
The recent growth of chatbots has been huge, so huge that by 2020 Gartner predicts that 85 percent of all customer service interactions will be done via chatbots.
Perhaps the most cited example of chatbots customer experience would be when you have an issue with a product; the chatbot would engage with you by asking a few questions and then take an educated, and usually very accurate, guess about what’s wrong and how to fix it.
Other examples include customer service, providing references or ideas for shoppers, as well as marketing and customer engagement.
So, the beauty of the chatbot is its ability to sift through large amounts of information and provide relevant results tailored to your needs and issues. This actually makes it more efficient than a human, who may struggle to handle so much information.
It’s also worth mentioning that, more often than not, the person trying to help you may actually be using a search engine like Google to try and find the solution to your problem or need – the same piece of software that you already have access to. This highlights a major problem for many companies, in that they lack usable knowledge bases.
Ultimately, this is what makes the chatbot an exciting new feature for companies. It will replace the existing knowledge bases. Some even say that it will replace applications; chatbots are generally used on messenger apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook, who combined have 2.8 billion users.
For companies, these chatbots are easy to set up and the applications are already on your customers’ phones, giving you around the clock access to your customers at a much lower cost with a higher level of efficiency.
If you’re thinking of introducing a chatbot to your business then take a look at our Business Intelligence page and find out about the service offerings and solutions that we can provide you with.
