Do AI Chatbots Offer Untapped Potential For Optimizing Customer Service Teams?

When customers have a question or an issue that needs to be resolved, perhaps the last thing they want is to deal with long wait times. 

It’s frustrating to have to watch for an email response or stay on the phone for 30 minutes just to reach a representative. In today’s fast-paced, competitive consumer economy, these tools might just be becoming outdated. 

Consumers have more options than ever and are more likely to voice their grievances through online reviews. This can tarnish a business’s reputation and hurt revenue. 

Poor customer support can damage a company, but good customer support can present moe opportunities. For starters, customer support can be harnessed to generate new leads and support the sales channel. It can also be a critical tool for growth by providing customer feedback to enhance products and services. 

Despite the importance of high-quality customer support, there can be a gap between a business’s ability to serve customers and scale. Companies relying on human representatives for all their support needs will reportedly pay a hefty price.

Some experts are saying that this is the time for the entrance of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. These are software applications that can conduct an online chat conversation via text or text-to-speech with customers. They can replace or supplement live human agents by automating conversations. 

AI chatbots have seemingly been shown to be efficient in a multitude of scenarios. They can answer questions in seconds, while conversions with live agents can take up to four minutes for a response. While human teams are limited in their ability to scale, some reports indicate that with a 3-4 minutes call,100 AI chatbots can manage up to about 2,500 outbound calls in one hour, while a single human agent can only manage 15 to 20 calls per hour. 

Human agents are also limited in the number of work hours they can commit. Human employees can’t realistically work nonstop for an entire shift, typically around eight hours. And if a company needs to address customer concerns overnight, a need to hire additional team members to manage these needs often exists.

Many businesses are using chatbots as their main portal of customer contact or to supplement human teams. Businesses can reportedly save money, scale their support teams, provide better service and improve the way they organize and collect critical customer information. This data can be then directed toward lead generation and help sales teams close new deals.

Leading customer support software providers include Zendesk Inc. ZEN, Twilio Inc. TWLO and Inforbird Co. Ltd. IFBD. Infobird as an example has recently made headlines for helping companies optimize each stage of the customer journey, from brand awareness to post-sales relationship management.

Learn more about AI chatbot-driven solutions for customer management and sales here. 

This post contains sponsored advertising content. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be investing advice.

Featured photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash