Malene Wessel, Head of Marketing at Live Guide Chat believes chatbots can boost a company’s customer service, taking over some of the most simple and frequent types of customer contacts. 
Many companies have FAQs and tutorials and try their best to optimize the design of their website to enable customers to find answers themselves. However, most customers want answers handed to them with minimum effort and can’t be bothered to browse around hoping to find an answer.
Chatbots can be your first line of customer service
You can use the chatbot to answer all the simple queries from visitors so your customer service team can focus on the more complex ones. If the chatbot doesn’t know an answer, it calls in your chat agents.
In this way, a chatbot can boost a company’s customer service, handling some of the most simple and frequent types of customer contacts.
Increase efficiency
If you migrated some or all your support to chat in favor of phone and e-mail to chat, you most likely noticed a significant increase in your service efficiency. With a chatbot you will be able to increase the efficiency even more. A lot more, actually: with high-repeat questions handled by the chatbot, costs with shifts and overtime can decrease by 10–50%.
Improve customer satisfaction
Lower waiting times, consistent and instant answers make customers happy, driving customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score up.
The bot never sleeps and never takes a day off. This means you will be able to offer 24/7 support on your most frequent queries. Customers will never experience a queue to chat and you will have less unanswered chats and phone calls.
The bot answers questions instantly. Even for questions it cannot answer, it provides other options in a timely manner, making sure the customer’s waiting time is kept to a minimum.
Eliminate peak loads in customer service
By reducing or completely eliminating peak loads in customer service, you can provide a better customer experience, save on staff costs and increase employee satisfaction.
Thanks to its 24/7 availability, the chatbot breaks a quantitative barrier: it simply answers the trivial customer queries faster and more flawlessly than a human being, and it works around the clock without any interruptions.
The chatbot as a valued colleague that can improve employee satisfaction
You can look at the chatbot as an intelligent assistant to your customer service team. If it does not know the answer to a question, it passes the question to a human colleague to take over the conversation. Once the chatbot is taught an answer, it will remember it forever, unless of course you decide to remove or change it.
Currently your customer service may be spending 20% of their time thinking and 80% typing. With a chatbot you can eradicate most of the fruitless typing, raising the level of job satisfaction for your human staff and unleash your team’s full potential.
Barriers in the organization
Many organizations end up endlessly discussing whether or not they want to use robots. However, much like with the revolution in all major industries, the chatbot is simply the next technological step forward.
Most major industries have chosen to automate parts of their workflow, creating savings, higher throughput, better quality and improved job satisfaction. In the customer support space, all of these benefits and more may be made available by the use of a chatbot.
About the Author
Malene Wessel is Head of Marketing at Live Guide Chat. For more information on how live chat can help companies increase sales and customer satisfaction while reducing their service costs visit liveguidechat.com.
