A recent study resulted in 52% of customers preferred messaging over phone calls for solving their service issues. Because calling often results in multiple transfers between different agents and on hold waiting time. Also, inconsistency in meeting customer’s expectation damages brand’s identity to develop fruitful, long-term customer relationships. Within the field of customer communications, the bar is set high, and we have worked hard to gain customer’s trust in instant real-time chat interactions. The evolution of customer service, originating from call centers and services disguised as chat, created an unfriendly, disappointing connotation that cast a dark cloud over the customer service experience.

Enter Chatbot – a vigorous new medium to increase sales and assist a wide range of customers. One of them is Facebook Messenger’s new Chatbot feature causing an upheaval in the technology industry.

While Chatbots are aimed at rattling the customer service world, humans will still be at the steer tomorrow. But, how can we ensure harmonious coexistence of humans and bots? Also, what should be the trigger point for automation (bots) to jump in? To answer the second question take a situation where the customer is spending a lot of time on the customer service page of a website. It is highly possible that they have an issue, complaint or query. Using reverse IP lookup, companies can find out these individuals and use automation to notify the right member of the customer service staff, and try to solve that better than the traditional approach. This is how the technology companies should start using to be first in the race of industry.

Chatbots can help customers with seemingly elementary tasks and act much quicker at times than humans. However, humans still have the ability to perceive and understand social hushed tones and subtext in a way that Chatbots cannot mimic. Call centers have been targeted as the next phase of the Chatbot roll-out revolution. Customer care representatives shouldn’t think about how to stop the Chatbot, but rather how to utilize its power for their good.

What will customers expect from a Virtual Assistant/ Chatbot?

Chatbots can offer many benefits over Customer Service agents of Call Centers.

The goal of the Customer Service Chatbot is to decrease the latency between sending customer’s query and receiving the required response. When this involves human interaction the answer may take hours or even days, if at all required. Automation using Bot can largely reduce the delay, down to the point where it appears to be instantaneous.

Chatbot assistants can provide access to New and Vast Audience

The great thing about Chatbots is that it is a benefit for both the organization as well as the consumers. Customers get the service they require in the App they already use on regular basis, and companies gain access to entirely new audience and save time and money as well. The cost of a Chatbot is a fraction of the cost to build, maintain and deploy an app. A Chatbot can be integrated with an already popular app with a huge, already engaged audience. The popular chat apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, and WeChat, have around $2 billion total combined users, giving organizations an incredible opportunity to expand their market reach.

Can Chatbot and Customer Service Executives form a better team?

Nowadays Chatbots are a trend and Customer Service industry is using Chatbots to deliver predetermined messages to customer inquiries, removing humans from the equation. For example, Chatbots can be programmed to provide details such as account information, Shipping updates, order status, etc. This is a smooth solution, though it isn’t the most effective one. Hence for companies to make a connection with customers that truly matters, artificial resources should be used in a different way.

Chatbots can be used to handle the initial interaction to gather customer details and information on the issue before handing it over to an agent. This will reduce waiting time issues for customers, also eliminate the time of passing the query to particular issue related executive. This Chatbot+Agent combo approach has few more advantages:

There is no initial wait time for the customers. They are attended immediately, and their info is collected. It gives them the satisfaction of an immediate response. If the customer problem is resolvable by the Chatbot itself, the customer service executive’s interference will never be needed. If at all the Customer Service Executive’s interference is needed, Chatbots can forward the query to the executive’s most qualified to handle the issue based on the automation.

Sooner or later, companies will have to offer customer service via messaging if you want to keep your customers happy. By implementing a digital workforce of software robots, organizations can ensure that work is done around the clock, eliminating the human error, reducing human dependency which will drive and ensure an ‘always-on’ service for customers. Messaging and Chatbots combination increases the customer care executive’s productivity and provides your customers with the immediate and convenient help they require. The technology behind Chatbots is complicated but grasping the benefits of using them is not. The use of intelligent software can enhance customer service experience without being obtrusive.