As customers increasingly expect instant, tailored support for their questions or problems, businesses need to be positioned to respond accordingly. Simple, powerful, and always on, chatbots help ensure your customers receive the prompt and efficient care they expect.
What Exactly Is a Chatbot?
Essentially, a chatbot is an automated tool that processes and responds to human language. They might respond to simple questions, “route” calls, or perform basic tasks. While we tend to think of chatbots as being text-based, many chatbots can also recognize speech input. Chatbots vary in complexity from simple programs that respond to questions with a pre-programmed response (data-driven chatbots) all the way up to complex digital assistants underpinned by natural language processing capabilities that allow them to “learn” over time (conversational chatbots).
Chatbots are increasingly popular as a way to efficiently manage customer interactions while reducing the load on internal staff. They’re convenient, effective, and can easily handle large input volumes at once. They can easily be scaled up and down and are popular with customers, who often prefer being able to solve a problem by tapping a few buttons vs. making a call.
Business Cases for Chatbots
Integrated into a thoughtful sales funnel and wider customer service offer, chatbots offer organizations of all sizes a number of benefits.
- Easily qualify leads. Chatbots can “sort” leads using just a few questions so that qualified leads are sent to your sales team. This reduces the time your personnel might spend talking to unqualified leads – and helps drives sales.
- Reduced ad spend. A site-based chatbot can help customers navigate your website, find products, or answer questions they might have. This means that prospects who land on your website are more likely to stick around – and convert.
- Free up team time. Chatbots are a great solution for those repetitive FAQs. Instead of your team spending valuable working time dealing with low-value questions or requests, outsource those to a chatbot.
- Skip the inbox. Chatbots can answer simple questions sent through your website, app, or social media pages, reducing the volume of requests in your inbox.
- Gather data. Chatbots can quickly gather basic information about new leads or existing customers, helping you dial in your customer personas and target your campaigns.
- Personalize the experience. Chatbots can dig into customer data and past conversations to deliver a tailored experience, for example recommending certain products or using a saved zip code to calculate shipping time.
- Solve customer problems. Chatbots allow customers to take control of simple customer service questions or tasks such as checking balances or activating cards – and without the wait.
- An on-brand experience. Don’t let the “bot” part of the name fool you. Chatbots can be customized to speak with your brand’s voice and deliver an experience aligned with your brand promise.
- Always on. Chatbots allow your business to serve customers outside the 9-5. Whether you switch them on purely out of hours or make use of them 24/7, they ensure you’re always reachable.
- Multi-lingual support. Support a greater diversity of customers with instant multi-lingual support that allows them to connect with you in their own language.
Regardless of your business’s type, size, or scale, a chatbot can be an effective way to streamline workflows, round out your customer contact operations, and deliver a positive customer experience.
Elevate Your Customer Service with ACD
Whether you’re considering integrating a chatbot into your customer contact experience or you’re looking to round out your existing chatbot capabilities with a robust customer contact platform, talk to the team at ACD. Our all-in-one, cloud-based platform is powerful, tailorable, and scalable – and will empower you to deliver best-in-class customer service with a fraction of the effort. For more information, get in touch today.
