As customers increasingly interact with companies through digital channels, expectations for fast and convenient support have grown. Today’s customer wants to spend less time getting information than ever before. They expect to receive services anytime and anywhere, regardless of time, location, or communication channel.
Over the past decade, live chat services have become a preferred option for providing or receiving customer support. More recently, fueled by technological advances in artificial intelligence (AI), AI chatbots are increasingly handling customer interactions that previously required human support agents. These automated agents are designed to communicate with human users using natural language.
AI chatbots are becoming popular in customer service for two main reasons. The first is the rise in the general popularity of instant messaging, and the second is the fact that conversational agents are ideal for performing repetitive and routine support tasks.
Benefits for Companies and Customers
Just like human service agents, chatbots function as company representatives to help customers solve problems or provide information and advice. Customers’ initial requirements for interaction are similar to those with human agents. Therefore, chatbots must also have certain characteristics that are expected from human service and support agents. The most important qualities include helpfulness, trustworthiness, and the ability to simplify common support procedures.
Customer requests from chatbots are both informational and emotional. Machine learning and deep learning algorithms supported by NLP techniques enable sentiment detection capabilities. Eventually, these capabilities enable the establishment of a virtual emotional relationship with users, similar to that of human operators.
Utilization of chatbots for customer support brings various advantages for companies, which can be summarized as follows:
- Provide continuous service and support availability. Customers can get answers to their questions or resolve problems at any time, regardless of the company’s working hours.
- Effectively solve routine tasks and questions. Automation of certain tasks reduces the support load, allowing agents to focus on more complex and demanding tasks. The result is faster responses and reduced waiting times for customers.
- Provide personalized services to customers. The ability to “recognize and remember” customer preferences creates the impression of individual attention and care towards the customer.
Features and Functional Requirements
A chatbot functions as the primary medium for providing information before a customer interacts further with other integrated systems. It is also a medium for gathering information, as it receives, records, and analyzes information from customers.
The basic functional requirements can be summarized as follows:
- Answers to Frequently Asked Questions. The most common purpose is to provide answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) from an AI chatbot by using NLP techniques. This functionality has been traditionally used in various ways in online services and websites to bridge knowledge gaps in an accessible manner. They typically use the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques to provide answers through dialog-based interactions. This offers customers a more immediate and personalized experience than a traditional knowledge base.
- Solving simple tasks. Advanced versions provide automated solutions for routine tasks, queries, problems, and user requests. Examples include order tracking, account management, step-by-step troubleshooting, and more. These tasks usually account for about 70% of all online service tasks.
- Redirecting customers to human agents. When a customer asks a complex question or expresses a request that exceeds the chatbot capabilities, it is crucial to enable a smooth transition to support agents. This approach ensures that customers are not left stranded and allows them access to specialized staff when required.
Relation to Other Support Channels
The primary purpose of chatbots is to enable self-service for customers to address their requests without the need for direct human involvement. However, there will always be at least some skepticism and resistance to the technology from customers in various domains of use. Rather than replacing human support teams, chatbots can simply hand more complex cases to agents.
Chatbots are just one of the possible channels traditionally used for communication and providing customer support, though. Other common channels include email, phone, social networks, dedicated web and mobile applications, websites, live chat, and more. The range of channels offered is no longer an exception in online business, but has become the norm. They are usually integrated within an AI-driven help desk software for customer service and support.
This diversity has triggered efforts to integrate company processes and IT systems through all available channels.
Multichannel support is defined as the use of more than one channel to manage customer support in a manner that is consistent and coordinated across all channels. Chatbots should be used in conjunction with other customer support channels. For successful deployment alongside other support channels, the following conditions must be met:
- Seamless and consistent user experience. Customers expect a consistent user experience and usability across all channels in the digital environment.
- Providing personalized answers to questions. If the information delivered is too general, it will be shallow and unappealing. A chatbot must understand the individual situation and needs of each customer.
- Adhering to the “rule of minimum knowledge”. A chatbot channel should have the least amount of information compared to one of the existing channels with the most knowledge.
