Benefits of Chatbots in Customer Service
Chatbots and other AI tools can help you grow your business exponentially, with minimal effort, while meeting the needs of your existing customers.
Chatbots, over the past five years or so, have completely revolutionized customer support. With so many of these handy little tools in the marketplace, small business owners can use apps like Tidio to help provide 24/7 customer support.
Now, more than ever before, customers prioritize convenience and expediency when dealing with brands. They will, disproportionately, opt to use the self-checkout option at grocery stores, download their apps instantly on Google Play, and use apps like Cashapp to send money around.
Chatbots and other AI tools can help you grow your business exponentially, with minimal effort, while meeting the needs of your existing customers.
So, What are Chatbots?
According to Chatbots Magazine, Chatbots are service powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence that you interact with via chat interface. Various chat Software providers, now include chatbot capabilities in their offerings.
These applications, based on computer programming, help automate various tasks, ranging from the most basic to fairly sophisticated operations. Chatbots, typically, are used to interact with customers during hours when a human customer service representative is not available or to help manage incoming phone or web traffic.
They will answer basic questions and often provide time-based data like store hours, shipping data, etc.
Types of Chatbots
There are, essentially two types of chatbots on the market today. The first being "rules-based" applications. These are there to execute very basic commands to help your customers.
These types of chatbots will be able to answer basic queries your customers may have, such as store hours, request for customer service phone numbers, inquiries about store locations, etc.
These types of bots cannot extend services beyond these basic functions. To the small business owner or entrepreneur, operating a human touch-ish operation, these types of bots will only fill in for you during off hours.
The other kind of bot operates on basic principles as well, so can perform basic functions and answer questions, but has capabilities that go for beyond that. This type of bot functions based on machine learning, or Artificial Intelligence. They comprehend language and get smarter as they have more conversations.
What the future holds
It is predicted that small business owners will have come to be the largest segment of businesses in the world using chats bots in the next few years.
"The global chatbot market is expected to reach $1.25 billion by 2025 and grow at an annual rate of nearly 25%, according to a recent report by Grand View Research, Inc. More and more AI innovations and machine learning technologies will also improve chatbot features, which will drive the market"
Chatbots are used today, across various consumer-facing industries. Healthcare providers, restaurant chains, insurance operators, and e-commerce firms are just a few of the major types of businesses fully engaged and committed to future investments in this type of technology.
Small business owners are encouraged to plan to use chatbots to help streamline and improve their customer service systems