What are some of the best practices for using chatbots and live chat in customer service?

Setting clear expectations can be an invaluable tool for a growing business. Personally, as someone who juggles multiple responsibilities, having a Chat Bot to keep clients informed or collect potential client data is a proactive approach. While I do acknowledge the preference for human interaction, it's important to recognize that not all human interactions are ideal. If a chat bot can efficiently help me achieve my goals, I would choose that option consistently.

Bottom line, whether to use a chatbot or not should always rest with the customer. Which means you have to maintain sufficient, sufficiently trained human agents to satisfy customer expectations.

Chat interactions are effective for most call engagements; however, knowing your particular audience, it is always a good idea to provide clear upfront messaging and options for callers to get directly to an agent. More often, I've seen where there are too many chatbot options; by the time the caller gets to an agent, they are frustrated. Keep the IVR prompting simple so the customer experience will be well-received from the chatbot and agent interactions.

There are instances where a chatbot can provide a simple, fast resolution, saving the customer time & the organization money while diverting employees to respond to more complicated or nuanced interactions; this is where the technology shines. The chatbot customer service experience may not replace a human, however personalized interactions, make the chatbot experience better overall. A failure in the programming of certain chatbots is not rapidly transferring the customer to a human should they request one. This in my opinion is the single largest frustration of the chatbot experience, followed closely by some customer’s disapproval of the personalized experience. A prompt should allow customers to opt in or out.

AI: We have new tools, which we conduct our day-to-day with. The learning curve is massive here!. We’re all in sales in one way or another. I believe face-to-face is usually the best answer. I also realize in business life itself. I don’t have time for the chat so we use email and text., Using AI to communicate for me seems extremely separated. If I had a customer that was communicating with me using AI. My first thought is maybe I’m paying too much for there service lol . My next thought would be how impersonal the communication is . I’m not saying there isn’t a place for AI. Direct communication will always be the best solution. AI seems to fit learning teaching training.

When creating a chatbot, it's important to consider how your team will integrate it into their workflows. Simply building a chatbot is different than training teams to change habits and use chatbots. Many teams struggle with adoption because changing habits is difficult. To help with this, involve your teams and agents from the start in shaping your conversational AI strategy. By designing the chatbot with end users in mind, you improve the chances it will be adopted.

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Added value is also important …maybe a human interface provides this by being able to feel the issues being faced and provide innovative out of the box solutions?