Advantages of Chatbots vs. Live Chat

In this article we’ll discuss how chatbots stack up against live chat, and what to look for in a chatbot platform in order to the development process more efficient and unified.

Chatbots are the Future of Customer Support

Chatbots offer several advantages over live chat or contact center agents. Although reduced costs are clearly a key incentive, it shouldn’t be the only consideration. There are several other advantages in offering your customers an intelligent automated self-service option.

1. Always On

While there will always be customers that prefer to speak to a live agent, what happens when it’s out of hours; or at peak times when your phone lines are jammed? A chatbot is available at your customers’ convenience over any number of different channels, not just your staffed hours and channels.

2. Fast

Chatbots are built to recognize, understand and respond to specific queries and problems in seconds. They can even offer up ‘best match’ queries mid-interaction, saving even more time for the customer. By contrast most agents typically must refer to standardized macros for common queries — all taking extra time.

Gartner highlights this with a report of a chatbot able to answer within 5 seconds of customer contact, while the average advisor took 51 seconds.

3. Accurate

Accuracy is key to reduce first time call resolution rates and to ensure customers return to the chatbot the next time they have a query. Most advanced conversational systems can solve 80% of queries automatically because of their high level of understanding, often achieving 98% accuracy.

4. Compliant

Chatbots ensure that legal notices are never forgotten or that industry regulation isn’t accidentally breached. In addition, customers and companies alike can track conversations to ensure transparency and accountability. Furthermore, important updates and changes can be centrally rolled-out and a proper audit trail maintained for compliance proposes where needed.

5. Scalable

There are only so many queries a live agent can handle at once. Live chat allows agents to help more than one customer at a time, but call center agents must finish one call, before starting another. A chatbot can handle millions of conversations simultaneously, all to the same high standard.

But there is still a need for the human touch…

Sometimes there is no substitute for the empathy live agents can deliver or the kind of intelligence that needs creativity or judgement to resolve a query. In these situations, it’s often the human ability to draw parallels with similar experiences that allows for problems in complex or unusual circumstances to be resolved.

Therefore, it’s essential for a chatbot to be able to seamlessly handover to a live agent when the need arises. Ensuring that all the information already gleaned during the conversation is transferred too, so the customer doesn’t have to start from the beginning again.

What is a Chatbot Platform?

A chatbot platform allows enterprises to rapidly scope, build, deploy and maintain conversational systems by making the development process more efficient and unified.

Building engaging conversational AI chatbot solutions can be complex. Toolkits — often referred to as platforms — help to simplify the development of AI chatbot systems.

Platforms should contain everything a developer needs to build a conversational system, from data mining tools through scoping out the initial build to the analytics that are needed to maintain the system and deliver actionable insight back to the business.

They allow enterprises to build advanced conversational applications using either linguistic or machine learning, or (ideally) a hybrid combination of both. Some can integrate into back end systems and third-party data sources to deliver answers that might need more than one information source to truly personalize the response.

A graphical user interface (GUI) is essential to enable both developers and business users to have visibility into the system. A visual, drag-and-drop style user environment also makes it easier for business users and subject matter experts to correct a dialogue flow or update an answer.

Data analytics from chatbot applications need to feed back into the system in real-time to increase personalization within a conversation and to automatically deliver suggestions for system improvements. While the GUI provides business critical data about customers preferences and delivers an accurate picture of the “voice of the customer”.

A conversational AI chatbot application shouldn’t just be something that is built and then forgotten — a tick in the box next to the word chatbot. To optimize RoI, capitalize on emerging channels or expand into new geographies, conversational AI applications need to be adaptable to tomorrow’s needs.

It’s essential that a platform has flexible connectors, SDKs and APIs to allow enterprises to seamlessly scale their application according to their needs.

The best chatbot platforms make it possible to create an application once and deploy it in multiple languages and, across multiple devices and channels, using most of the original build. It also enables for AI assets to be shared between applications, allowing for even faster creation and greater RoI.

While there are many different chatbot platforms available in the market, they are not all built equally. Enterprises would be advised to list the criteria and functionality they need from their chatbot applications before deciding on which technology to use.

Visit artificial-solutions.com/chatbots to read the full Chatbots Guide for 2020