The Business Value of Chatbots in Customer Engagement

Despite some of the disappointment which followed the Chatbot hype over this last three years, there are numerous evidences of the business value of chat bots for sales and customer service. 

Since 2016, all of software companies (Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon,..) were announcing chatbot solutions based on AI technologies. Despite the investments, product launches, and news coverage, chatbots disappointed somehow both users and the tech companies betting on them.

Definition

Simply, a chatbot is a text-based interface that lets users execute certain actions and get information using language type interactions. The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement platform offers the capabilities to implement chatbots to interpret questions and retrieve answers.

Chatbots for Customer Engagement

Chat has quickly become one of the primary ways to interface with a company’s website. Some of the key observed patterns:

1. 90% of the calls placed to any given company’s contact center reportedly come after a visit to that company’s website.
2. 30% of the customers are using a site’s online chat feature to communicate with a company in the last 12 months.
3. In average, the “Answer Bot” is able to handle approximately 29% of all customer queries itself, with no humans involved at all.

Example in Sales : Qualifying leads

Chatbots can be designed to help solve the sales challenges by for examples separating real prospects from customers looking for help, as well as helping sales reps deal with potential customers more efficiently.

Chatbots could be used to automate relatively simple but time-consuming tasks like capturing leads’ details and asking qualifying questions. This can help free up sales agent time for more complex tasks, such as understanding customer pain points and building relationships.

Example in Customer Service :

Customer service ranks high on the list of functions people report they would like to use a chatbot for. Customers would be willing to use a chatbot for “a quick answer in an emergency,” “resolving a complaint or problem,” and “getting detailed answers or explanations.”

There’s evidence that suggests customer service chatbots can be a useful tool for these kinds of user problems. Globe Telecom, a Philippines-based telecommunication company, says that building a customer service chatbot reduced the overall amount of calls being made into its call center by half, cut call center costs by 10%, and helped enable a 3.5x increase in employee productivity.

Indeed Cahtbots responds to repetitive questions, freeing up human agents’ time to work on other tasks, and reduces the average handle time of customer interactions overall.

Conclusion

Defining your business value case starts with understanding your desired outcomes for deploying an enterprise chatbot. For instance, you might want to reduce call volumes in your contact center. For enterprises, these outcomes could mean saving from cost reduction and/or increased revenue.

Here are some ways to predict and measure a chatbot’s return on investment as part of your business case:

1. Reducing Costs : deflecting incoming request (call, email etc..) through self-service automation reduces operational costs for your customer service. In average, business cases are typically formed around the assumption that these assistants will offload 30% of human work,
2. Supporting Revenue Growth : By handling more customer interactions with a chatbot and deflecting the number of interactions that require an agent or sales representative, you can grow your customer base, expand your geographic footprint, and introduce new products and services without increasing your human capital costs.

Post mainly inspired by CBInsight article: