Conversational software agents such as chatbots are increasingly used to communicate and support customers by replacing human chat service agents. These chatbots have been designed to comprehend customer queries and automate responses to those queries, simulating a human conversation, using natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI). This article discusses the role of AI in chatbots for customer support.
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Importance of Chatbots in Customer Support
Customer support automation has gained significant attention among leading brands owing to their rising focus on increasing organizational efficiency and achieving business goals without affecting customer experience. Several brands have planned to invest significantly in AI-powered chatbots to realize customer support automation.
An AI chatbot is primarily a software program that can simulate human speech. These programs enable people to communicate with computers conversationally and naturally. Moreover, AI-powered chatbots for customer support become more accurate and smarter over time as they can learn from every customer interaction.
Thus, AI chatbots can allow companies to streamline their operations, provide better experiences to customers, and assist customer support agents in their roles. AI chatbots can also significantly decrease customer service costs by reducing the number of human chat service agents.
In business process management, using AI in chatbots can facilitate the automation of processes and customer services, enabling new solutions, operations, transactions, and applications based on continuous information research and free learning.
The chatbots can increase service efficiency as they are fast, effective, and assertive and can act with accessibility, availability, and agility without interruption. AI chatbots for customer support can transform time-consuming customer calls into efficient and fast interactions within fractions of seconds, which is the expected latency time.
Additionally, AI chatbots provide simple answers and ensure a high degree of resoluteness and objectivity in interactions as the first service layer, reducing call center queues and allowing human customer support agents to solve complex queries.
Routine efficiency in the customer service process has become a key differentiator in extremely competitive industries, such as the financial industry. Financial institutions can effectively distinguish themselves from their competitors by improving their customer support services to effectively disseminate relevant information to their customers at the right time.
Impact of Chatbots on Service Quality
AI chatbots for customer support represent an emerging digital marketing strategy that companies are increasingly implementing to adapt to the growing digitally oriented service world. Problem-solving, customization, trendiness, entertainment, and interaction are the five key customer-related functions of chatbots in the marketing sector.
Studies demonstrated a positive correlation between these customer-related functions and the communication credibility and accuracy of AI chatbots, which is crucial for customer satisfaction. Among these five customer related-functions, problem-solving, entertainment, and interaction are necessary for improving customer support service performance.
Challenges in Chatbot Use
Although social interaction is critical in offline customer service, the digital world lacks this aspect. AI chatbots have to display characteristics similar to human customer support agents to make positive interactions with customers.
The lack of humanness in chatbots for customer support can hinder their interaction capabilities. For instance, customers can be frustrated for not being understood properly when the language skills of chatbots fail to meet their expectations.
Moreover, the absence of human communication forms, such as gestures and voice, can also increase interaction problems. Chatbots can trigger negative emotions in customers due to unfulfilled expectations, leading to communication break-offs.
Thus, the willingness of a user to interact with a chatbot depends on the attitude of the chatbot and the feelings transmitted by it. Additionally, chatbots must possess attributes such as prompt responding, active listening, a trustworthy personality, and a socially oriented interaction style through the use of modern idioms or emojis in their messages to ensure a more authentic interaction with the customers.
Perceived entertainment is an important motivation for usage as it positively affects the attitude of consumers toward the overall service performance of chatbots. Chatbots possessing an amusing interface with funny content and animated features will attract greater customer attention. The positive effects of perceived entertainment include customer loyalty, brand associations, and brand awareness.
Customers prefer chatbots with problem-solving capabilities even more than human agents for low-complexity tasks. Users perceive that chatbots possess a higher service quality and are willing to seek low-risk advice from a chatbot. Thus, the problem-solving function is crucial to improve the AI chatbot service performance.
Customization and trendiness are the remaining two customer-related functions necessary to fulfill customer expectations. Trendiness has become a determinant factor for chatbots due to the growing importance of fancy lifestyles among customers. AI chatbots can be designed to provide high-quality information about emerging trends or newly designed products to customers during or beyond the conversation to enhance the service quality and meet the new expectations of customers.
Customization involves offering personalized services or products to customers based on their major preferences and interests without their explicit requests. Chatbots can meet individual customer expectations and needs in a personalized and effective way, which improves the overall customer experience. A personalized chatbot service is perceived as high-quality service by customers, leading to greater brand loyalty.
Recent Developments
Although the extensive utilization of AI-based chatbots has resulted in significant time and cost savings, they still routinely fail to fulfill customer expectations effectively. Thus, customers show less willingness to comply with the requests made by the chatbot.
In a study published in the journal Electronic Markets, researchers investigated the influence of the foot-in-the-door compliance technique and verbal anthropomorphic design cues on user compliance with a feedback request from the AI-based chatbot in a self-service interaction by performing a randomized online experiment with 153 participants.
The results demonstrated that both the foot-in-the-door technique and verbal anthropomorphic design cues significantly increased user compliance with a service feedback request from an AI-based chatbot. Moreover, the social presence mediated the effect of verbal anthropomorphic design cues on user compliance.
In the last few years, several AI chatbots with exceptional capabilities have been introduced for customer support. These chatbots can provide round-the-clock customer support and effectively resolve customer queries, reduce the average handle time (AHT), ensure faster resolution of queries through an upfront collection of customer information, and allow human customer support agents to spend more time on complex and high-value customer cases.
For instance, the language-agnostic Ultimate AI chatbot does not depend on a translation player. The exclusive language detection model of Ultimate has been designed specifically to understand informal, short customer service messages.
Ultimate’s AI chatbot can natively integrate with leading customer relationship management (CRM) solutions such as Zendesk, Salesforce, and Freshworks. Additionally, Ultimate provides custom application programming interface (API) integrations to connect the chatbot with the backend systems of an organization and can perform end-to-end automation of more complex processes.
The Ultimate AI chatbot can respond to customer questions instantly across every digital channel, including social media messaging platforms and email tickets. Multilingual reporting and advanced analytics allow users to track the performance of the chatbot closely. The chatbot is most suitable for advanced automation solutions customized to specific business requirements.
Similarly, the Answer Bot introduced by Zendesk has been specifically designed to improve the customer experience. Answer Bot works across messaging apps, chat, and email, providing support in 18 languages. The chatbot is most suitable for pointing users to knowledge base articles.
Although the AI chatbot is easy to maintain, it cannot effectively meet the requirements of customers with complex business cases. AI chatbot developed by Netomi assists companies in responding to customer queries automatically in a conversational manner.
The chatbot has been trained on past messages and can solve cases across email, chat, and social platforms. Netomi AI chatbot can be used easily with the existing tech stack of an organization due to out-of-the-box integrations with major helpdesk providers. Moreover, the chatbot supports over 100 languages, allowing companies to serve their customers worldwide.
References and Further Reading
Misischia, C. V., Poecze, F., Strauss, C. (2022). Chatbots in customer service: Their relevance and impact on service quality. Procedia Computer Science, 201, 421-428. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2022.03.055
Adam, M., Wessel, M., Benlian, A. (2021). AI-based chatbots in customer service and their effects on user compliance. Electronic Markets 31, 427–445. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12525-020-00414-7
Andrade, I.M.D., Tumelero, C. (2022). Increasing customer service efficiency through artificial intelligence chatbot. Revista de Gestão, 29, 3, 238-251. https://doi.org/10.1108/REGE-07-2021-0120
Pollock, L. (2022). 15 Best AI Chatbots for Customer Support [Online] Available at https://www.ultimate.ai/blog/ai-automation/15-best-ai-chatbots-for-customer-support (Accessed on 31 July 2023).