As businesses grow and scale, the natural challenge is on how to maintain close relationships with customers. There is a tendency to shift focus to efficiency and speed, away from a personalized approach that centers on customer experience.
However, consumer experience is still king. Businesses can't afford to be slow in servicing customers, or provide sub-par interactions with their brand. The ability to reach businesses online and via social media has heightened the focus on immediacy and availability of information and support for customers.
The rise of conversational marketing techniques like chatbots provide businesses a way to maintain immediate relationships with customers. However, there is always the question of whether customers will dislike the experience of talking to an automated machine, and prefer a real human being instead.
Is the chatbot trend all that's cracked up to be, or is it a gimmick?
A Shift in Communication Standards
People most often turn to messaging rather than phone calls nowadays. There are clear signals that customers now prefer to text or chat rather than engaging with brands via call or email. These have added benefits of higher conversion rates than having potential customers fill out a form and wait for a response from a customer service representative.
Minimizing downtime in your sales and support funnels allows you to get straight to business when dealing with your customers.
There are a few ways to capitalize on this conversational marketing trend: hiring and training more team members to handle support chats, obtaining outsourced support, or investing in a chatbot.
A Personal Touch with Chatbots
Only 38% of potential customers actually want to talk with a human when engaging with a business, according to research done by Survey Monkey and Drift. It's important to provide the option, but when faced with immediate answers versus assurance that you're talking to a human being, majority would prefer to finish their business and get on with their day.
However, just because your business employs a chatbot, doesn’t mean that your responses have to be impersonal or robotic. It’s important to make sure your chatbot exhibits your own brand’s values. A properly configured chatbot should be an extension of your own customer service team, and exude the same values you expect of your support personnel.
Going the Extra Mile: When to Employ Chatbots and Humans
Take note that using chatbots doesn’t mean you can do away with customer service staff. Chatbots work hand-in-hand with a robust team, freeing up your staff from having to deal with simple queries.
For complex, technical issues, it is still better to have someone able to detect emotion and frustration to properly deal with customers facing problems. Irate, angry customers may very well lash out if they have no way to contact a human being. Because of this, make sure that there is always an available option to speak to a human being in all chatbot communications.
Working As a Team: Chatbots and Humans
There doesn’t need to be a competition between chatbots and humans. There is no winner, because they need to work together to fulfill gaps in your customer service strategy.
Chatbots provide fast responses to the majority of common questions fielded by support agents, freeing up your staff to deal with complex cases and instances where accurate assessment of the customers’ emotions are crucial.
Ultimately, the important thing is to come up with a good strategy that utilizes both to provide the best customer experience to your market. And in that, everybody wins.