Online Chat for Business: Live Chat v. Chatbots

In the world of customer support, there is a currently a lot of talk about chatbots and how they are showing promise to revolutions the customer support experience.

Chatbots are software programs that are designed to simulate human conversations. Using programmed responses, businesses are able to streamline the support experience by allowing immediate access on a 24/7 basis to the information and guidance their customers need. And by minimizing the need for actual human labor in these chat interactions, businesses are driving down their labor costs while they improve response time and enhance the overall support experience for the customer.

However, are chatbots are relatively new to the customer experience scene, there is a current debate regarding whether consumers prefer to interact with a human or a chatbot or whether they even notice the difference.

The Challenge of Live Online Chat for Business

As many businesses and support organizations have found, managing live online chat tends to be easier said than done. While setting up and monitoring website interaction through live chat to support customer issues is seen as an effective method for building relationships with customers, this benefit is lost if requests are made outside of business hours or if there is a long wait for an agent during business hours.

When you couple these potential customer frustrations with the overhead costs that are required to set up a live chat service and support it with real human, the value of live online chat becomes questionable.

The Advantages that Chatbots Offer

Chatbots, in contrast to live chat support, seek to drive labor costs down while improving the overall customer support experience. For smaller, more resource-constrained, businesses this becomes a critical difference. And fortunately, for these small business owners or for businesses of any size that like the value that chatbots can bring, the technology continues to get better at the art of engaging and satisfying customers.

In comparing the two approaches, some of the distinct advantages that chatbots

offer over live online chat include:

Persistent Availability

Chatbots offer the opportunity for anyone, anytime, anywhere to get the support they need through (increasingly) natural chat.

Minimal Labor Costs

While chatbots are not meant to completely replace your support staff, a well-designed bot can handle the vast majority of inquiries and requests and hand off the interaction to a hum only when necessary. For support organizations, this creates a great opportunity for efficiencies and decreased operating costs.

Multi-Tasking

Unlike humans, chatbots can efficiently handle requests from multiple customers at the same time. A well-designed bot can optimize each interaction and make the consumer feel like the chat is laser-focused on their needs.

Data Collection

Another powerful advantage for chatbots is in their ability to collect data from each of their interactions, much more efficiently than even your best support representative ever could. This valuable information can be reviewed and incorporated into your chatbot responses so that, over time, your bot becomes even more efficient.

Contact us to discuss chatbot development for your business or support organization.