Chatbots and Virtual Assistants - Revolutionizing Customer Support

Discovering the Benefits of AI Chatbots and Virtual Assistants

Let’s start with all the benefits that come with AI chatbots and virtual assistants – the reasons why these solutions have already revolutionized customer support. How exactly do they give an edge to organizations utilizing them?

• 24/7 support – There are many fields where constant customer support is crucial (e.g. payment processing). However, employing a team of specialists for this task is often expensive, especially if additional costs apply to night shifts or overtime costs. AI chatbots won’t fully replace people, but they will significantly reduce the number of employees that you need on those shifts, helping you reduce your company’s spending.
• Time efficiency for customers – Chatbots are an excellent solution for product queries that do not require human customer support or input. Instead of writing a mail or a ticket and waiting for the response, customers can refer to an AI assistant for help. It may not solve the most complex problems, but the simpler ones? The so-called frequently-asked questions? Yes. This way, you can increase customer satisfaction without investing in more employees or live support services.
• Focus on high-value tasks – AI chatbots and virtual assistants also have an extremely important advantage for digital products that require large customer service teams – they help your specialists focus on high-value tasks. Integrate AI into phone calls and chats as the first-line solution, solving the most basic queries, and your specialists will have to handle only the more difficult, complex, and challenging problems – those they’re truly trained for.
• Personalization – Virtual assistants can also utilize data particular to individual users. This enables the chatbot or AI to quickly adjust the tone and messaging depending on the identity of the customer it is dealing with. Such data-driven personalization is especially useful for maintaining and closing leads and ensuring consistency in your communication.
• Proactive support – A great advantage of virtual AI assistants is the fact that they can reach out to your users proactively, based on their behavior on your website or within your app. As a result, you achieve even higher levels of customer satisfaction while increasing conversion rates. Why the latter? Because a customer’s attention span is short, and waiting for a response from your team might discourage them from making a purchase, or they might simply be distracted in the meantime, forgetting about their pending purchase.
• Employee experience – Having more mundane, repetitive, and simple tickets handled by a virtual AI assistant has another extra advantage – your employees are much more motivated. They only handle the tricky, more creative, more interesting tasks, which tends to lead to greater job satisfaction. The result is reduced employee turnover, as they are less likely to leave your company and search for new challenges.

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How to Implement AI Virtual Assistants and Chatbots: the Dos and Don’ts

The advantages of virtual AI assistants and chatbots are one thing, but their implementation is another. If not done correctly, it can lead to customer frustration. Therefore, you need a well-thought-out plan.

AI and user experience must be interlinked, with the former supporting the latter. To ensure that this is so in your case, follow these best practices for AI chatbot implementation:

• Find the balance – Firstly, consider what can realistically be done by your AI virtual assistant or chatbot and what should be done by human employees. Sending your users to AI in cases that might be too tricky will only result in customer dissatisfaction. You need to draw a clear line between the issues tackled by your artificial intelligence and those handled by your employees.
• Don’t force AI on the customer – Sometimes, a typically simple ticket might actually be complex. Yet, in those situations, bots won’t really be able to help. This is why you should give users the option to switch to human support seamlessly. Avoid systems that block access to customer specialists or make it strenuous (such as having to repeat three times, “I want to talk to a human”).
• Point out the limitations – This way, your users will know when they need to find a way to talk to a human, even if the AI assistant hasn’t suggested it.
• Integrate the bot in your app – If you do not provide live support and want to reap the advantages of AI chatbots, make sure to implement them as an integral part of your app. To be effective (and appreciated) AI chatbots need to be easily accessible. It’s a question of solving problems promptly – nobody wants to leave your app just to access your AI assistant on your website.
• Train your staff – Your customer support specialists need to know how to handle tickets that were initially responded to by a chatbot. By building an AI-ready workforce, you can ensure that this transition is seamless, enhancing customer experience. Don’t focus only on the capabilities of your bot and the way it handles the issues. Make sure to consider the communication style that it uses – this way, you’ll create consistent messages between your AI and human support.

Useful AI Customer Support Tools

Despite the clear benefits of developing an AI chatbot or assistant, businesses often don’t have the required resources to deliver such a project. However, this does not mean that you have to give up on using artificial intelligence – you can opt for one of the many AI chatbots and virtual assistants that already exist.

What exactly is available, and how do these AI customer support tools work? Let’s take a look at a short overview:

• BrightBot – This easy-to-use solution is trained by pasting your company info into it, making it quick to implement on your website. BrightBot’s simplicity makes it well-suited for the beginning of your journey with AI chatbots, though the lack of advanced customization may not suit a larger customer support team.
• Tiledesk – This AI customer support tool is much more complicated than BrightBot, but the extra setup effort pays off in quicker, less expensive, and more efficient customer support. What’s most important is that Tiledesk enables you to seamlessly switch the customer between AI and human support whenever you need to, thus combining the best of both worlds.
• LetsAsk.AI – This is another excellent chatbot for customer support, based on ChatGPT, which is a big plus – especially considering the breadth of information and data that this model uses. Integration of LetsAsk.AI is simple (like BrightBot) – all you have to do is embed the copypasted embed code into your website.

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Key Takeaways

Chatbots and virtual assistants based on AI have a plethora of advantages for customer support teams. They help businesses provide quick, 24/7, and cost-effective support. What is more, you do not need to build and train your own AI model – there are many ready-made solutions based on existing AI tools like ChatGPT. If you’re looking for more efficient and cost-effective customer service (taking the pressure off your current support teams) perhaps it’s time to test one of them in your business.