A study by Juniper Research recently found that by 2020 chatbots will produce cost savings of over $8bn (£6bn) per year for businesses. Improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) are helping redefine customer service and sales, enabling businesses of all sizes to deliver on-demand and personalised services.
Intelligent machines are slowly becoming a business commodity. In a very short space of time, they will enable SMEs to match the 24 hours a day, seven days a week multilingual sales and service levels delivered by the largest enterprises.
The ‘here-and-now' consumers
This ability to deliver 24/7 customer service is becoming increasingly important as consumer behaviour continues to change. We have seen a shift from social networking to social messaging and the requirement for on-demand answers.
To remain competitive, companies must solve problems quickly and efficiently across multiple channels, and this is where chatbots and AI are showing a significant return on investment. Always communicating on-brand, chatbots improve the consistency of services, answer questions 24/7 and never lose their temper or turn up late. They provide SMEs with the ability to deliver the efficient communication that their customers demand.
AI also has the ability to improve the service your business delivers. Consider your business - how many times do staff copy paste templated responses or remind someone how to reset their password? By using AI to learn how your business responds to the usual questions and deliver answers automatically, you enable staff to focus on the more complex - and perhaps higher worth - customers.
Customer service can move to concentrating on improving and building relationships, and providing a better service at the same or lower cost.
Enhancing, not hindering, human interactions
There is, of course, the fear that the use of AI takes away the personal touch a human interaction offers. But the irony is that, despite being machines, chatbots make customer interactions much more personal. They service consumers instantly via the platforms they already use every day, such as Facebook, Twitter, Slack and live-chat. It is a double-win for SMEs as they will also gain additional resources to train their team on the more complicated queries that cannot, and should not, be automated.
A business does not have to trust and wholly rely on the technology. A chatbot does not have to operate alone. In a hybrid form, it can send instant alerts to staff and facilitate slick human takeovers. The chatbot can try its hardest to deal with a customer but should the customer ask to speak to a human or the chatbot fails to understand a question, it can gracefully fall-back to a staff member to take over the conversation.
The future of customer service
As businesses of all size adopt AI into their communication, it will increase the level of service people demand of brands. In a very short space of time, consumers will become reliant on, and expect to talk to, chatbots to get instant answers and support. It is happening already; surveys are showing millennials prefer messaging and texting businesses over making a phone call.
The next time you have a question for a company, check if there is a chatbot to talk to and see if you can tell whether AI was part of that conversation. I wonder if your problem was solved quicker and if you enjoyed the experience. After all, AI implementations are already raising the stakes in customer experience, and SMEs should start testing and learning to keep up.
