Leveraging chatbots in customer service is gaining popularity.

Why?

Chatbots can engage with your existing customers and potential buyers via chat and voice conversations.

Using chatbots can help reduce your customer support costs. In fact, by integrating chatbots, both businesses and consumers can save about 2.5 billion customer service hours by 2023.

How can chatbots help businesses and consumers?

Chatbots offer a fair share of benefits to businesses and consumers.

Chatbots can help businesses:

• Improve their conversion rates
• Boost their customer service efficiency
• Gather data and insights about their customers 
• Save on operational costs

Chatbots can help consumers:

• Get instant responses
• Take advantage of 24/7 customer service
• Get assistance while shopping on or checking out a website
• Get support in their language as AI chatbots offer assistance in multiple languages

Challenges of using chatbots

Using chatbots also brings some challenges such as:

• Mis-interpretation of messages: It isn’t always easy for chatbots to decode the user’s intent behind their message and questions. However, advancements in AI technology are simplifying this.
• Expensive: Most small to medium-sized businesses avoid using chatbots as creating and deploying them is costly.
• Security issues: Customers often share their sensitive data when communicating with chatbots. You need to ensure that the data is secure.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) capability: It is still an issue. If you have users who do not speak English, you may find it challenging to find a chatbot that caters to them.

Regardless of all of these challenges, chatbots are still the future.

To learn more about the challenges and opportunities associated with chatbots, check out this infographic, first published on my blog, ShaneBarker.com.

Image Courtesy: shanebarker.com