Benefits of Implementing AI Customer Service Chatbots

Customers don’t call your support center to hear “Your call is important to us” followed by the lullaby. They expect quick and seamless service, so they can get on with their day. AI customer service chatbots make it happen. 

AI chatbots help users resolve their queries and find information instantly using text, audio, or a  combination of both. This eliminates the need for human intervention for simple queries and keeps the line open for complex tasks. 

In this blog post, we have explored how adopting the tool benefits the customers and your support team alike.

What is an AI Customer Service Chatbot?

An AI chatbot is a type of virtual assistant that uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) models to understand and respond to customer queries. It helps automate common support tasks like order tracking, answering FAQs, or booking appointments so your human representative can focus on more complex tasks. 

The chatbot operates 24/7, provides multilingual support, offers omnichannel support, and learns over time to improve its responses.

What are the Benefits of AI Chatbots for Customers?

Let’s explore how implementing AI chatbots benefits your customers. 

1. Offers Quick & Consistent Support

You can automate responses to customer requests and ensure quick and consistent service even when agents are unavailable. Additionally, you can route trickier and high-priority requests to relevant teams much faster or create tickets at any time of the day. 

2. Delivers Personalized Communication 

With an AI customer service chatbot, you can personalize every interaction and cater to the user’s needs with less effort on the customer’s part. For example, when a customer initiates a chatbot conversation, the AI can pull customer info, past interactions, and current activities. 

You can also personalize their experience by proactively:

• Updating them on their product delivery status
• Sending tutorials to onboard users 
• Notifying them of any system failures and keeping them updated

3. Provides Omnichannel Interaction

The modern customer switches between multiple channels to communicate with customer support. From a phone call to a chatbot to email, they want to pick up where they left off. 

An AI-powered communication platform with omnichannel integration bridges this gap. With a consistent and connected infrastructure, your chatbot picks up where the call ended.

4. Speaks Customer’s Language

A genAI-driven chatbot tailors the communication based on the user’s preferred language. It caters to a multi-lingual market, making it easier for customers to comfortably address their concerns, instead of forcing them to use the brand’s home language. 

5. Continuous Accessibility

Global businesses need solutions that break geographical and time-zone boundaries. Chatbots with artificial intelligence ensure the company’s support team is always “available” to assist, irrespective of the day, time, or holiday. 

6. Offers Self-Service Options

The new generation is more accustomed to using chatbots to resolve their requests, as it provides autonomy and efficiency. AI chatbots offer self-service solutions, allowing users to resolve their concerns on their own time and pace. From fetching details from the database to directing users to knowledge bases, it can engage customers more interactively.

Exotel’s AI-powered chatbots deliver conversations that feel human by understanding emotion, intent, and context while maintaining your brand’s tone. From using information from uploaded documents to seamlessly switching channels, it adapts to the customer’s flow effortlessly. 

What are the Benefits of AI Chatbots for an Organisation’s Customer Support?

Now, let’s also look at how implementing AI-driven chatbots can benefit the customer service team. 

1. Gaining Insights on Customer Experience

You can employ chatbots to gather feedback from users after the end of an interaction. You can tailor it to offer incentives in exchange for completing the survey. Additionally, the chatbots can automatically gather actionable insights from each interaction. The data will allow the AI to continuously improve its communication, while offering valuable information on customer experience. 

2. Enhance Service Quality 

GenAI-powered chatbots have evolved in understanding the intent and sentiment behind customer conversations. They can identify nuances and provide contextually aware responses catering to users’ moods in real-time. Or the bot can share these insights with a human agent after routing the user. The agent can tailor the interaction to offer a resolution while eliminating escalation.

Chatbots enhance support quality over time by 

• Tracking and identifying patterns in every interaction
• Collecting data to build better contextual awareness
• Learning which response is best suited in different scenarios

3. Increase Employee Productivity

By using it to automate tasks like scheduling appointments, responding to general queries, and offering self-service options, it eases agents’ workloads. 

For example, you can use chatbots to: 

• Provide order status 
• Offer onboarding tutorials
• Assists in scheduling/adjusting appointments
• Collecting feedback
• Helping with payment or balance inquiries

Deflecting such repetitive tasks helps agents focus on complex issues and improves employees’ satisfaction by reducing burnout. 

4. Streamline Customer Services 

AI customer service chatbots can enhance customer service operations by streamlining workflows on your agents’ side. The bot can pull up the user’s information at the beginning of the interaction and decide whether to route the user to the best-suited agent. It can also analyze the support ticket’s context and recommend a personalized response for the user.

5. Identifies Potential Leads

You can create a natural flow of conversation that asks qualifying questions and engages potential leads to convert them. Instead of directing the potential customers to a form, the bots can gather information to qualify them through the sales funnel. As a result, the bots can increase engagement, boost conversion, and reduce abandonment rates.

6. Lowers Operational Costs

AI chatbots require an upfront investment, but they help save money over time. By handling simple tasks, automating ticketing systems, offering self-service, and intelligently routing conversions, the bots lower operational overhead. 

Additionally, it can scale up and down for high-traffic seasons, so you don’t have to hire more agents. 

Powered by adaptable GenAI, Exotel’s chatbot scales effortlessly to handle spikes in volume, offers true omnichannel continuity, and delivers human-like conversations. Our intelligent platform continuously improves and ensures uptime with resilient infrastructure, making it a dependable part of your CX strategy.

Features Customer Service Chatbots should have

An AI Chatbot should feel like a helpful team member, instead of blocking agent productivity. Here are some features you should look for when considering it. 

1. Conversational AI and NLP

Customers don’t speak in scripts, and neither should your chatbot. Artificial intelligence and natural language processing allow the bot to identify user intent, process human language, and provide contextual and human-like responses. 

2. Omnichannel Integration

A good customer service bot should offer seamless conversation across multiple channels. Look for true omnichannel integration to create a unified support experience instead of forcing users to repeat themselves. 

3. Multilingual Support

Multilingual chatbots ensure your customers receive the appropriate support regardless of their preferred language. 

4. Custom Workflows and Automation

Beyond answering simple questions, the bot should trigger workflows like rescheduling an appointment, tracking order status, or processing a refund/return. It should automatically escalate any complex query to a human agent without losing context. 

5. Detailed Feedback Loop

Look for platforms that gather customer feedback after key interactions and use conversation analytics to improve its performance over time.

How to Choose the Right Customer Service Chatbots 

Here’s how you can evaluate the ideal chatbot for your business needs. 

1. Define “why”

Start with a clarity on why you need to implement the bot. Identify the key metrics you want to improve; this will help you prioritize which features to look for.

2. Assess Integration Capabilities

The best chatbot is the one that integrates with your company’s tech stack. Evaluate compatibility with your existing tools before adopting the tool. 

3. Look for Personalization Power

To offer the best customer experience, its important to make them feel valued. Ensure that the bot can recall past interactions, great users by their name, and respond with appropriate action.

4. Don’t Compromise on Security

Look for an AI customer service chatbot that abides with enterprise-grade security compliances, offers secure data storage, and role-based access controls.

Which Industries Benefit From AI Customer Service Chatbots?

Many industries can benefit from implementing AI-driven chatbots. But here we will mention a few industries that have been using it to its full potential. 

1. Retail

You can reshape the customer experience by offering 24/7 support, personalized product recommendations, and real-time order tracking. 

• Customers can use chatbots to track their orders and initiate returns/replacements
• The bots can tailor product options by analyzing users’ browsing history and purchase behavior
• It can also send automated reminders to nudge shoppers back to their purchase journey 

2. Healthcare

In the healthcare industry, it helps reduce administrative burdens, streamlines patient interactions, and enhances access to information. 

• Patients can find available openings to book or reschedule appointments without the need to call the front desk
• Chabots can be used to send reminders about upcoming visits, post-treatment care, and medication schedules

3. Banking & Financial Services

In the transactional industry, AI-powered chatbots help deliver secure, quick, and user-friendly service. This means customers don’t have to wait in line only to be told that it’s lunch hour. 

• Account holders can check balance, transaction history, credit score, or transfer money through a secure chatbot interface
• Bots can also notify users about any suspicious activity and help them resolve the issue quickly

4. Government

Many institutions and agencies have been adopting AI customer service chatbots to handle a large volume of citizen queries efficiently and transparently. 

• Bots provide detailed information about services like taxes, permits, schemes, and benefits
• It can also help guide citizens through the application process for cases like passports or grants

Best Customer Service Chatbots 

Let’s have a look at the top 5 customer service chatbots. 

1. Exotel

Exotel is an AI-powered communication platform that integrates its AI-powered chatbot with voice, social media, SMS, and web channels in one robust platform. It can create powerful conversational workflows without silos. 

Key Features:

• Fluent in multiple languages and offers human-like conversations
• Versatile and adaptable to match the company brand and style
• Easy deployment across multiple platforms 
• Efficiently collects customer insights across every chat 

2. Intercom

Intercom’s Fin is an AI-first customer service chatbot that provides a connected system across multiple channels. It offers proactive messaging, generating helpful content, handling complex queries, and seamlessly escalates to agents as needed. It combines live chat, help center content, and user behavior tracking. 

Key Features: 

• Unifies all data and content the chatbot uses in one platform
• Create powerful drag-and-drop automation with workflows
• It learns everything about your company and product to generate responses
• Personalizes services for every customer to serve their unique needs

3. Freshchat by Freshworks

Freshwork’s chatbot, Freshchat, offers a clean UI, built-in bots (Freddy AI), and native integrations. It supports smart workflows, custom intents, and quick setup. 

Key Features:

• Engages users on their preferred channels – message, live chat, email, and voice
• Offers an AI-driven bot experience across the website, native app, and messaging channels
• Unifies agents’ workforce, allowing them to see users’ past interactions and open issues
• Proactively engages customers to stay ahead of potential issues

4. Zendesk

Zendesk’s intelligent chatbot offers personalized customer experiences where users are. It offers help center articles, triages incoming queries, and passes complex issues to human agents. When integrated with Zendesk Support, it offers a unified ticketing and support platform.

Key Features:

• Offers 24×7 support by deflecting common issues to the bot
• Delivers service across any channels, including WhatsApp, Slack, and Facebook
• Unifies all interactions in one place to centralize the agent workspace
• Allows you to customize your messages

5. Yellow.ai

It uses a dynamic NLP engine that enables the bot to understand 100+ languages and dialects. It offers customer services, HR, IT, and marketing support across multiple channels. 

Key Features:

• Offers frictionless omnichannel experiences across 35+ channels
• Instant self-serve option to provide on-demand resolution
• Blends AI and human effort to ensure a delightful customer experience
• Generates personalized texts based on customer interactions and preferences

Best Practices to Successfully Implement AI Chatbots for Customer Service

There are certain factors you must consider when adopting AI customer service chatbots. Here are some practices to follow to get the best of it.

1. Identify the Need for AI Chatbots

Instead of adopting it to get on with the trend. You need to first identify which areas in your customer support operations need AI integration. Identify the areas of friction that prevent customers from receiving the service they need. This will also help you set achievable goals, such as reducing wait time, improving first-contact resolution (FCR), or lowering escalations. 

2. Offer a Way to Interact With Human Agents

When implementing AI in customer service, you should look for a way to balance automation and human interactions. While users might enjoy the autonomy of resolving queries, they don’t want to get stuck in the robotic loop. 

Provide a way for your customers to connect with the agents. Train the model to recognize complex issues or detect negative emotions, offering them the choice of speaking with a human representative. 

3. Gather Customer Feedback After Key Interactions

After deploying the chatbot, collect customer feedback after key interactions. This will help you gain the user’s POV of how useful the bot has been in improving their experience. Using the insight you can train the model to sharpen the bot’s response. 

4. Monitor & Optimize Chatbot Performance

Apart from gathering customer feedback, you also need to test and monitor its performance on your end. Analyze the flow of conversation to identify unexpected outcomes, glitches, broken workflows, and unhelpful responses. 

Key Takeaways

AI customer service chatbots provide 24/7, consistent, and personalized support across channels in multiple languages. It empowers customers while also boosting agent productivity. This tool also has its potential challenges, due to which it is important to identify the right platform that aligns with your business needs and offers the features you are looking for. 

Exotel is an AI-powered communication platform that offers a versatile GenAI chatbot that molds to your business needs. With its advanced semantic search, it goes beyond keyword matching to generate intelligent, context-aware responses based on what your customers really want.

FAQs

1. What Type of Queries can AI Customer Service Chatbots Handle?

The tool can handle basic troubleshooting. FAQs, appointment booking/reminders, order tracking, onboarding, and collecting feedback. 

2. Are AI Chatbots Secure for Handling Sensitive Data?

Yes, with proper data protection rules and encryption, AI chatbots can securely handle sensitive customer data. 

3. What are the Differences between AI Chatbots and Traditional Live Chat?

The two tools serve different purposes and have their strengths.

AI chatbots:

• It is available 24/7
• It can handle multiple conversations simultaneously
• It responds instantly

Live chat: 

• It is limited to business hours or agent availability
• It can only handle one query at a time
• It may involve a wait time