Goodbye annoying customer care reps! It’s the dawn of the age of the Chatbots.

Customer Care reps have always tested my Christianity. The good Lord knows I always try and represent him well but sometimes, the other party wins. I mean, how rude can Customer care reps be sometimes? Many businesses have lost customers because of rude customer care reps. Oh if only we had an alternative to human customer care reps!

I am so glad we do!

Hello, Chatbots for Business!

Can I just say how relieved I was when I got to know about having a Chatbot for my business? See, my business is in its baby stages and I cannot yet afford to have Customer Care reps attending to my every client’s whim. So I outsourced! And boy, has my life ever been so much easier. Chatbots do not ask for off days, they do not talk back and they say exactly what you tell them to (I promise you, I am not a control freak). The fact that they have no emotions whatsoever, means they will not snap at my clients. Happy clients equals more money!

Here’s a couple of benefits of having a Chatbot for your business:

1. Extensive customer assistance. A survey shows that 83% of online shoppers need support during shopping. Chatbots are incredible in that they are accessible 24 hours of the day, 7 times a week and, drum roll… even on holidays! Yes, no need to wait for the weekend to be over or for the long holiday to be over to get your queries answered. Right here, right now.

• Always available customer care support. Researcher, Gartner says customer service is the most important factor to success. Simply put, when your customer is not happy. They are not going to come back and spend money on you.
• The customer care process can be immensely improved with the aid of Chatbots. Bots are programmed to give automated answers to repetitive questions immediately and forward requests to a real person should a more complicated issue arise. This will enable human customer care reps to save time and attend to more important, unique cases and not repetitive questions.
•  Proactive Customer Interaction. Companies generally practice “passive customer interaction”, meaning they only respond when customers make queries, rarely ever initiating conversation. Well, in today’s business world, you cannot afford to be that reluctant. There are so many businesses similar to yours, vying for Your client’s attention and a Chatbot for your business could be the difference between keeping and losing a client.
• Increased Customer engagement. It’s of utmost importance to keep your customers engaged with your brand. Research says, companies engaging with their clients on social media were able to increase customer spend by 20% to 40%! Am I the only one hearing the sound of tonnes of money? Ka-ching!

As we can see, Chatbots can be a great back up for customer care for relatively basic and repetitive tasks with great speed, cost-effective, easy to implement, maintain and use. The biggest challenge you need to pay attention the most is, the conversation capability or “personality” of your Chatbot in order to increase or even just retain your brand perception and customers.