Chatbots - Adding Power to Customer Service with Artificial Intelligence

Chatbots are the instant messengers powered by AI-based technology to provide customer support through chat to your customers in real-time around the clock.

Ensuring a positive customer experience is of utmost importance for any business, and for that, they need to be quick and available 24X7 without any downtime. This is what led to the rise of the chatbots. 

Over the years, big brands from every industry, including the travel and tourism industry, have added chatbots to their messengers, ensuring quick customer service. Chatbots quickly gained momentum and now powers almost 85% of the businesses.

Known for gathering customer insights, Chatbots collects customers’ data based on their interactions with the brands in terms of activities, queries, and preferences. This data allows businesses to identify the most common questions and the kind of information customers are looking for. Based on the data, you can optimize your website data to make the information readily available for your customers, thereby giving them more reasons to stay and come back again. Apart from that, chatbots offer immediate support round the clock to your customers with a personalized touch that can lead to more sales or bookings.

Chatbots also effectively saved millions of dollars for businesses worldwide as it saves the recurring expenses you pay every month to your customer support team as salaries. On the other hand, setting up chatbots requires significant one-time investment with relatively lesser maintenance and enhancements.

Though it seems promising, Chatbots, too, have some shortcomings that are yet to be taken care of. Due to a lack of emotions, unlike humans, chatbots are pretty straightforward at handling customers. On the other hand, your customer care executive can be emotionally intelligent enough to understand customers’ emotions and respond accordingly. Keeping this in mind, many software giants are working on making chatbots more human by giving them a personality.

Apart from that, Chatbots can only take care of entry-level questions, not those complex queries that your customers might ask due to different issues with the same booking or sale. They fail when a customer asks a question whose answer is not in their resource. They need to be optimized based on your knowledge base to better handle customer queries in a structured manner. This optimization leads to ongoing maintenance of the chatbot based on their knowledge base as they need to be continuously fed with new data based on customers’ interaction and queries.

Conclusively speaking, despite having its pros and cons, Chatbots are the need for the future for every business as they can save a lot of money, time, and resources, which is what all companies need amid this pandemic. You just need to focus on finding the right solutions.