Chatbot vs Live Chat – The Winning Pick For Your Customer Support

The last time you interacted with a live chat agent, it probably didn’t feel “live”. Live chat remains an effective tool as long as your customer support team can timely address all the customer queries. When the customers’ queries outnumber your support reps to the point that they cannot address all the queries without your customers running out of patience, then that becomes a point of worry.

Often it so happens that live chats leave your customers hanging without a response or ask for their email address only to get back to them later (which isn’t in the next 48 hours). This increases the turnaround time, while increasing frustration!

Why are chatbots replacing live chats?

With endless queries streaming in and having to employ many humans to take care of those interactions, live chats are often difficult to work with. The customer is kept on hold which becomes irritating, to say the least.

Not to mention the repetitive questions like ‘Can I have your order number / shipment id?’. The complex interface of managing a live chat also adds to the problem. The whole process of getting in touch with a live chat agent becomes daunting and laborious for the customer.

Enter chatbots and these issues are addressed instantly! Custom chatbots are now taking up the virtual interactive space, and rightly so. Answering questions about your offerings, solving support requests instantly, saving time, and offering a competitive advantage — all of these facilities that are associated with live chat are offered by custom chatbots, while saving time and resources.

Custom chatbots have simplified the aspect of user engagement and customer retention. How? Let’s find out!

1. Scalability

   A team of human agents handling the live chat do their best to solve the customer queries with negligible wait times. But things get difficult to manage in case of multiple customers lining up at the same time. After all, human agents can only cater to a handful of queries at a given time. Others would have to wait or be met with the response “Please leave your email id, we’ll get back to you.” Either way, your customers are having to wait to get answers they are looking for.Custom chatbots are a clear winner when it comes to scalability. Chatbots engage with thousands of customers at the same time, in a personalized and optimized manner. This gives the customers instant answers, without them having to wait.

2. No Human Supervision

   Live chats require humans to individually respond to every chat. This requires businesses to hire people specifically for this tiring and repetitive task. After hiring, onboarding and training the employees to perfect the job can take months. At the same time, with your conversation flow in place, a chatbot can be deployed in a shorter time.Once deployed, sequential chatbots cater to each and every chat smoothly without any human supervision required. In the case of AI-based chatbot that needs to identify the language, intent and context, it can take longer to train the chatbot. This does not mean chatbots replace the employees. Chatbots simply automate the routine tasks so that your team can focus on more complex tasks.

   Chatbots really provide the best of both worlds. A chatbot can take care of the simple queries, whereas the queries that require human intervention can be passed on to your human agents within the bot using chatbot-to-human handover.

3. Savings galore

   With live chat, you need to hire multiple agents to answer many customers at the same time. Prior to that, you also need to make sure your agents are well-trained and have good communication skills to speak to the customers. This means you have to spend monthly to talk to visitors coming to your website. This is both a time-consuming process and an expensive one.But custom chatbots are pocket-friendly versions of live chats. You need to invest just once in your chatbot and it is there to stay!

   Also, by adding chatbots into your business, you’ll be increasing your revenue, as your current employees will be given time to focus on nurturing leads and closing sales, while chatbots perform the day-to-day activities.

4. 24*7 Availability

   Live chat cannot function round the clock, as humans are bound by time. If a visitor wants to talk to your business at the end of the day, live chat will not be able to cater to their queries. This contributes to bad customer experience which in turn is a loss for your business. According to Forbes, businesses lose $75 billion due to poor customer service.

   But chatbots are available 24 hours, 7 days a week to engage with your customers, without incurring you any extra cost, unlike live chat.

5. Ease Of Use

   Anyone who has used live chat from the side opposite to that of the customer will tell you that it is no piece of cake. A live chat comes with two-fold interfaces: a chatbox for the visitor and a dashboard cluttered with live and past visitor data. This complicates the simple process of conversation. Chatbots come with a clean and unified interface on which your website visitor talks to the bot and it replies. With this, you still have complete control on your bot via the same interface where you train it and make it smarter.

In Conclusion

One might argue that chatbots have no human touch and hence cannot be better than live chat. And we agree. Because chatbots are not made with the purpose of being better than their human counterparts.

Chatbots are not here to replace humans, but to assist us.

Chatbots are here to assist their human counterparts in getting more done. If the customer needs to talk to an agent, the right chatbot solution will notify the agent about the same, thus eliminating the need to constantly monitor the conversation.

Chatbots are emerging as the next step in filling the gaps in business processes. Chatbots are assisting humans to drive more sales by improving marketing, customer engagement, and customer retention. Wouldn’t you want to make the most of the chatbot revolution?!