8 Powerful Ways Chatbots Can Transform Your Customer Experience (Insights From David Cancel, CEO of Drift)

Chatbots are changing the way brands interact with their customers, and when the chatbot is of high quality, those changes are usually positive.

In fact, a survey by Oracle found that 80% of brands plan to use chatbots by 2020, while a Ubisent study found that 35% of consumers want to see more companies using chatbots, which is interesting considering the practice is still quite new.

Here's how a chatbot enhances customer experiences:

1. Seamless live chat
2. 24/7 customer service
3. Endless queries, zero chance of sass
4. A smoother journey
5. Less stress
6. Goodbye, IVR
7. Personify your brand
8. Reinvent your forms

How a chatbot enhances customer experiences
While the benefits for the company that uses chatbots include reducing costs (your live chat support staff bill will be much lower), the real winner will be your customers. Heres how a chatbot enhances customer experiences.

Here are the eight ways a chatbot can improve your customer experience.

1. Seamless live chat
Customers can engage with a chatbot in much the same way they would in an online conversation with live customer support employees, so the learning curve for customers to engage with chatbots is practically non-existent. Since many chatbots use natural language processing methods, they can analyze the customer's question and deliver a response that meets the customer's needs.

(Drift's conversational chatbot)

Most chatbots can also be seamlessly integrated into the company's website or smartphone apps, which saves the customer the time and trouble of searching the company's online resources for the answers they need. Or, customers can talk to your brand at any time without leaving their favorite messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. In Facebook's recent F8 2018 keynote, for example, it was revealed that over 8 million messages have been exchanges between Facebook users and businesses that are using Facebook's chatbot live chat since it's inception but less than 1% of companies that have a Facebook profile are actually using the technology.

Read this next: 4 Key Customer Experience Metrics (And How To Use Them For Your eCommerce Business)

2. 24/7 customer service
Your live chat support staff need sleep but your chatbot doesnt.

Customers' needs often arise outside of business hours, so they need a way seek out answers to vital questions at times when customers service staff members are unavailable. Chatbots offer customers the opportunity to get answers to their questions at any time, so they don't have to wait for a response from a voicemail or email message. The best chatbots can also offer the customer the feeling of conversing with a live operator at any time.

(Using a chatbot allows you to offer a 24-hour service)

3. Endless queries, zero chance of sass
Although some chatbots are designed to simulate human intelligence, other systems have been developed around the idea of letting computers do the things that they were built to do: handle dull or repetitive tasks, such as calculations or database searches. David Cancel, CEO of chatbot development firm Drift, wrote that the goal of a chatbot should not be to create a perfect simulation of a human conversation but to satisfy the customer's needs.

A brand shouldnt try to build a human-like chatbot, Cancel told us, a great chatbot should be able to take actions that maximize their chances of success toward achieving particular goals.

And if a customers goal happens to involve asking to have their password rest for the fourth time in a week your chatbot won't mind!

4. A smoother journey
To ease the purchasing process for the customer, your chatbot can pop up on any product page to offer additional information, video content or even a discount code. Chatbots can also help customers with the process of gathering information, such as the item they wish to purchase, the method they want to use for purchasing the item, and how they want it shipped. Who knows, maybe even those dreaded shopping cart abandonment rates will finally drop, too.

5. Less stress
A recent survey by chatbot developer Helpshift found that 94% of the 2,000+ respondents dread contacting customer support. The current methods of handling customer support calls, from overseas operators to automated telephone menus, have done little to ease a customer's dread at reaching out to a vendor's customer service branch.

The survey also found that customers would welcome the use of chatbots to satisfy specific needs. At least 70% of the respondents answered that they would use chatbots if they could accomplish much-needed tasks, such as resolving issues with the need to contact customer support, reduce the time needed to resolve issues, reduce the time to get a customer service representative on the phone, and streamline the entire customer service process.

Find out the other 3 points in the rest of the blog, '8 Powerful Ways Chatbots Can Transform Your Customer Experience (Insights From David Cancel, CEO of Drift), here!