Alex RaineyAlex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
Table of Contents
- Customer Support and AI Chatbots
- Advantages of AI Customer Support Chatbots
- Generating Customer Profiles
- Round-the-Clock Availability
- Cost Optimization
- Conversational Marketing
- Scale
- Disadvantages of AI Customer Support Chatbots
- Language Misinterpretation
- Cannot Understand Emotions
- Limitations in Responses
- Best Practices for Implementing Chatbots
- Let Users Opt Out
- Improve Data Security
- Conclusion
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Mar 19, 2024 11:34 AM
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Customer support has a great effect on how well your business retains its client base. When customers are satisfied and receive a positive customer experience, they’re likely to stay loyal. AI customer support chatbots can help you with that.
In this guide, you’ll learn about AI customer support chatbot pros and cons, as well as the best practices when implementing them in your business.
Customer Support and AI Chatbots
Many businesses, potentially including yours, have a hard time providing a positive customer experience due to the following aspects:
- Lack of personalized communication with the customer when resolving issues
- Lengthy waiting times and back-and-forth processes
- Automated responses that don’t offer valuable fixes to customer problems
- Generalized solutions and lack of context
That’s where AI chatbots enter the picture. By leveraging the power of conversational AI and natural language processing models, these chatbots have the ability to understand context, predict emotions, and promote a more personalized interaction with your clients.
Advantages of AI Customer Support Chatbots
So, how exactly do businesses benefit from AI customer support chatbots? Here are some advantages you need to know.
Generating Customer Profiles
Chatbots can collect data during customer interactions, whether explicitly or implicitly, and use them to build detailed customer profiles. This allows you to do the following:
- Develop plans for improved targeting in your marketing campaigns
- Personalize your support interactions in future sessions
- Allow human agents to understand your customers when they need to take over
Your AI chatbot can achieve this in many ways. For example, it can directly ask users for their demographics, preferences, and feedback on past experiences. You can also integrate your chatbots with an existing customer relationship management system to create a comprehensive client profile.
Round-the-Clock Availability
Unlike human support agents, AI chatbots can provide help to your customers at any time of the day. This is really a massive advantage because people expect immediate answers and support, especially in today's online space.
Businesses with a global reach can also benefit from this. It allows them to help their customers around the world without worrying about local business hours.
Cost Optimization
AI chatbots cannot completely substitute for your human team for sure, but they can free up your team from routine tasks. This allows your human agents to focus on more complex issues. From a certain perspective, this reduces the need to hire more people to handle menial tasks, saving on staffing costs.
As mentioned before, chatbots can provide customer service 24/7. This takes away the need for overtime pay for human agents, too.
Conversational Marketing
Imagine a user visiting your website to look for a new pair of running shoes. Your traditional marketing strategies might involve showing them ads for different brands and sending them promotional emails.
Things can be a bit different with an AI customer service chatbot. For example, it can proactively pop out on your customers' screens and ask them questions about their product preferences. Based on their answers, the chatbot can recommend products suitable for the customer.
Scale
Unlike human agents, who can only focus on one conversation at a time, chatbots can juggle multiple chats simultaneously. They can answer questions and resolve issues for a larger number of customers much faster. This also reduces wait times and burden on the customer support team.
Since customers aren't stuck waiting in line for a human agent to become available, chatbots can provide near-instant answers to common questions.
Disadvantages of AI Customer Support Chatbots
Despite the benefits, AI chatbots have several limitations, including the following.
Language Misinterpretation
Complex language, sarcasm, slang, and even typos can confuse a chatbot, leading to misinterpretations and irrelevant responses. Instead of helping your customers quickly, this can lead to an even more frustrating support experience.
Moreover, many AI chatbots are primarily trained in the English language. While multilingual support is being developed due to the increasing need for AI by businesses around the world, the ability to understand informal subtleties in these languages is likely limited.
Cannot Understand Emotions
Techniques like sentiment analysis, language pattern recognition, and the usage of conversational AI can help chatbots predict the mood of the user. However, “predicting” is fundamentally different from “understanding.” They rely on picking out emotion keywords and their training database.
Unlike human agents, AI customer support chatbots are mere lines of code down to their cores. They don’t have the capacity to perceive and properly respond to emotions as humans do.
When faced with an upset customer, they might produce generic responses that don't address the user’s frustration, making the situation worse.
Limitations in Responses
AI customer support chatbots can only go so far with the information that you provide. If a customer asks something that it hasn’t been trained on or is missing from your database, it will not produce a substantial response.
The same thing can happen when your chatbot fails to understand the context of your customer’s specific situation. Some customers tend to ask one topic without providing additional information. So, even if the question itself is within the chatbot's knowledge base, it might produce inaccurate or unhelpful answers.
Best Practices for Implementing Chatbots
To counter the disadvantages of using AI customer support chatbots, follow these implementation best practices.
Let Users Opt Out
Make sure to inform users they are interacting with an AI chatbot at the start of the conversation. Then, briefly explain what information the chatbot collects and how it's used. To provide freedom to your customers, a clear and easy-to-find “Talk to a Human” button should be readily available in your chatbot’s interface.
Improve Data Security
You should also provide settings and options that allow users to request the deletion of their conversation history with the chatbot. This not only gives them control over their data privacy but also shows that you care about their opinion.
Conclusion
AI is revolutionizing the customer experience. By understanding AI customer support chatbot pros and cons, you can develop appropriate strategies for implementing it in your business. When you’re ready to start, make sure to visit My AskAI to create a powerful customer support chatbot for your website.
Written by
Alex Rainey
Alex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
