With the evolution of smart voice assistants, the way businesses communicate with their customers has transformed tremendously with less human intervention. To meet the increasing customer expectations, businesses have started adopting chatbots for instant solutions regarding queries related to any new products or services of the brand. Chatbots came into use with the help of Artificial Intelligence that combines Machine Learning and virtual Intelligence to simulate human conversation through text and voice commands. Let’s find out how a conversational AI chatbot can help businesses address & mitigate challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic with less effort and costs.

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Top Ways that Help in Saving Business Operating Costs with Chatbots

If your business is looking for ways to deliver improved operations and smarter interactions with customers, a chatbot is what you need. Research by Business Insider believes more than 80% of businesses will use chatbot automation by the year 2020. Additionally, $4.5 Billion will be invested in enterprise intelligent assistants by 2021. As there are many development firms available in the market today, ensure that you choose the experts of the AI chatbot solution provider having a strong technical expertise of all the latest market trends.

Without wasting any further time, we will find out what are the capabilities of chatbots that enable business owners to save their operating costs

10 Ways Chatbots Reduce Business Costs

Replaces Human Agents

The main motive of implementing chatbots is to replace human agents through automation that helps in ensuring that customers get robust support of 24/7 availability, even after business working hours. Using a chatbot saves the business from the expenses of hiring customer support agents and the efforts it would take by 1 agent to address issues of multiple requests. Unlike human operators, the chatbot needs no weekend offs or vacations, ensuring a lower load on the rest of the staff.

Solves Customer Inquiries

Chatbot helps in handling several commonly asked questions or low-level tasks that many human agents earlier handled. Most of the queries can be resolved by sending a link or searching a database. Whether it’s about answering general queries related to the brand, like business hours, handling basic operations, finding a product, or providing assistance on order issues, the bot can handle them & process the first interaction level before transferring to a human agent, if needed.

Constant Availability

One of the best benefits of using customer service chatbots is their availability enabling customers’ queries to be attended at any time and from anywhere on the globe. This can be a huge cost-saving factor as it provides 24-hour service while relying on human operators for three shifts a day would be extremely costly. Another big advantage is the convenience for your customers, who get their problems solved instantly at any time of the day.

Ensures Customer Satisfaction

Though this point may not be directly related to cost savings, it is closely associated with the ultimate purpose of any business i.e. making customers happy, which helps in attracting others & maintaining a good reputation. Adding a chatbot can improve customer service tremendously, thereby increasing the number of happy customers & retention rates. Serving hundreds of customers simultaneously with no waiting times is a plus point as a few seconds’ delay can make them leave for other options.

Better Service with Fewer Errors

Chatbots help assist every customer with a personalized touch, helping them make quicker purchase decisions with more satisfaction & high probability of returning. As chatbots work on algorithms with predefined sets of questions and answers, your customers can easily rely on them for accurate information in almost all cases. Human operators are more likely to make errors or overlook important details due to work pressure, fatigue, distraction, or sickness.

Collect & Evaluate Data

Every conversation between the chatbot & customer can be a great source of analytical data without the need to conduct individual surveys. The activity can be analyzed thoroughly, which helps identify customer service situations like user engagement and user flows or trends. Customer data analytics can be very costly as it requires the collection of data from different sources, but using a chatbot can reduce these costs by storing the conversation data for free. Apart from customer data, this analysis helps assess the chatbot’s performance to fill any gaps and handle customer conversations more effectively.

Boost Brand Awareness

A message sent through a chatbot messenger service is more likely to be read than an email that may end up in a junk folder or remain unattended. A quick notification is more effective than any other marketing channel to increase brand awareness. A chatbot is one of the most cost-effective ways to inform customers about upcoming sales, discounts, product recommendations, or any new updates. Interaction with chatbot helps in building a channel for your business that will drive revenue & promote your brand image.

How chatbots can help reduce customer service costs by Margin

Chatbots in sales

You’ve probably entered a website where a widget came up, similar to a regular chat, asking things like your name, telephone, email, and profession. This data, if answered, will be stored in a cloud system and will generate leads (people or entities that may become customers). This saves the labor of a seller who would normally have to create extraordinary ways to understand the type of person for whom they are selling, how and when to talk to them. Free from these occupations, the seller can turn their attention to other activities besides improving assertiveness when selling. Resulting in lower costs and higher profits.

AI chatbots continue to learn from every customer interaction.

Based on the successes of companies like Staples and Autodesk, we can already see why this trend is growing rapidly. As chatbots have more interactions with customers, they learn from each conversation. As they participate in “hybrid” conversations with live agents, they learn from the human representative, and the rep can learn from the virtual agent as well. When agents and chatbots help each other to deliver better service, it fosters increased customer trust and confidence in chatbots as well. It becomes a closed-loop “virtuous circle” of learning and trust.

Chatbots in Banking Applications Becoming Dominant 

Chatbot integration in mobile banking apps will be the dominant channel for chatbot-driven customer communications, accounting for 79% of successful interactions in 2023. This dominance is due to several reasons, primarily an increase in user preference for app-based banking, as well as the strong performance of early banking chatbots, such as Bank of America’s Erica.

Research author Nick Maynard explained: “Chatbots in banking allow heavily automated customer service, in a highly scalable way. This type of deployment can be crucial in digital transformation, allowing established banks to better compete with challenger banks”.

Saving costs in retail with AI

Before AI-based Chatbots, customer interactions had to be handled entirely by customer service agents. Scaling up service capacity came at a high cost for companies, given it is labor-intensive. It is also why customer service has historically been one of the first services to be outsourced, despite its importance in building a loyal customer base. With AI, retailers can cut costs by automating more customer interactions through Chatbots. According to Juniper Research, this will save retailers up to $439 billion by 2023. Today, automation through Chatbots saves up to $7 billion in retail.

While scalability is considered one of the biggest problems in the sales process, hybrid Chatbots are able to increase their knowledge base at a fast pace whether inquiries are recurrent or highly complex. Chatbots can welcome new customers on the website with personalized messages and follow-up if they leave their shopping cart before checkout. In this respect, Chatbots can also collect valuable meta-data about the customer and give tailored suggestions about products and services based on consumer behavior. In addition, the use of chatbots would help to free up the time of customer service agents to add further value and devote more time to specialized cases.

Closing Statement

Every business revolves around its customers, and chatbots surely help provide an enhanced customer experience that will eventually help increase sales and customer loyalty. Implementing chatbots in the business will not only help attain better productivity but also lead to lower costs, as it addresses several challenges effectively. Suppose you are thinking of adding a chatbot to your business. In that case, we highly recommend you get an estimated development cost using a reliable chatbot cost calculator to help you plan your budget better. For better business outcomes, get a custom chatbot built specifically for your business requirements & gain a competitive advantage!