Chat support is growing quickly and is here to stay
While chat support is nothing new, it has experienced tremendous growth over the past few years and is quickly becoming standard for many organizations. In fact, according to a recent Nielsen study, 63% of surveyed people have increased their messaging with a business over the past two years. As communication shifts towards text-based channels in our personal lives, the impact is hitting businesses as well. Customers want to message businesses like they message their friends and family. And with a computer at every desk and a smart phone in every pocket, it’s easier than ever. The last piece of the puzzle is making sure you are enabling your customers to chat with your team through channels that fit with exiting support operations.Not only is chat support a great trend for the customer as it provides a faster, less intrusive, and more convenient way to get questions answered, but it also allows businesses to apply modern technologies to their support operations to ensure customers receive answers faster and with more consistent quality. What’s not to like about happier customers + more efficient support teams?
*Nielsen study of 12,500 people that use messaging apps.
Bots will be your new best friends
Once you’re set up to provide chat support to your customers, it’s time to introduce bots to the equation. Adding chat as a channel has the ability to 3-4x the efficiency of a team simply due to agents being able to handle multiple chat conversations at one time (vs only one phone call at a time). Then when you add bots to the conversation that can automatically respond to basic FAQs, you reduce the number of inbound questions your team receives by 30-40%, which again significantly increases efficiency. With the time-consuming FAQs off the table, agents are now free to address only the most important and complex issues that your customers face. This not only ensures time is being spent on the right issues, but drives a better customer experience as important issues are being routed to the right people, faster.While bots may be new to many people, they’re not a fad and they’re not going away any time soon.
According to Gartner, “By 2020, the average person will have more conversations with bots than with their spouse.” Like it or not, bots are becoming a major part of daily life and it's time to take advantage of them. And the best thing about bots? Similar to how agents become more knowledgeable the longer they are on the team, bots do as well. You can view detailed analytics on each question that a bot answered incorrectly and use that information to ensure it answers that question correctly the next time it is asked. Over time, by leveraging machine learning models that are built into bot platforms, the bots actually begin to learn and improve on their own.
Take a look at our proprietary bot platform that we built specifically for B2B enterprises and see how you can add chats and bots to your support strategy.Do you use chat and bots as part of your support strategy today? We would love to hear how it's working for you.
