What is a Customer Service Chatbot?Instant Responses Without the Human Input
What is a Customer Service Chatbot? Definitions & Overview
Whether you’re a financial institution or an eCommerce merchant, you’ll need human customer service agents to field inquiries, handle grievances, and authorize refunds.
But, your staff’s time is valuable. A lot of customer service inquiries only require basic responses, rather than in-depth assistance, which means that they don’t necessarily have to be serviced manually. That’s where automated solutions like customer service chatbots come in.
But, what exactly is a customer service chatbot? What role do they play in the customer service process? In this chapter, I’ll walk you through what these tools are and how they help businesses lighten their customer service workloads.
Customer Service Chatbots
In this article, we take a look at what customer service chatbots are, how they work, and why they’re beneficial. We also talk about potential downsides, discuss the role they should play in your overall customer service function, and examine whether they’re right for your business.
What is a Customer Service Chatbot?
- Customer Service Chatbot
A customer service chatbot is a conversational interface that interacts with customers to resolve issues and answer simple questions. It uses rudimentary AI and “yes/no” programmatic decisioning to streamline customer interactions and resolve customers’ questions.
[noun]/kəs • tə • mər • sər • vəs • CHat • bät/
In essence, a chatbot is a script that performs basic communicative tasks. Primarily used for customer service and support, chatbots streamline interactions between consumers and merchants. They are often the first interaction a customer has with your business, answering simple inquiries or guiding callers to the proper human agent.
Customers can (and often do) interact with chatbots directly on a merchant’s site. But, the contemporary customer service environment is omnichannel, and so are the chatbots that guide users through it.
Custom bots for Facebook Messenger, Kik, Wechat, and WhatsApp are exceedingly common. In fact, it's estimated that AI-enabled chatbots could be responsible for up to 95% of customer interactions in 2025.
What Do Chatbots Do?
Support chatbots can be fully automated, or they can function as a tool for live agents. Simple automated systems are often rules-based, whereas more complex systems leverage artificial intelligence to resolve user queries.
Rules-based Chatbots
Rules-based chatbot apps are pre-programmed with a limited range of yes-or-no question options. An algorithm determines the bot’s response during a conversation. While easier to implement, automated chatbots typically lack any human-like behavior.
AI Chatbots
Artificial intelligence-based chatbots can recognize sentence structure, resolve open-ended queries, and understand the language of the user. They provide appropriate answers by comparing questions to available data, giving interactions an overall more human feel. AI chatbots also learn from each encounter, fine-tuning performance by analyzing correct and incorrect responses.
Live Chatbots
So-called “live” chatbots work alongside your customer support team, routing communications and connecting contacts to the agent with the right skills and knowledge, all in real time. By asking simple questions, bots can also provide the agent details such as the caller's name, their current wait time, and the nature of their issue.
Chatbots can save both you and your customers time and energy. They’re not without drawbacks, though, so you need to be careful when deploying them.
