Before we dive in, let’s consider the knowns.
Chatbots handle full conversations around 69% of the time
If you’ve not interacted with many chatbots, then it would be easy to assume they are just in place to greet customers and provide generic information. However, AI chatbot technology is extremely advanced and is capable of dealing with much more personalized and complex tasks.
According to a report published by Com100, chatbots are capable of handling full conversations with customers and do so almost 70% of the time. Of course, chatbots can’t deal with every query, but they can be used to assist with common queries from start to finish.
Stat: 34% of people use a chatbot as a means of getting connected with a human. (Source)
For this reason, it’s crucial to have a seamless bot-to-human handoff in place. Customers surfing your website expect the option to transfer over to human assistance for more complicated issues, concerns, and queries.
With today’s advancements in bot technologies, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that chats can do it all. Don’t fall into this trap! A human touch is more helpful than an automated bot in certain usages, especially when it comes to nuanced or delicate interactions such as payment disputes.
Is sending a customer or user to a chatbot something they actually want?
A debate continues to rage about whether chatbots are viewed as annoying or helpful by customers. In fact, both views are true. And the determining factor for whether a user likes interacting with a chatbot — or even prefers it to a human interaction — depends entirely on the context.
On August 15, 2018, upstart mobile voice and data provider T-Mobile announced it would ban all robots and automated systems from direct interactions with customers on support calls and chats.
Live chat vs chatbot
Being able to chat with businesses has become a natural part of websites as an opportunity to interact with potential customers in real time. There are two main types of chat – live chats and chatbots. The big difference is that live chats are manned by real human beings. Chatbots on the other hand is a programmed machine which has been fed with huge amount of data. This enables the machine to answer questions that the machine already knows the answer to. In the chat world there has always been great debate about the two types of chats and which one is better. On a daily basis we hear both pros and cons for bots and livechats. At Weply we believe that live chats are the best solution for most businesses that are not e-commerce.
As mentioned before only 0.5% of people actually prefer chatbots over live chats. The majority would like their chat partner to be a real human being. The survey also show that over +50% of all the respondents have had bad experiences with chatbots. We believe that so many prefer live chats because of human’s ability to feel and show empathy and understand an individual context. In a buying process, customers want to feel listened to which only human chat partners can. Besides the human aspect there are other areas where chat bots are still not developed enough to compete with chats manned by real people.