Meet Your New Customer Experience Professional: Chatbots for Today’s Customers

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of customer engagement? It probably isn’t chatbots, yet evidence might tell you otherwise. Chatbots are becoming the new customer experience professionals.

Read on to learn more about rising levels of chatbot adoption across a variety of sectors, and why chatbots can lead to increased customer engagement.

What is customer engagement?

Customer engagement refers to the emotional connection between a customer and a brand. The stronger the emotional connection, the more your customers will buy from you, and the easier it will be to retain them.

Why does it matter? Engaged customers are your best prospects. They understand your value, and they want what you have to offer. Moreover, they’ll also willingly advocate for your brand.

Customers prefer chatbots

You might think that customers are only willing to deal with other human beings, but you’d be wrong. Humans want to solve their problems quickly. If a chatbot can fix a problem faster than a customer service representative, a customer will choose a chatbot.

Research bears this out. A Hubspot study shows 71% of respondents are willing to receive assistance from messaging apps, while a Facebook report revealed that 65% of Millennials, 65% of Gen Xers, and 63% of Baby Boomers would prefer to use chatbots than call a customer service representative. The Facebook research demonstrates that customers’ love of chatbots isn’t linked to a specific demographic; everyone benefits from their convenience and speed.

How do chatbots improve customer engagement?

In addition to solving customer problems quickly and easily, chatbots boost customer engagement. There are three reasons for that:

• Chatbots offer omnichannel customer engagement, meaning that customers can interact with them on your website, your app, or through the social media channels of their choice.
• Customers can get the information they need at any time of day or night with AI-powered chatbots.
• AI-powered chatbots enable data-driven customer engagement; they collect information on each interaction so that you can improve future interactions.

Who’s using chatbots today?

The use cases for chatbots abound. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

• More than 28% of real estate businesses use chatbots because clients love their speed and ease of use.
• By 2022, banks will automate up to 90% of customer interactions.
• Companies with between one and 50 employees are more likely to use chatbots, so they can devote their resources to mission-critical issues.
• KLM Dutch Royal Airlines’ BlueBot sent two million messages to over 500,000 customers in 2018 about flight-related information.
• Over 80% of small businesses in India and Brazil report that WhatsApp’s chatbot enables them to improve their customer service.

The right chatbots keep customers coming back to your brand again and again because they feel a strong emotional connection to your brand. Moreover, these chatbots deliver data-driven customer engagement; they measure the success of interaction so organizations can learn from missteps.

Download our eBook entitled EngageOne™ Converse: Intelligent self-service that’s far from artificial to learn more.