Why could chatbots be the next game-changer in customer care experience?

Have you heard of the chatbots? If you haven’t, then probably you are living under the rock. It is the latest technology that is touted to change the customer service across the world. If you have been following the news you would know how analytical software called chatbots are being created and developed by various companies to enhance their customer support experience. With accumulated data and analytics, these robots are designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner.

Ashish Gupta- Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer, Policybazaar.com, says that in coming days, the artificially intelligent chatbots can help the customer care segment by operating without any human assistance – thus, making life easy for professionals supporting customer care. So how does a chatbot work in enhancing overall customer experience? Simply put, the technology makes use of the data collected over a period of time and processes it to communicate with a customer like a human.

Humans vs chatbots: efficiency

In most customer care jobs, handling the sheer volume of data becomes challenging for a human assistant. When dealing with large volume of data, the response time increases significantly for human assistants, which at times leads to a frustrating customer experience. Whereas, when a chatbot is involved in the process, it processes data at a faster speed and the results are generated in seconds.

For example, if we take a case of human assistant versus chatbot dealing with the customer trying to buy an insurance policy online. Earlier, when a customer used to go online to buy something online, a chat would come in and a customer support person would start responding if he/she had the bandwidth. While, nowadays in the case of a chatbot, immediately when a chat comes in, the chatbot starts responding to the customer, reducing the average response time to 2-3 seconds. When asked a complicated question the robot stops working and the customer support person takes over — so that incorrect information doesn’t get passed — thereby, reducing manual work to a great extent.

Implications of chatbots:

When we look at the usage of this technology, there are a lot of benefits that one can see in the long and short-term for a company. Firstly, it leads to better conversions due to smoother chat and customer experience. It also decreases the stress and load on support center team by tackling the initial problems.

For instance, If a company has to follow the usual paradigm – it wouldn’t be able to increase its traffic without investing in a large support team but with using chatbots a large amount of work is distributed among machines. A big advantage of machines is that they don’t face problems like fatigue and can work faster than humans. Building a large support team for a company can be an expensive and slow process -- every time a fresh batch arrives, the cost of training increases the expenditure for the company. It is a complex operation for trainers to explain the data analysis and execution to every individual for sales and marketing – whereas, a chatbot is pre-fed with information and data which can imitate a human conversation.

Pros, cons, and future of chatbots in India

One of the biggest advantages of using chatbots in customer care segment is to provide a superior experience to users. It will reduce the cost for a company as human labour will go down once data is managed by robots. Processing of data at a faster speed and using it at the right time enhances operational productivity and improves customer experience resulting in more efficient sales for the company.

While, if we look at the disadvantage of this technology, a big concern is that fully automated systems are less accurate contextually. Thus, we cannot fully rely on machines to do all the work for humans. Also, the data needs to be protected very well so that it doesn’t get any aberrations due to a virus or technical glitch. And, of course, a chatbot cannot replace the humanitarian aspect that assistants develop with customers over a period of interaction time.

Overall, if we look at the future of chatbots in India it looks like a game-changing technology that can lead to a great customer care experience for users. A completely automated system, especially in a complex product like insurance is some time away, but technology changes so rapidly and usually behind iron curtains that it’s hard to say.