A recent survey found that 87% of people prefer to talk to people, but 25% don’t care as long as they get their questions answered.
How to use AI chatbots to get in touch with customers
Mode.ai Eitan Sharon, founder and CEO explains how AI chatbots use natural language processing to improve the customer experience.
In the first Chatbot Trends report, Intercom reports that customers expect a chatbot on websites but still prefer collaboration with other people.
The survey asked 1,000 consumers and business leaders about their opinions about chatbots and the most common applications for the communication platform. The research showed that 87% of consumers prefer to talk to people. Only 15% of the respondents preferred a bone.
People prefer people because of their ability to understand complex situations and answer different questions. Twenty-five percent of consumers in the survey have no preference at all as long as they get an answer to their question. Bots also received points because he was always present and pointed customers to the right team.
If you want to learn more about chatbots in a nutshell, you can read plenty of online materials available, as well as attend webinars and conferences about the subject. Understanding customer preferences, usage patterns, and expectations can help better inform business owners about which types of bots best fit their organization’s goals and objectives.
In Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Customer Service and Support Technologies, 2019, Gartner puts chatbots at the height of inflated expectations and predicts that technology will reach a plateau in the next two to five years.
Gartner reports that chatbots are the most common of artificial intelligence in organizations. Gartner predicts that as chatbots learn more about a company’s users, “the use cases for the technology will increase to support onboarding, training, productivity, and efficiency.” This changes the way customer service is provided and influences the number of employees a company needs.
According to the Intercom survey, companies usually use chatbots to handle administrative tasks, such as forwarding questions to the right team, booking product demos, qualifying sales leads, and engaging website visitors.
The study found that bots were the most useful for sales organizations, increasing sales by 67% on average, with 26% of all sales starting via a chatbot interaction. Intercom reports that the three most important cases of sales use are: gathering information and qualifying leads, booking product demos, and involving visitors to the website.
The survey of 1,000 people showed that B2C companies were more satisfied with chatbot solutions, probably because questions from consumers are more repetitive and less complex than questions from business users.
Industries that reported the highest satisfaction with chatbot were:
- Technology – 73%
- Retail – 67%
- Production – 57%
- Healthcare – 56%
Intercom recommends companies select a chatbot to pay attention to these criteria:
- Works seamlessly between sales, marketing, and support
- Does more than visitors ask questions
- Respects customers’ time by being helpful, not distracting or annoying
Intercom collaborated with an independent market research agency to investigate a sample of 500 consumers and 500 business leaders. The margin of error of the survey is ± 4.1% at the 95% confidence level for the consumer survey and ± 4.3% at the 95% confidence level for the business executives survey.
Founded in 2011, Intercom sells a business messaging platform that allows sales, marketing, and support teams to contact each other and talk to customers.
