Chatbots and human agents are considered as two effective means of responding to customer inquiries. The former offers a quick way to respond to questions while the latter gives that necessary human element to better engage these customers. But using the two side by side in an effective communication strategy can be challenging. Let\’s take a look at how you can combine and take advantage of both to better engage and retain customers.
Chatbots vs. humans: what each offers for customer support
When planning your integration strategy, you need to have a good idea of what each mode of customer support offers. This will help you decide the role each will play in your larger strategy. You will also be able to determine how to better transition customers from one to the other when needed.
Benefits and challenges of using human agents
Arguably the biggest benefit of human customer support agents is that they can display empathy. This is an irreplaceable aspect of customer support since people are more responsive to assistance if they feel like the other party had a genuine desire to help. On the other hand, this empathy helps agents better understand the problem a customer has and look for a more effective solution.
Another important advantage of human agents is the ability to understand various nuances of human communication. Some of these nuances include:
- Cultural sensitivity
- Sense of urgency
- Experience
- Tonality of speech
By homing on these nuances, agents can quickly ascertain the emotions of the inquiring party and adapt their responses. For instance, human agents will be able to discern annoyance on the part of the customers and switch to a calmer manner of speaking to appease them.
Meanwhile, the biggest drawback that an entirely human customer support system is that they might be a bit slow on responding to inquiries. Even a larger team can take in only so many calls. This can leave other customers waiting for a long time. Such long waiting times can create a negative impression on customers about your business.
Benefits and disadvantages of chatbots
Chatbots’ main benefit is that they provide good load balancing for human agents. Using a chatbot lets customer support teams entertain more inquiries and better get them through to the human agents. This setup also lessens the waiting time that customers encounter.
These tools are also used for streamlining the customer support process. Here, the team can program the chatbot to organize incoming inquiries into different priority levels and direct them to human agents as needed. Additionally, the bots can be used to handle basic inquiries, further lessening the load on agents and letting them focus on more critical assignments.
Using chatbots more effectively
With the above benefits taken into consideration, you can begin deciding what roles chatbots and human agents will play in your communications plan. In most communications strategies, chatbots will serve as the first level of customer support.
Here, their purpose is to respond to basic inquiries. It is worth noting that most customers prefer to resolve their issues on their own before contacting customer supper. In this case, they will be often looking for quick answers to basic questions.
Image from Tidio.
By looking into the various inquiries customers made to your agents, you will be able to determine the most common questions asked. These would then serve as the basis for a database of responses you can feed to the chatbot. If the chatbot is unable to find a relevant answer from the database, it can then direct customers to human agents for help.
Using multiple chatbots
Note that you are not limited to using just one chatbot in your communications strategy. Adding several other bots at different parts of your support process further streamlines it. Some of the other uses for chatbots include:
- Product suggestions
- Delivering news
- Offering customer incentives
- Engage social media followers
Each purpose requires a different level of chatbot sophistication. For instance, a chatbot meant for product suggestions will need to be used alongside an artificial intelligence program that analyses customers’ buying patterns. This lets them deliver more effective recommendations for products that customers will actually buy.
Improving your human support agent’s capabilities
As you work on improving the implementation of chatbots, you also need to hone the skills of human agents. One of the important lessons that you need to impart to agents is the concept of active listening. This is the act of mindfully hearing out another person and comprehending the meaning behind their words.
Image from Caroline Hendrawan.
A good way to instill active listening to your human agents is by encouraging them to ask followup questions. The questions need to be those that naturally come up from the previous points the customers are talking about. Train your agents on the skill by having them converse with each other and keeping track of the questions they ask. You can then provide useful pointers to improve their questioning skills.
Using positive language
Another important skill customer support agents need to master is using positive language to engage people on the other line. This can be surprisingly tricky, as they need to carefully choose the right words for the benefit of their customers. There are several popular phrases that agents can employ but they need to regularly hone their vocabulary and expand their vocabulary of postive phrases.
But positive language does not end on just words. Agents also need to learn more about creating the right tone for their responses. A calmer tone when receiving calls makes the person on the other line more willing to answer your questions. It is also important for agents to be patient in listening to clients. This will help them better understand the particular customer’s situation and provide the appropriate response.
Providing transparency
One important thing to remember when combining chatbots with human agents is that you should be honest with customers about when they are engaging each. For instance, your chatbot should start with a line that says it is one. You can also design the interface of your business chat panel to indicate when the conversation has switched to a human agent.
That level of honesty is vital as it will give your customers better cues on when to provide the relevant details and make the support call easier to resolve. It also helps you build the trust of your customers since they will know that they are talking to actual people on the other line.
Take advantage of your chatbots and human agents for better customer support
As the technology behind them improves, you can expect chatbots to become more effective in engaging customers. But don’t think that this will be the end of the line for human agents. By taking advantage of the two channels and combining them into a seamless strategy, you can gain more benefits from both and better communicate with your customers every time.