Today, it is difficult to imagine an online conversation without having a chatbot assisted in some way. Chatbots and virtual assistants are popular in banking, hospitality, travel, education, fintech, retail and many other industries.
To put this statement into numbers, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc, the global chatbot market size is expected to reach USD 27,297.2 million by 2030, registering a CAGR of 23.3% from 2023 to 2030. Trustify Technology’s experience in Chatbot development also validates the popularity, as we help clients design and build chatbot for various purposes. For example, we developed a chatbot for restaurants that can answer FAQs, such as menu items, operating hours, and reservation availability.
In this article, let’s take a look at what makes a great chatbot and how you can use it to help with customer service. We provide information on chatbot technology for customer service and the benefits that chatbots and virtual assistants offer. If you’re looking to improve your customer service with a bot, Trustify Technologies offers CRM-based chatbot development within’ Salesforce, as well as custom chatbot development, and ChatGPT integration.
Developing a customer service chatbot: why should businesses do it?
When clients come to work with us at Trustify Technology, many seek to improve their customer service. We often hear the same story that over 50% of support questions are too trivial. These problems can be easily solved by looking at self-served knowledge bases for answers, but customers still choose to contact live service agents and get help in a conversational format.
In this situation, our clients encounter a dilemma: they need to expand their team of support agents, which will increase their support costs. Otherwise, their product’s users or customers will likely experience long wait times and/or poor quality assistant services. To solve this problem, we always recommend developing a chatbot. This allows you to optimize support costs while maintaining a high quality level of support. The benefits of having a chatbot or virtual assistants include:
Benefits of chatbot for business and customers
Thanks to the chatbot, customers can receive answers to their questions very quickly. In our experience, a well-developed chatbot can maintain an average response time of 5 seconds or less when handling basic questions. This speed is possible 24/7, so customers can always receive exceptional and high quality support. Mainly due to these factors, US consumers already in 2024 rated the interaction with a chatbot as “highly effective”.
Implementing a chatbot or virtual assistant can reduce the support ticket volume by up to 70%, allowing your service team to focus on more complex issues and resolve them faster. It also creates a real learning opportunity when your agents handle complex issues, helping them avoid burnout due to repetitive tasks.
What makes a chatbot intelligent?
For a chatbot in customer service to become effective, there are two factors that are essential: a well-established service process and natural language processing (NLP).
The foundation of a chatbot’s operation is well-defined customer service processes, which allow machine learning engineers to create effective algorithms and fine-tune models for the chatbot to function. And NLP enables chatbots to recognize and communicate in human language by analyzing incoming text requests. With sufficient training and data collected during interactions, these bots can continuously improve by recognizing more and more textual patterns.
Chatbot technology has advanced in recent years, and the capabilities of chatbots have grown exponentially. They can now handle impressive workloads and have come a long way in simulating human interaction. Modern chatbots like Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, etc. are powerful AI applications, capable of supporting natural conversations and maintaining long, meaningful conversations.
Platform-based and integration options
Today, all major customer service platforms offer chatbot solutions or chatbot integrations. When a bot can extract CRM data, it helps to facilitate the training and improve its performance.
If you are using customer service without chatbot functionality and the option of migrating to another platform with chatbot availability seems complicated, then the best option is to develop a custom chatbot or integrate with solutions like ChatGPT.
Custom chatbot development: How to make it a success
If you opt for custom chatbot development, in order to get the most out of a chatbot in customer service, we recommend an iterative approach. You can get started by having your bot answer simple questions, review sample conversations regularly to highlight areas where additional bot training is needed, and gradually add more complex tasks to the list.
Following this simple formula will ensure that your bot will provide a consistent return on investment while you improve your service. To measure the effectiveness of your chatbot, you can use the KPIs that your human services agents use. If you want to automate customer service with a chatbot, we at Trustify Technology are here to help.