Advantages of using AI Chatbots

Chatbots are a type of artificial intelligence that mimics interactions with human users. They are often employed as customer service agents, and their purpose is to answer common customers' questions and resolve simple problems.

Chatbots have the potential to handle first-level questions more efficiently than waiting for a customer service rep; for example, airline chatbots provide access to travel itineraries, boarding passes and more. This can reduce costs associated with customer service by allowing customers to easily self-serve.

By allowing customers to self-serve through chatbots, companies are able to improve their customer effort score at key points in their customer journey.

Disadvantages of Using Chatbots

While chatbots can provide a useful service to customer service teams, they do have some disadvantages. Chatbots are only as good as the information they contain and are often not updated with current events, causing them to provide incorrect or out-of-date information. Chatbots also cannot understand complex questions which means they will not be able to help customers with complicated issues.

Many people do not like chatbots because they are unable to create a connection with a chatbot. Chatbots are unable to express emotion, demonstrate empathy, or understand nuance which leaves some people frustrated.

However, for simple customer interactions and queries, chatbots are very effective and can contribute to creating great digital customer experiences.

Using chatbots for sales

As well as customer service, Chatbots are being used for marketing and sales purposes. Chatbots can be used to provide information about a product or company, answer simple questions, or even handle more complex tasks such as scheduling appointments by asking the user for their preferred date and time. If the user is unavailable, the chatbot can also offer a few alternative times for the user to choose from.