Throughout my many ventures, I’ve worked on improving the customer experience through various strategies. One of the most appealing technologies in recent years has been the emergence of artificial intelligence to provide companies with the assistance they need to do more, and to do it right.

My first concern was much like those of others: When you hear that a chatbot is going to serve as a customer service representative, it seems like it could be more impersonal than usual. But I’ve since learned that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I entered the chatbot industry to delve deeper into how this technology can actually enhance the customer service experience for all types of industries. What I’ve learned is that, just like everyone in business, there is an opportune time and place in which to use a bot as part of your customer service experience.

Here are some ways to know when a bot can help you — and when you really need a human to take charge:

• Handling routine tasks. Many customer service interactions are routine, but they are just as important to the customer regardless. Bots can step in and handle these basic tasks, such as taking orders for a restaurant or answering questions about hours of operation or directions. Providing the customer an immediate answer to these common questions means they can be on their way, rather than having to wait for an email response hours later or until Monday morning.
• Redirecting calls. Bots can determine where a call should be routed to speed response times and ensure the customer gets in front of the best person to handle any issues that are too complex for the bot to remedy on its own.
• Sorting through heaps of data quickly. There is so much information available in a company. A bot can utilize its artificial intelligence to scan that data and find the critical points that a customer service agent can use to provide assistance to a customer. This saves the customer service rep an extraordinary amount of time and gets the customer their answer much more quickly than if the agent had to sort through all the content on that subject themselves.
• Responding to messages. Using a bot for a messaging app provides an immediate response to customers that might have otherwise taken minutes, which is essentially more time than the customer wants to wait. Customers will be pleasantly surprised to receive an immediate answer when they use the messaging app on your website or social media profile. This gives you 24/7/365 customer service without having to hire and pay for people to be available just in case someone contacts your company.
• Handling communication touchpoints. You could also have a bot reach out to customers via text or email message on the company’s behalf. This can be done after the bot scans databases to determine, based on a customer’s purchase history, whether they are ready to buy again. Or maybe a customer has an upcoming birthday and you want to offer them a special promotion on the company’s behalf. Bots may also do a good job at upselling, offering a customer additional products or services as it senses what the customer is searching on the website. This is an excellent way to stay on top of promoting repeat sales without having to incur labor costs for this marketing effort.

While chatbots are a useful way to improve your customer service, they are not a replacement for human beings. Bots have a long way to go before they can assess and understand what a customer is saying in terms of their tone and emotional state. Having a human join the conversation after the bot initializes the immediate response is an ideal way to approach the customer experience, helping to create a more efficient and responsive customer service system.

How to Get Started

If you are concerned that adding a bot could screw things up because the technology is still developing, you may want to first use one internally within your organization. See how the bot works, help the bot learn and get it up to speed, and discover how the bot uncovers patterns in previous customer interactions. This will help determine what the most common questions and concerns are so you can focus the bot on learning how to handle those issues. This way, you’ll be able to build a knowledge base of content for the bot to search and understand how to tackle these issues for you.

This approach also gives you an opportunity to try out the various types of bots that are available, including those that can be integrated with messaging apps. The ability to test out the bot can help you and your team feel more comfortable with how this new technology can personalize and enhance the customer experience.

While bots aren’t necessarily ready for every industry, and many B2B applications may still pose significant challenges, they do have their place in many areas already that they are improving day by day, making them worth another look when evaluating customer service solutions for your business.