Did you know that 96% of customers expect answers in 5 minutes, or they consider that bad customer support! (and 80% of customers expect an answer within 2 minutes…).
You’re doing your best but how can you keep up with that expectation!
You want to keep your customers happy, you want to have the time to grow your business, but you spend so much time/money keeping customers happy you can’t grow the business! This is where AI has the potential to help keep your customers happy – it won’t work for everyone though, so this article talks through whether using an AI customer support chatbot is right for you.
AI changed drastically in 2023 and is still soaring along in 2024
There were huge steps forward in the world of AI in 2023 and it is continuing at a fast pace in 2024. What we all used to know as a “chatbot” has been left behind, as they are now much more capable than they once were. It used to be the case that an “AI chatbot” could only respond if you asked it the right questions, but that’s no longer the case, they are capable of being much more helpful now (thanks to “LLMs”) so long as they are used correctly.
What’s an LLM? Much of the development in AI has occurred due to progression of LLMs (Large Language Models) – essentially it means an AI can really understand the meaning behind language (not just yes/no answers) without needing a defined question-answer pattern to follow.
While they are now much more capable than ever before, there are still some situations where they may be doomed to fail.
So could you use an AI support chatbot to help provide great customer support? What’s required for it to work? What types/options are there? This article will run through this so you’ll know if an AI Customer Support chatbot is suitable for you.
“But my customers might not want to talk to a robot” – very true! Some won’t, and that’s fine – this doesn’t have to be a choice between human-or-ai support, it is possible to use both. Some customers will prefer to talk to AI if it gives them instant answers to their questions – so how can you do both? We’ll cover how to safely include the benefits of AI while still providing for those that want the human touch (if you want to provide that of course!) so making some customers even happier and without upsetting other customers.
Why even bother considering an AI Customer Support Chatbot? (show advantages of AI, with research links)
But why even bother? I don’t want to fob off my customers with rubbish responses. I want to free up the resources for my business to grow and succeed but not at the expense of supporting my existing customers!
That’s absolutely the right attitude – here’s how an AI customer support chatbot might be able to help you with that:
- Give customers power to answer their own questions – In 2024, 69% of all customers prefer self-service support models. You can “empower customers to get answers to their own questions“. Make them feel in control and comfortable with your business, reassure them that they can use your product themselves, instead of them feeling like they need to rely on a support person to move forward.
- Give instant answers – so your customers can continue to get value from your business, with no delay – making your business more valuable to them. Don’t hold them up.
- Provide support 24/7 – 64% of customers say 24/7 support is the best feature of chatbots. Customers are happy to talk to AI if it gives them answers quicker.
- More time to grow the business – less time on customer support means more time growing the business – the really good stuff!
- Increase revenue and/or profits – Less cost associated with support means more budget for sales/marketing, product improvement, or profit!
- Increase retention – improved responses to customers means customers are happier and so more likely to continue with your business.
- Increase word of mouth recommendation – more likely to recommend to others, as they get excellent value from your business, in part due to your excellent customer support.
- No risk – you could apply AI in a way that supplements your existing business (not by replacing anything), therefore eliminating any risk if a customer doesn’t want to talk to AI.
Using an AI Customer Support chatbot is added value to your business, not corner cutting, not fobbing off your customers. It can be a win-win if the right chatbot is used in the right situation.
“But I’m worried that using AI may upset some of my customers” – the next section talks about how to handle this in a way that keeps everyone happy!
But I’ve heard that some customers don’t like AI chatbots
Many customers actually want the benefits of instant AI customer support – so if you are unsure, keep everyone happy and provide both options. Be sure to provide AI as a tool to help the customer get their answer quicker, not as a way to seperate them from being able to contact you. It just so happens that by providing a tool to help your customers, you would also have the added benefit of significantly reducing your support ticket workload too! Win-win! We run through a number of example scenarios and how to handle them later in this article.
“But isn’t talking to customers a great way to get feedback?” – Yes absolutely, but never at the expense of providing a fast enough response to their urgent questions. The main goal is to keep your paying customers as happy as possible:
- some customers will need an instant answer – so they’ll choose the instant AI answer option.
- others will prefer to talk to a human – so they’ll choose to use the “contact a human” option, and you can get feedback from them then!
The people that don’t want to talk to a human, probably won’t want to give you feedback either (these are the ones that probably want a quick answer from the AI), so you won’t be missing out on anything by providing AI as an option.
All this assumes the chatbot is implemented well – but AI chatbots can provide a bad experience where they are implemented badly. This article will help you make sure that an AI chatbot could work well for you, or help you figure out if it’s not suitable for you.
The next section covers the types of chatbot available and which situations they are best suited to.
Types of customer support chatbot
The term “AI customer support chatbot” can mean a lot of different things. Here is a brief explanation of the different types of AI customer support chatbot that are available:
- Customer-facing, actionable
(i.e. provide an order update, cancel subscription etc)
These are often based on a pre-planned “flow” of a conversation. This means you can have control over the conversation (such as to nurture leads, or automate cancellations etc) but therefore also needs time to construct every possible conversation that could occur.
This option can be great to automate specific tasks, but can be frustrating if a customers question doesn’t fit into one of the predefined paths. - Customer-facing, informational
(i.e. ”how do I do…”, or “do you provide…”, or “what’s your policy on…”)
Recently these are now often LLM based which means they are incredibly flexible in providing answers to customers.
These are generally quick to set up as they will take in the information available on your website/knowledgebase/support documentation etc. It is however completely reliant on that information existing; if you don’t have support information available to give the LLM chatbot, then it won’t be able to answer those questions. - Back-of-House AI assistant
Very similar to the above information chatbot, you could use a back-of-house AI assistant to draft responses to your customers questions to help respond quicker.
You would still receive the question in you current way, maybe by form, or by email (so the customer doesn’t see any change), but you’ll respond to questions quicker by using the AI to do most of the work for you.
This is again reliant on the information being available (such as on your website, or knowledge base) for the chatbot to refer to.
There are many options available for each of the above, and some chatbot providers provide a combination of the above wrapped up in one package. We have collated some example companies in a following section of this article to help you find the best product for you.
Now that you know what types of chatbot are available, the next section helps you decide which key features are right for your situation.
What does this look like in reality
So now you know about the main types of AI chatbot, lets look at the specific features of Customer Support tools so that you can decide which solution (whether it’s AI or non-AI) might be most suitable for your specific situation.
Here we describe the requirements of both AI and non-AI options so you can directly compare if an AI option might be suitable for you or not. Bear in mind you can often mix-and-match the below features (depending on the provider) so in a later section we’ve collected some example providers of each feature.
Live chat
Where a chat widget allows a website visitor to chat directly with your human customer support team. Providing the personal touch is great! But it does also set the expectation that you are going to respond quickly. If a customer needs to wait more than 5mins for a response they will consider that bad customer service. We would recommend that you only use live chat if you are going to be able to respond within the expected 5mins.
Contact Us form
This form is often also included as part of a chat widget, but could be shown as boxes on the webpage itself. The form generally asks for name, email, subject and message; this information will then be sent by your chosen method to your support team. This could be into your support ticketing system (such as Help Scout) or simply direct to an email inbox.
Customer Facing Chatbot, Flow-based
This is where a website visitor opens the chat widget and is given a set of options to try to answer their query. These options are sometimes clickable, or sometimes the chatbot will ask for simple answers to be able to understand the query.
If the majority of your queries are specific and actionable (like cancelling a subscription etc) then this could work well, but if the queries you get are very varied, this type of chatbot is not suitable. Each path of conversations need to be predetermined as part of setup process. This does mean you have complete control over how the conversation moves along, but with this type you do also need to predict every single possible question the customer could ask.
Recommended to automate simple repetitive procedures. Not suitable to provide informational responses. These might sometimes be called “AI” but these are far behind the latest in AI capabilities.
Customer Facing Chatbot LLM based
This is where the latest advancements are making life much easier for everyone. This is good for informational type responses, such as “how to….” much like your very own Google search engine but specifically for only your business information!
The user can ask questions in casual question format, including typos and confusing terminology, and the AI will instantly provide the user with an answer about your business. The AI can provide an answer, and also provide links to the original information on your website if they want to read more.
This system does rely on the information being available to it (much like if a support team was responding to your customer queries) – if you have information available on your website, or a support help centre, or knowledge base, or responses to previous support tickets, then this can work well for you. These are often very quick to set up.
Back-of-House AI Assistant
This is very similar to the LLM based customer facing chatbot, but is instead used by your support team to draft responses to user questions, drastically reducing the time it takes to respond.
Not only can these assistants draft a response, but can also provide your support team with links to the relevant documents so they can quickly access the information to check/adjust the response if needed.
What customer support features best suit me? How to choose!
So that’s a summary of some of the options available, how to choose which best suit your business? The below table should help point you in the right direction:
What’s your specific scenario?
| Focus | Solution |
|---|---|
| I want to have real conversations with all my customers | Live Chat, and/or Contact Form |
| I want to provide instant informational answers 24/7 | LLM Chatbot |
| I want to automate a process such as cancellations | Scripted Chatbot |
| I want to increase efficiency in responding to support tickets | Back-of-House Assistant |
| I want to reduce number of incoming informational queries | LLM Chatbot |
| I want to reduce number of incoming actionable queries | Scripted Chatbot |
Remember it might be wise to include a combination of the above to ensure you keep your customers happy. Such as providing a method of human contact (live chat or contact form) AND also provide a method of quicker response (AI chatbot of some sort).
The next section provides examples of companies that provide a combination of these options.
Where can I get these services from?
Need a help where to start looking? Here’s a few examples of different providers that provide different feature sets, depending on your needs:
Here are links to the above providers so you can try them out:
- Crisp – Live chat provider
- HelpScout – Ticketing system and knowledge base provider
- SupportAgent – Back-of-house AI assistant provider
- Resolve247 – AI customer support chatbot provider
- Zendesk – Customer service platform provider
- Intercom – Customer service platform provider
How to use AI so it’s a Win-Win!
If done right, everyone’s happy!
No customer is going to be unhappy that you gave them the option of getting an instant answer from an AI! So long as you use a reliable/tested chatbot then there is no downside!
The customer knows the AI chatbot is just a robot, so doesn’t expect a full human level capabilities – so long as:
- it doesn’t give them false information and,
- they have the option to speak to a human if they need to,
Then if anything adding an AI customer support chatbot can only be a positive step forward. There doesn’t need to be a down side.
Example customers if you do / don’t use an AI chatbot:
Lets play out the scenarios that could occur:
- Customer Sarah – Sarah is in a rush, she wants an answer now. She’s a bit sceptical about asking an AI (because they’ve always been so rubbish in the past!) – but she tries it out and BAM she gets the answer she needs instantly. Sarah is happy that you’ve got great customer service.
POSITIVE outcome. - Customer Bob – Bob sees your AI chatbot, doesn’t want to talk to AI (even if it could help, he doesn’t like “robots”), so clicks “talk to human” instead, and you’re in the normal flow you would have been without the chatbot.
NEUTRAL outcome. - Customer Greg – Greg asks your AI a question, the AI says it doesn’t have the information and suggests to get in contact with customer service. Greg then clicks the Contact Human button to forward the same question to your human customer support team – Greg hasn’t lost any time.
NEUTRAL outcome.
So long as you use AI as an additional source of information, there should be no risk in using it – that is so long as you use an AI that uses anti-hallucination systems to ensure the answers it provides are correct.
What’s a “hallucination”? This is where an AI presents incorrect information as fact. Some of the very basic AI chatbots hallucinate often, however a reputable chatbot should have anti-hallucination measures in place. Make sure to look for anti-hallucination measures when choosing what AI chatbot to use.
If you would like to know more, we have a dedicated article on how to pick the right AI customer support chatbot.
Use AI to maximise your business potential
Empower your customers to answer their own questions – give your customers the tools to get maximum value from your business! That’ll make your customers happy, which will help grow your business. But on top of that with the reduced workload on customer support you’ll be able to focus on business growth, increase sales and sky rocket your business!
Get your own AI Customer Support Chatbot now
If you would like to get going with your own chatbot in just a few minutes, Resolve247 is here to get you started straight away! In just 5mins you can get started with your own chatbot that can immediately answer 50% of your customers questions AND help you respond to questions quicker!
Get your own AI Customer Support Chatbot now
If you’ve decided to use an AI customer support chatbot, but maybe you want to read more about how to make sure you pick the right provider? We’ve written a more in-depth article on what to look for when considering an AI customer support chatbot in the article “how to choose an AI customer support chatbot”.
Q&A
- Q: What if I don’t have any information on my website, no knowledgebase, and no support ticket history?
- A: the AI chatbot will only be as good as the information available to it. If no information can be provided to it, then it won’t be able to respond well.
- Q: How can I incorporate the efficiency of AI while still having a human connection?
- A: You have two options here:
1) You could provide options – provide both an AI chatbot and also a way to talk to a human, to keep everyone happy.
2) You could use a back-of-house AI assistant – to make it much quicker to answer your support tickets.
