There is always drive under companies to innovate using new strategies of customer service. Other popular methods which have emerged in recent years include AI chatbots and traditional surveys.
Although both techniques strive to collect actionable insights from customers, they do so in vastly different ways and with varying degrees of success. This article will take on AI chatbots and traditional surveys, focusing in their advantages and limitations but also its impact on customer service. We are exploring these AI chatbot for customer service and survey tools with the intention of offering a detailed analysis, through this blog so that businesses can make informed decisions about their customer service strategies.
Automated Customer Interactions: AI Chatbots
AI chatbots have changed the course of business-customer interactions. Powered by artificial intelligence algorithms, these smart virtual assistants can understand and answer the customer questions in voice notes. Unleash the AI powered Chatbots : Natural language processing (NLP) has made substantial progress, making the chat-bots more sophisticated and context-aware of framing personal solution.
Benefits of AI Chatbots for Customer service
24/7 Availability:
AI chatbots operate 24/7, thereby available to customers at all times and saves time on responding. This availability leads to better customer satisfaction and a stronger brand image.
Efficiency and Scalability:
Contrary to human agents, an AI chatbot is capable of managing numerous customer interactions all at once hence highly efficient and scalable. No matter how many new leads show up, they lead handlers can get back to them quickly.
Consistency in Responses:
Following the scripts of these AI chatbots results in reliable and precise answers to their consumer enquiries. By doing so, the chances of human errors are completely reduced and customers can be sure that they get precise news.
Read: Top 6 ChatGPT Alternatives
Personalization:
AI chatbots analyze customer data using advanced machine learning and offer personalized recommendations and solutions. However, it lacks emotional intelligence that can interpret and solve emotions that are not straightforward for the chatbots. AI chatbots become robotic, or their solutions are inadequate. Moreover, customers need to be redirected, which affects customer satisfaction. They are also not efficient to answer and solve complex queries but they are only helpful in handling routine responses. Moreover, they have an initial development cost.
Small businesses and startups may find it expensive to create chatbots. Traditional Surveys tools are used to gather data through questionnaires. Questionnaires are structured statements designed to draw explicit customer insights. These statements include multiple-choice answers which customers can only choose one answer, a Likert scale which is more of a matrix for subjective data to be collected and open-ended questions which allows for qualitative data to be collected. Advantages of traditional survey tools include.
Surveys may be influenced by response bias, where participants answer questions incorrectly or partially. This may cause some data collection and, as a result of the skewed insights that can be taken from it, reduces overall reliability.
Limited Response Rates:
Asking customers to fill out a survey is often easier said than done — and it shows in how low response rates can go. This could result in a biased sample that is not truly representative of the wider customer base.
Time and Effort:
Traditional surveys suck tons of time and effort to design, distribute, collect data from them. Organizations have to devote time and effort into writing good survey questions, as well as an appropriate methodology for gathering data points.
Selecting the Right Approach
They reach the obvious conclusion that there is no single answer to customer service. Whether you choose AI chatbots or regular surveys wholly depends on factors such as business goals, audience and resources. When making an important decision for your business, it is vital to make sure that you are aware of the following:
Nature of Inquiries:
If most customer queries are simple and common, then AI chatbots can handle them easily; they will decrease the waiting time for answers in real-time.
Emotional Engagement:
For anything with a personalized and emotional interaction attached to it, human administered surveys may make more sense for the business.
Cost and Scalability:
Businesses with less resources can make use of AI chatbots to handle many inquiries’ at scale for a fraction of the cost. Although, traditional surveys demand you to invest in survey design, distribution and collecting the data.
Data Depth:
More traditional surveys provide a rich source of qualitative and quantitative information, allowing companies to capture fine-grained characteristics from consumer preferences and behaviors.
Conclusion
To sum it up, while AI chatbots are great for real-time responses and instant support, traditional surveys are better at providing a long-term customer satisfaction metric. The advantages of AI chatbots are efficiency, scalability and availability 24/7 while the advantage for traditional surveys is depth in insights along with flexibility to format your questions.
The selection of these 2 ways depends on what the business needs and objectives are. However, a deep examination of inquiries (flow and type), emotional depth, price point, scalability to data set size can be used by other businesses to make an accurate decision in line with their goals for customer service.
Check out: AI Chatbots: Current Flaws and Improvement Suggestions