Updated on March 21, 2023
Chatbots have revolutionized customer support and service automation in business organizations today. It doesn’t matter if your organization is big or small; chatbots have something to offer everyone. Almost all modern and evolving businesses have deployed chatbots to increase market relevance. Not only are they multifunctional, but they also can carry out each task with extreme precision and accuracy. When understood properly, chatbot advantages and disadvantages can be used to boost business operations across departments.
What are chatbots?
A chatbot is software powered by artificial intelligence to interact with humans and solve their problems. Chatbots have become increasingly successful in messaging platforms because of their 24/7 availability and unbiased responses. The number of business organizations that have started using chatbots has increased exponentially in the past couple of years.
Customer support automation help enhance business operations
Every business is built around its customers, hence taking care of customers is a primary business function across industries. A time-tested way of ensuring customer satisfaction is strategically implementing customer support automation to boost customer engagement and satisfaction. Using chatbots as a part of your customer support automation boosts several facets of enterprise operations. To understand how chatbots do this, we will cover their advantages and disadvantages.
Let’s take a look at it.
Chatbot Advantages
Today, most organizations have learned the benefits of customer service and support automation. Chatbots are a significant aspect of any organization’s support automation strategy. They have revolutionized how an organization works by simplifying many day-to-day tasks. Let’s look at chatbot advantages that will help your business operations.
1. 24/7 availability
Unlike humans, one of the best chatbot advantages is that they are available around the clock for customers. Customers can text chatbots when they feel like it, and they will likely revert within a few seconds. This reduces the waiting period, and customers’ problems can be solved at the earliest hour.
2. Conversational Marketing Tactics
Chatbots are multifunctional, especially regarding marketing benefiting your organization across various operations. One of the most notable chatbot advantages is that it can help you with lead generation and product consultation. Chatbots also can transform leads into buyers by increasing their engagement with your website and products. Chatbots are the best tools to promote your newly launched products or services.
You might also want to read How Can Your Business Re-engage with Lost Business Leads?
3. Managing customer requests
As Artificial Intelligence powers chatbots, they can manage different customer requests simultaneously. Multitasking is mostly beyond human capabilities but is one of several significant chatbot advantages. But chatbots make it seem easy while maintaining the quality of responses. Chatbots can answer customer queries and, at the same time, manage data on your website.
4. Comprehending Natural Language
Newly developed chatbots in the market now have the capability of articulating the meaning behind the request made by customers. Through sentiment analysis, chatbots can easily understand your mood and behavioral patterns to give desirable responses. While this makes chatbots more personable, they are limited in understanding complex customer needs. To circumvent this, you can program multiple chatbots and focus on chatbot-to-chatbot handoff based on intent turning this limitation into one of the most significant chatbot advantages.
5. Cutting down operational costs
Now that the markets are evolving dynamically, businesses need chatbots to look after different tasks simultaneously. Not only are they able to manage everything efficiently, but they also save on the cost of hiring manpower to do various tasks. Handling staffing in an organization can add to operational costs, so saving costs through this chatbot advantage can benefit an organization.
6. Help in finding potential customers
Lead generation is one of the chatbots’ best features as they help find potential business prospects and market segments. Chatbots are also effective in converting these leads into regular customers. This can help an organization grow and become profitable within a short period.
7. Minimizes the possibility of errors
The chances of a chatbot making a mistake are minimal as chatbots are backed by Artificial Intelligence, eliminating the possibility of error. This means there is no need for double-checking data management and customer feedback reports created by chatbots.
Read How to Calculate Your Chatbot ROI
Chatbot Disadvantages
While chatbots have become an integral part of most modern business organizations, there is also a downside. Chatbots have several disadvantages that all organizations must be aware of so that these flaws cannot impact them negatively. These disadvantages include the following-
1. Frequent updating
For a chatbot to be responsive, it has to be frequently updated. This means feeding chatbots new information about products and services and providing conversational inputs from users. Other ways include using interaction analytics to make chatbots converse better with customers. Such a process must be an ongoing task, and inefficient updates will make the chatbots less effective. Also, you have to constantly save new information in your chatbot based on the recent set of queries and questions that people are asking in the current scenario. When it comes to chatbot disadvantages, this can be a significant challenge.
2. Context and style of speech affect the input
Even though chatbots have become proficient in understanding human language and emotions through chats, they are still not perfect at it. In many situations, chatbots might misinterpret what the customer is trying to say. This will directly impact the input from the organization’s end, and the customer might feel agitated.
3. Unable to deal with agitated customers
Chatbots can only handle a limited number of customer scenarios regarding queries, FAQs, and providing specific information. This means they are likely to encounter a situation in which they cannot process a reply. Often, a chatbot cannot assess if the customer is angry. Due to this, the chatbot might not be able to provide the customer with a response to address the customer’s query. This might leave them even more frustrated and angry.
4. Not fully proficient with NLP
Many chatbots have come into the market, claiming they implement Natural Language Processing effectively. But chatbots have still not gained the ability to process all the emotions of human beings. Often, chatbots might not be able to decipher what the customer is trying to say and how the customer is feeling on a particular day. This way, customers might not be able to receive the desired responses.
5. Cannot replace humans for complex queries
Chatbots cannot compete with humans in emotional intelligence. No matter how technologically advanced they are, they still would not be able to understand customers’ emotional and psychological complexities like a human executive would be able. One cannot predict if a chatbot may be able to revert responsibly in sensitive situations or not.
All of these shortcomings are common to all the available chatbots. Despite their multiple uses, it’s safe to say that chatbot disadvantages need to be frequently dealt with.
Conclusion
There are indeed a lot of things that a chatbot adds to an organization, but at the same time, a risk factor is also involved. Chatbots add significantly to your company’s reputation and customer satisfaction. You need innovative strategies to deploy chatbots to ensure that you yield the most benefits you can and, at the same time, not get too affected by the disadvantages associated with them. Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of chatbots can help you tap into the full potential of customer support automation for business operations.
At Kommunicate, we are envisioning a world-beating customer support solution to empower the new era of customer support. We would love to have you on board to have a first-hand experience of Kommunicate. You can signup here and start delighting your customers right away.
