It’s live! Access exclusive 2024 live chat benchmark data & see how well your team is performing.

Get the data

Customer Service Industry Trends 2024 

Dig deep into five customer service predictions that are expected to have a lasting and powerful impact far beyond the year. 

Find out more
Customer Service Trends Report herobanner
Bringing Automation to Customer Service - 5 Chatbot Examples for Any Industry featured image

Bringing Automation to Customer Service – 5 Chatbot Examples for Any Industry

The life of chatbots in customer service has been turbulent. However, as bot technology has rapidly improved, so too has organizations’ readiness to adopt chatbots in their customer service operations. By introducing a chatbot, organizations are now expanding customer service availability, cutting costs, increasing team efficiency, so much more. 

In this blog, we’ll look at some of the best chatbot examples across industries, revealing how organizations are using automation and the benefits each brings. So let’s jump straight in to our first chatbot example. 

1. Reducing repetitive work 

Staffing has become increasingly difficult in customer service. Thanks to heavy workloads and customers with increasingly high expectations, customer service roles have traditionally seen heavy turnover. To slow the high turnover in these positions, organizations are focusing on the agent experience and turning to automation. 

The majority of customer service queries are repetitive and simple in nature, like ‘how do I reset my password’, ‘where is my delivery’, or ‘what time is your store open’. While these queries can easily lead to agent burnout, they also use up valuable agent time. These common queries are an excellent opportunity to introduce chatbots. Chatbots can be used to handle almost all of these common inquiries so agents have more time to focus on more complex questions and tasks. On top of this, with these questions automated, teams can also increase their service capacity without increasing team size. 

For the first of our chatbot examples, we’ll look at Tangerine Telecom in Australia. Tangerine first introduced Comm100 Live Chat to customers to improve the accessibility and speed of their customer service. With live chat proving successful and request levels growing rapidly thanks to new service offerings, Tangerine turned to Comm100 AI Chatbot to manage these increased support levels without having to hire more agents. 

The chatbot proved to be a great success for Tangerine, and in December 2019, 84% of chats routed to the chatbot were resolved without agent intervention. On some days this number rose as high as 91%. According to Richard Branson, COO of Tangerine: 

“The bot has allowed us to not only effectively manage the increase in chat volume, but it’s also saved us a considerable amount of money by not having to hire a lot more agents.”

Richard Branson, COO of Tangerine 

Read the full story: Comm100 Chatbot resolves 91% of assigned live chats for Tangerine 

2. Offering 24/7 support 

We’ve seen in the first of our chatbot examples that chatbots can fully automate a large portion of common but time-consuming queries. With most queries handled by chatbot without a sacrifice to service quality, organizations can now introduce chatbots to offer 24/7 support for their most common requests. 

The importance of around-the-clock support cannot be understated. A whopping 83% of customers surveyed said that they expect to engage with someone immediately when contacting a company. The significance of 24/7 support is even greater for organizations looking to reach international audiences, as limited support hours can result in missed sales opportunities. 

For the next of our chatbot examples, we look to a growing use case for chatbots – growing student engagement in higher education. As with the first of our chatbot examples, Thompson Rivers University first introduced Comm100 Live Chat for student support. Seeing success from the introduction of new digital channels, Thompson Rivers next sought to bring a chatbot to their support environment. 

With the chatbot handling 83% of incoming chats without agent intervention, TRU was able to introduce 24/7 support with the confidence that students would receive around-the-clock support and the quality they expect: 

“The Future Students team was the first department to implement Comm100 Live Chat and we were immediately the envy of our colleagues in other departments – so much so that four more departments quickly adopted Comm100 Live Chat after seeing the success we were having with it. Now five departments across the university use Comm100 Live Chat and Chatbot, and likely more to come.”

Lachlan Todd, Communications & Systems Coordinator, Thompson Rivers University

Read the full story: Thompson Rivers University adopts Comm100 Live Chat & Chatbot across 5 departments 

3. Improving quality of support 

In our first two chatbot examples, we see that chatbots can handle repetitive requests to expand service and introduce 24/7 support. With chatbots introduced to a live chat environment, these simple requests are responded to immediately, and agents can spend more time responding to complex customer queries. 

As service quality is maintained and agent capacity is increased, chatbots introduce improvements to all aspects of support. Customers needing fast answers to simple questions are responded to by bot, while customers needing a more careful response receive the full attention of a support agent. 

For the next of our chatbot examples, we’ll look at how the introduction of a chatbot has benefitted Canadian Blood Services (CBS). In the case of CBS, Comm100 Live Chat was introduced to expand the accessibility of available service. Live chat was undoubtedly popular, but there was still room for improvements offered by automation. CBS once again turned to Comm100 for their customer service needs, introducing an AI Chatbot that could offload simple requests from agents and free them to handle more important queries: 

“For us, the chatbot wasn’t launched to reduce agent headcount. It was launched so our agents can spend less time on simple queries, and more on the complicated and high-value queries.”

Denny Michaud, Customer Relations Manager, Canadian Blood Services

Read the full story: Canadian Blood Services improves customer & agent experience with Comm100 AI Chatbot – Pt. 2  

4. Ensuring fast support 

The next of our chatbot use cases is key to any customer service operations – fast, effective service. As diverse support options have become increasingly necessary, organizations have seen high levels of chats that can be difficult to keep up with. Customer service teams often face an uphill battle to keep wait times and response times low, even with the modern tools provided by live chat. Chatbots can help ensure fast support with low waits by: 

  • Acting as a “front door,” to collect information about users which is then passed on to support agents. 
  • Managing all the common requests that don’t need agent involvement. 

Unlike human agents, chatbots have unlimited capacity, and can immediately respond to customers. Even when an agent is needed to resolve an issue, having a chatbot assist with customer queues can greatly increase efficiency, saving customers and agents time running through introductory questions. By the time a chat is transferred to an agent, they can be ready with all of a customer’s background information. This same process can also be used to ensure that chats are routed to the best agent or team for the job, avoiding unnecessary transfers between agents. 

For one of the best chatbot examples of this in action, we can look to IMAGINiT Technologies, who saw great success with Comm100 Live Chat and later introduced AI Chatbot to bring the benefits of automation to customers. While transitioning to a smaller support team size, a chatbot allowed IMAGINiT to maintain service levels, including keeping wait times and response times low: 

“The Comm100 team has been awesome… I really like having a dedicated person for customer support so I can so easily and quickly get an answer to my question.

Jana Gauvey, Marketing Operations Program Manager, Rand Worldwide (parent company of IMAGINiT) 

Read the full story: IMAGINiT Technologies hits 1683% ROI with Comm100 Live Chat & Chatbot 

5. Providing a self-service option 

The need to provide customers with a self-service option is growing – 70% of customers now expect a company to have a self-service portal or content available. Chatbots are a great way to direct customers to self-service content so that they can get their answer quickly and be on their way. While the use of chatbots for self-service is growing, there is still much room for improvement. Currently, 27% of organizations use bots to recommend self-service resources. 

Rackspace Technology is a great example of this. Their HR team was being bombarded with questions from employees that could easily be answered through a knowledge base or FAQs. To encourage their employees to self-serve, Rackspace set up a Comm100 Chatbot as a front door that answered their common queries and directed them to resources where they could find the answers themselves. 

“When our employees could only use our HR portal to find information, they often resorted to sending tickets into our team. Responding to these messages was incredibly time-consuming and costly for us, and a poor experience for our employees who had to wait up to 4 hours for a response. With Comm100 Chatbot now in place, our employees want to get the fast and straightforward support from the bot. This has significantly reduced ticket support volume, giving our team more time to spend on other tasks. And for our employees, it’s not taking them seconds to get the answer to their question, rather than hours!”

Andrea Trevino, Manager, HR Services, Rackspace Technology 

Read the full story: Rackspace Technology reduces support volume & cost by encouraging self-serve with Comm100 Chatbot 

Wrap Up 

In each of these examples of good chatbots, we see that organizations have played to the strengths of automation to keep high service levels without losing the all-important human touch. To learn more about how chatbots were implemented in these chatbot examples, and to find out how Comm100 chatbots can help your organization, book a personalized demo with us today. 

Kate Rogerson

About Kate Rogerson

Kate is the Content Marketing Manager at Comm100. She has extensive experience in content creation for technology companies across the world, including the UK, Australia and Canada. She specializes in B2B messaging, branding and soccer trivia.