More and more companies are opting to acquire overseas data a chatbot to improve their customer relations, but is it enough? We often hear that chatbots are the future of customer relations, but can customer relations do without humans? Will chatbots, through their artificial intelligence, replace people working in customer relations? These are some examples of questions that we often hear around this subject.
With over 35 years of experience in customer relations, we know that new technology is often a sign of change. But will these changes be beneficial for customers using outsourced call centers? We now know, thanks to numerous studies, that consumers are looking for personalization and speed of exchanges with brands. From this desire, particularly driven by digital natives (Generation Y), customer/company relations must follow this trend or risk seeing their customers leave for the competition. But do chatbots meet these demands?
Often criticized, chatbots are also prey to a very human vision of customer relations. This very human vision aims to be based solely on human exchanges to offer local customer service. They are also criticized on the question of investment and profitability of such a product. Because yes, a chatbot has a production cost, but also a fixed cost for its maintenance.
We can therefore ask ourselves whether the use of chatbots is a real opportunity or a very big marketing stunt.
The first question we can ask ourselves to know if chatbots are a real opportunity for customer relations is to know if they really help customer relations. Because yes, chatbots were created with the aim of strengthening the links between a customer and a company. This strengthening through this technology is done in different ways which are for customers:
Ultra-personalization of the customer experience by making it possible to respond to a simple request quickly.
To connect with a technician for more complex requests or those requiring human intervention.
To contact a brand at any time of the day or night.
To be considered by the brand and thus to be listened to for ever more efficient customer service.
From the point of view of brands, chatbots are also a real opportunity that should not be overlooked. Indeed, a chatbot would improve customer relations for several reasons which are:
Know the recurring problems that a product may encounter and thus transmit them to the teams concerned.
Provide more technical work to a company's technical and sales teams
Give an innovative image of customer relations and thus boost your reputation
Collect user data to better understand future customer expectations
Using this data to anticipate a customer's needs
Chatbots therefore have a dual scope in helping with customer relations since they improve the internal and external. The improvement of the external through a relationship of proximity, speed and precision. The internal through an improvement in the work and productivity of the workforce.
Profitability is an important issue for every business, but the question is whether there is real profitability in owning a chatbot. To see if there is profitability, let's compare the costs between a chatbot and a prospecting and/or technical service team.
The cost of manpower
For prospecting or for a technical service, there are two possibilities that have a different cost. Because yes, if you internalize or outsource this part, the cost will be different as well as the service and productivity.
Firstly, the internal employment of employees who will cost you the salary, charges and equipment. In addition, you are not immune to bad recruitment and consequently to a drop in productivity.
Secondly, outsourcing can be very beneficial for you in terms of costs and reputation. Call centers have a moral obligation to satisfy you and your customers. The cost is also cheaper, especially for one-off prospecting. However, choosing your call center carefully must respond to a logic of improving customer relations. In addition, you will not have the constraint of personnel management. Only the result will count as well as the return on investment that you have made.
From a non-financial perspective, a human can make about 90 prospecting calls and receive 30 to 40 calls for a technician to get the job done right.
In short, the human cost depending on your campaign types can be higher if you internalize it. In addition, productivity can fail you in the event of a recruitment error. So opting for an outsourced service can be profitable for you whether for short or long actions.
The cost of a chatbot
How much does a chatbot actually cost? To start, we need to look at the different types of costs around this technology. The different costs are:
The production costs of a chatbot can vary very quickly depending on the type of technology you use. You can even reduce these costs if you outsource the production of it with existing tools on the market.
The different salaries of the people working on the implementation of the project
Product maintenance for tool debugs
The daily update that requires a full-time person.
However, a chatbot can be very profitable if you use it as an additional support and thus respond to more complex requests. If we take the case of telephone prospecting, a chatbot or voice assistant is able to handle nearly 400 calls per day. On a part more focused on after-sales service, a chatbot can handle more requests and those 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There is therefore a real opportunity to improve your image because you will be able to respond to many requests.
However, a chatbot cannot be used alone. Imagine that it does not know how to answer a question because it is not in its script? To whom does it send the request? Therefore, chatbots are only one more tool for customer relations.
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