If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve decided to engage your customers more effectively. But you’re confused. Chatbots and live chat both seem like they could help you. But you want to give your customers what they deserve - the very best option.
Allow us to help you with that.
We’re going to walk you through both of these options and then help you pick the perfect solution for your business.
Are you ready? Let’s get started!
What are Chatbots?
Chatbots help you scale up your conversations by automating them. These bots can either be pre-programmed or they can run on artificial intelligence, allowing them to handle increasingly complex conversations.
They have the capability to handle around 80% of our inbound customer queries and eliminate wait times. To make it even better, a single chatbot can engage your customers around the world in multiple languages.
What is Live Chat?
Live chat empowers you to answer your customer’s most complicated questions without delays. It is phenomenally better than phone calls for one simple reason - your agents don’t need to take care of one customer at a time and keep everyone else waiting.
Outsourcing Live-Chat spares your customers the immense frustration of waiting on hold, or worse, navigating through an IVR.
What is the difference between Chatbots v/s live chat?
Now that you know what makes chatbots and live chat so different from each other, let’s get into the benefits that each of them has to offer.
What are the key benefits of chatbots?
Chatbots are working all day, every day. They don’t take breaks, they don’t fall sick, and they don’t go on vacation. They’re always online, continuously taking care of your customers and answering their questions.
That means that your customers always get an instant response and don’t have to sit and wonder whether you’re concerned about them at all.
Let’s face it. Most businesses look at Customer Support as a cost-center.
We could argue that high-quality support is more of an investment than an expense. We could show you how treating your customers right and taking care of them keeps them coming back to your business. We could even elaborate on how fantastic experiences make your customers tell everyone in their network about you.
Instead, we are telling you that you could create these amazing experiences and increase your customer lifetime value while lowering your support costs.
And yes, you can do that with chatbots.
You don’t need human agents to waste their time on all the repetitive queries that flow in. It’s a waste of their time and your money.
Reports have shown that engaging intelligent chatbots can cut your support costs by as much as 29%.
By pulling information from past conversations and from your internal systems (if integrated with them), bots can get a better understanding of your customers. The bot now knows your customers’ interests and needs and can deliver recommendations and create experiences that are hyper-personalized for individual customers.
Bots help you engage with your customers faster, without delays. But that’s not all. Powered by artificial intelligence, these chatbots increase the accuracy of your responses and reduce the scope for human error.
Explore this article to understand chatbots and their benefits in detail.
What are the main advantages of live chat?
Intelligent chatbots help you answer 80% of your customer queries. But the remaining 20% need human attention. And you can’t force customers to wait for an email. Making them call you up and wait on hold isn’t the best idea either.
Live chat empowers you to answer these questions without any delays, minimizing customer frustration.
Live chat allows you to have 1:1 conversations at scale. A good agent could even have 7 of these conversations simultaneously. Your customers get the personal touch, without having to wait.
That allows you to develop real connections with your customers and get to know them better.
90% of customers in an ATG study said that a live chat widget makes them trust a website more. It makes them feel like they won’t be left fending for themselves if they do end up having issues after making a purchase.
And when your live chat system is integrated with your CRM, your agents will be able to support and guide them more effectively. Your customers will start seeing your agents as trusted advisors.
Scouring through your entire website isn’t the most convenient thing for your customers. If they see a live chat widget, however, they can get all the answers they need with ease.
It’s more convenient for your agents too. With a one-view inbox, they no longer need to hop across multiple chat channels to engage with your customers.
If you’d like an in-depth breakdown of the benefits of live chat, check this out!
What does your business need: Chatbots or live chat?
Both chatbots and live chat have their own benefits. But what’s going to be the perfect customer engagement solution for your business?
What’s going to prove more advantageous to you - automation or the personal touch?
Cognizant has reported that 69% of their survey respondents prefer chatbots due to their instant replies. Forrester’s research shows that 44% of customers believe that live chat is the best feature an e-commerce website can have.
At this point, the real question is, ‘Do you really need to choose just one?’ What if you could have a solution that offers both in a single, unified module?
That’s where Engati comes into the picture.
Unified module
We have combined our chatbot and live chat solutions into a single module to ensure that you get the best of both worlds.
You get the speed that chatbots offer, along with the personal, human element that live chat brings to the table. All that, in one solution. And you don’t even need to set them up separately. Your agents can be onboarded while you’re setting up your chatbot.
It even allows your live agents to take over conversations from your bot with ease. And if your agents happen to be unavailable, your bots can take over from them.
After a live chat session, you can even use a bot to effortlessly collect feedback about the conversation.
TL;DR
Chatbots allow you to serve all your customers quickly and efficiently, with negligible costs. They also help you personalize your customer engagements to a large extent.
Live chat’s main advantage lies in the fact that it empowers you to answer your customers’ most complex questions without delays.
But the good thing is that you don’t need to choose just one. You can get both, in a single solution.
A combined solution like the Engati platform allows you to seamlessly switch between bots and live chat. It empowers you to give your customers instant responses, while also engaging them in real, human conversations!
Explore Engati’s unified chatbot and live chat solution today!
