Conversational user interfaces bring in the best of both worlds: human-like natural interaction combined with the benefits of digital technology.
- Availability: Like any other automated digital technologies, conversational interfaces are low-cost and are available 24/7. It is like having someone man the web chat desk all the time so that customers always have someone to get answers from.
- Personalized experience: Unlike websites and smartphone apps, chatbots can provide a very personalized experience owing to the conversational nature of interaction. One-to-one conversation settings provide ample opportunity to understand and adapt to a user's goals, preferences, and constraints.
- Low cost: Chatbots are digital solutions and therefore provide customer support services at least ten times cheaper than humans doing the very same tasks.
- Consistency: Chatbots can be consistent in services, which may be hard to achieve with human operators and may be very important in certain sectors.
- Quick response times: Unlike human-based systems, the response time for chatbots is much quicker. Users no longer have to wait for their call to be picked up and during a conversation, the chatbot responses will be quicker than human responses, especially when human operators are tasked with more than one simultaneous chat (sometimes up to five). The ability of chatbots to handle simultaneous conversations also removes the bottleneck of limited customer support bandwidth and therefore helps businesses scale up.
- Scale up: Chatbots can easily scale up to handle increasing and seasonal traffic, which is not easy to do when using a battery of live advisors. Holiday season may particularly drive up demand for customer support. At such times, chatbots can be used to handle low priority and easy tasks, thereby reducing the load on live advisors—and human assistance can be used judiciously to handle high-value conversations.