One of the best things your business can do to help out customers is to answer their queries on an immediate basis. With the ongoing option available between chatbots and live chat software, it’s hard to decide which one will work best for your business. To ease your pain and relieve you from any confusion, we’ve listed some of the ways that will help you decide which chat software is better for your website. Before that, let us know what chatbots and live chat software are.
What Exactly are Chatbots & Live Chat Software?
Chatbots were mainly invented to remove the limitations humans face daily. Prof. Björn Schuller, a computer scientist at the University of Imperial College in London, said, “This will be the next generation of intelligence to be met in daily experience. It’ll probably come out probably sooner and help out humans on the right note”. Even after being quite fast and responsive, chatbots are quite sophisticated to be used and have several limitations.
On the other hand, Live chat software is a basic customer service communication channel that connects a prospect or a customer with the respective customer care executive. Instead of automated replies, real humans are there to provide support toward any customer queries.
Keeping up with the current situation, the business environment is actually changing rapidly. They are unable to decide which one would fit best for them. So, to clear out the bad air, let’s go ahead and compare chatbot and live chat software.
Comparison Between Chatbots and Live Chat Software
Below are the top 5 ways to help you decide which software is better for your website.
1. Human Involvement
If human touch is important for your customers, live chat solutions can help you to boost customer satisfaction with personalized conversations. On the other hand, chatbots delivering humanized touch is difficult in many scenarios. They may fail to understand the complex customer issues, which can be better resolved with the help of human agents.
2. Workability
Chat software overpowers humans in this aspect with quite large numbers. Talking about numbers, a chatbot works 24x7x365, which also enhances the user experience of your website. The most beneficial aspect of having chatbots is their ability to operate with many customers with ease. A chatbot can go around chatting for hours without even asking for breaks, money, and it also saves time on a better note.
Sometimes, the work doesn’t demand you to stay up all the time. Instead, it requires human touch for following up. In such cases, a live chat comes up with a lot of benefits. It helps out with handling the queries in a better way, but the provided solutions are significantly better as well.
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To summarize, if your business needs to respond to customers within 30 seconds, a chatbot as the first contact can be an ideal fit for your business. However, if your customers are not very time-sensitive and prefer to talk with a real human, having a live chat is a better choice.
For better support, you can also start conversations with a chatbot for handling repetitive questions and route the complex queries to the live support team.
3. Cost Efficiency
If your business receives more than approx 1000 visitors a day, one live agent could handle all of them. To address all issues of these visitors, you need a huge team of agents and then provide them training for better resolution. This involves a lot of money and time. However, in this situation, chatbots are simple and easy to install. The amount of work delivered by the single chatbot would still be larger than what a team of 20 people could do.
To summarize, if you are a start-up and the cost is a key business factor of your business, a chatbot is the best solution. It will help to automate business operations without hiring resources. On the contrary, live chat can be a better option when the customers look for a detailed explanation of any complex query.
4. Understanding
Understanding the complexity of any issue is not something you can do with an AI-based chatbot. If there’s a human presence on the site, you can be assured that the situation will be handled in a much better way. Chat software on your website is basically filled with automated replies that may not understand what the other person has to say. They work with the help of certain keywords.
If you have got a complex problem and the chatbot isn’t coded for, you’ll get the most random and stupid replies, which can turn off the customers. Humans are accustomed to a conversation that holds a different slang, is short, and feels casual.
5. Emotions
Emotions are the biggest accustomed tool in which humans overpowers every software in the world. When dealing with a client, humans can not only trigger some emotions into them but also empathize with them to rule out certain problems. Apart from being empathetic, humans can easily make a single line humorous, sarcastic, or even fun to read at the same time.
These are some of the things where chatbots can never outperform humans. They’re totally AI-based, which doesn’t have any type of feelings (at least not until now). However, a chatbot may give out smart replies, but it can never outsmart humans in terms of connecting with one.
Final Verdict
The best take you can have on this confusion is to use both the chat software together. This will deliver a better customer-based service that may work wonders for your business. By understanding the pros and cons of live chats and chatbots, you must have better insights that are more ideal than what you’ll get by using one of them.
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Chatbot Vs. Live Chat: What To Choose For Your Business? was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.