by Silvana Emad Sep 26, 2023

Chatbots are all the rage because companies are seeking ways to streamline operations and respond to customer inquiries without using up all of their service staff. Conversely, chatbots frequently detract from the personal touch that is crucial to building brand trust since they lack the intellect and empathy to communicate with a real person. Although many companies now employ chatbots, clients still prefer to speak with a live human customer service when they need assistance.

Table of contents

This article will discuss whether it's best to employ a chatbot instead of live chat customer service and which choice is best for your business.

Live chat customer service vs. chatbots

Live chat customer service is becoming more and more common for many reasons. Complex interactions are better handled via live chat since some topics demand discussion and justification.

Effectiveness and response time

Talking to a live representative enables you to solve complex issues with ease and practicality. Multitasking is available with live chat, which boosts the effectiveness of your team by enabling agents to manage many conversations at once. You can trace down the conversations and route them to the right employees for faster support.

Profitability

Live chat also offers the quickest response time when compared to other reactive communication platforms. By previewing the customer record, your customer support representatives will be able to:  

  1. Use rehearsed responses to quickly respond to FAQs.
  2. Provide immediate sales and support help.
  3. Chat with the right team to get a speedier response.

Cost-effective company decisions are necessary to increase revenue and reduce expenses. Live chat is more affordable when compared to other communication channels. It enables real-time communication between clients and your customer support representatives, reducing sales funnel drop-off and ultimately increasing the return on investment (ROI) from turning website visitors into paying customers.

That's why live chat customer service is still the most accurate choice, even though chatbots are widely used by businesses.

Human approach

Understanding the circumstance is essential to offering accurate solutions. Without a doubt, chatbots answer right away simple questions that fit into known or predicted patterns.  However, they might not be able to reason through and adapt to difficult questions where clients might need trustworthy answers. 

Even with machine learning and natural language processing, complex inquiries are difficult for a bot to handle. A live support agent can help with the emotional connection by seeing the right pattern and can offer other useful suggestions to solve issues. Live chat and chatbots are frequently used by businesses to assist and engage with clients. The two tools can work well together. 

Every customer-centric organization's top priorities are engaging customers in real time and offering top-notch customer service. Businesses that successfully interact with their clients were able to boost customer spending by up to 40%. 

Live chat customer service achieves the perfect balance between prompt assistance and one-on-one communication. Being naturally communicative allows for easy and natural direct and intimate contact. 

It is conversational, as it allows agents to have meaningful, interactive conversations with customers by employing real-time consumer interaction tools like co-browsing and video chat. 

Because you can personalize greetings, dialogues, and visitor information using live chat, it adds a sense of personality. This encourages patron loyalty.

So how do you make a choice?

You can categorize different client interactions to determine whether they can be handled by live personnel or should be handled by bots. 

Any repetitive task is the ideal situation for a chatbot to be used, whereas any sophisticated inquiries require human assistance.

Both live chat and chatbot technologies are intended for modern business communication in order to deliver a differentiated client experience. Check out some world examples Of How Companies Are Using Chatbot In 2023 as per Forbes.

By integrating the right technology between chatbots and live chat, you can meet customer expectations and improve the trust of your company.

It is believed that live assist agents are more adept at rapidly and simply resolving client issues. Humans are incredibly effective at providing complex answers and finding solutions. On the other hand, chatbots promote ongoing client connection, which raises customer satisfaction. 

Customers who are happy with a product or service become brand advocates and loyal consumers. 

The conclusion is that the greatest strategy for providing a wonderful customer support experience is to combine live chat and chatbot. Knowing the advantages and disadvantages of both live chat and chatbots can help you decide which is best for your company. 

Learn more about Elastic Email services / 24-7 a real customer support team is always there for you ready to help whenever you need them.

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Silvana Emad

Silvana Emad is a regional marketing lead in Egypt at Elastic Email , she's a professional marketer with a success track record in the software & technology industry. Outside work in her free time she is a painter , documentary photographer and a self taught Egyptologist.

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