Should my company hire a chatbot?
When deciding whether your company should hire a chatbot, you need to think about the business cases for it. Hiring a chatbot makes sense when you have a strong business case for improving your customer service and making it available 24/7 to your customers.
For example, if your business is global, with customers all over the world, it is beneficial to have a chatbot on your website or your portal to give advice to your customers in any timezone. In case you represent a smaller company, you might want to hire a chatbot to help manage your customer service and automate processes. But if you do not have a clear business case that brings you value, it might not be beneficial to use.
Chatbots and the technology behind them can improve and make your company’s customer service more efficient and reachable, as bots are trained machines who can respond to customer inquiries. With them, you can automate the repetitive work your customer service has to do, and this way your valued employees can focus on the more demanding and complex inquiries, or even on more deeper problem-solving.
With a chatbot, you can create more revenue by having it taking in customer service inquiries, but also taking in orders for your company’s products. A chatbot can take a customer through the process of ordering new service, or guiding their way to renew their subscriptions.
“Team Chatbot” – who’s in it?
There should be a fair amount of resources to manage your chatbot. This is because even after the go-live moment, you need to have a team that continuously develops the chatbot and makes sure it performs as designed.
- The Service Designer
The service designer takes care of user experience and makes sure that you have a service that fulfills customer needs and business needs, and solves relevant problems. The service designer makes sure that the service makes sense and guides the team towards a cohesive service that responds to the needs of the original problem. - The UX/UI Developer
The UX/UI designer and developer develops the outlook of the chatbot to match the company’s needs and styling demands. If the same person is also the developer, it is worth it to have a substance matter expert in the team as well. - The Substance Expert / Project Manager
This person knows the ins and outs of the business problem you are trying to solve, having responded to these inquiries and interacted with the customers. He or she brings the business problem angle to the team. This role can be a project manager, or a content designer within the team. I would recommend having this person as a project manager, as that role is usually the one who is able to select priorities based on knowledge on the business and act as an advocate for the customer. - The Copywriter
Additionally, as chatbots are based on algorithms and AI learning, and their goal is to bring value for the customer through written text, a skilled copywriter goes a long way in saving time when designing and writing content. I suggest having multiple content designers within the team if you plan to go big with your content. But always remember to start from small when it comes to content.
Chatbot or Not?
So, to recap: why should your company hire a chatbot anyway? Because you should want to improve your customer service and provide your customers with real-time information any time of the day.
You probably also want to make more money by freeing up working hours to rather develop services than to make your customer service agents respond to the same questions over and over.
Makes sense, don’t you think?