Chatbots are about to fulfill the promise they once made in the hype, and a new study commissioned by Intercom shows where chatbots can have the greatest impact.
We fundamentally believe that chatbots have the potential to change companies in two ways: improving efficiency and helping companies meet growing consumer demands.
In our first "Chatbot Trends Report" (Chatbot Trends Report), we witnessed the beginning of a role for chatbots in terms of efficiency. We worked with an independent market research company to randomly sample 500 consumers and 500 business leaders.
In 2019, business leaders benefited from their chatbots and saved an average of US$300,000, with the support and sales teams being the most influential. But for consumers, there is still some room for improvement: Although 74% of consumers want to be able to encounter chatbots on the website, 87% of consumers still prefer to communicate quickly with humans rather than chatbots. In other words, 25% of consumers do not care whether they are communicating with humans or chatbots, as long as they can achieve the desired effect.
A chatbot available to everyone
Chatbots are rapidly expanding beyond the field of customer support to drive growth in all stages of the customer life cycle. In fact, sales are now the most common use case (41%), followed by support (37%) and marketing (17%).
We also found that chatbots can be used for a variety of automated tasks, from sending visitors’ questions to the right team, to scheduling product demonstrations, creating sales opportunities, and attracting website visitors.
Satisfaction with chatbots varies from industry to industry. B2C companies are twice as satisfied with investing in chatbots as B2B companies. This may be because B2C queries are generally more repetitive and simpler than B2B queries. The industries with highest satisfaction levels are technology (73%), retail (67%), manufacturing (57%) and healthcare (56%).
What makes the company so excited about its investment in chatbots? Let's analyze it.
Return on investment of selling chatbots
Over the past 30 years, the way we buy and sell has changed drastically. The days of telemarketing and telemarketing are gone, and to a certain extent, mass advertising is also gone. Modern consumers want quick and personalized responses through real-time chat, and this kind of large-scale response is what chat bots are good at. This year, chatbots have brought considerable returns to sales adopters because they have made huge improvements in their sales work:
Chatbots increase sales by 67% on average, 26% of which are achieved through chatbot interaction.
35% of business leaders said that chatbots helped them complete their sales transaction goals.
The top three sales use cases are: collecting information and identifying potential customers, booking product demonstrations, and attracting website visitors.
Chatbots are also an important part of our Intercom sales activities. We use our own customized robots on all key pages of the website (including pricing pages, demo pages, and homepages). For example, if you visit our pricing page, our bot will be triggered in a few seconds and ask you what help you need. After answering a few questions, the website will provide you with the most suitable plan and advice, or provide you with an opportunity to communicate with our sales team.
Supporting the ROI of chatbots
It is fair to say that the technical support team is the earliest adopter of commercial chatbots: Alaska Airlines introduced its virtual assistant Ask Jenn to the world more than ten years ago:
Fortunately, since the Ask Jenn era, support for chatbots has made great strides. Modern chatbots can help teams filter problems, triage problems, and provide immediate solutions, ultimately leading to a more efficient support team and a better customer experience. Specifically, some of the benefits brought by chatbots today include the following:
Business leaders said that the primary way to save costs by speeding up customer response is to use chat bots.
The response speed of chatbots has increased by an average of 3 times.
Business leaders say that chatbots have increased their customer support satisfaction by 24%.
Interestingly speaking, our internal support team found that using Intercom's custom robots can reduce the time to solve problems by 50%. Chatbots can easily classify a large number of chat records, freeing our team to free up time to deal with more complex problems that need to be solved manually.
消费者并不完全满意，但尚有一线希望
虽然企业可以欣然接受聊天机器人带来的新机遇，但我们的研究表明，聊天机器人并没有完全满足消费者的期望。
近四分之三的消费者希望在网站上遇到聊天机器人，但只有 15% 的消费者在与公司进行快速交流时更喜欢聊天机器人，而不是人类。事实上，如果有选择的话，87% 的消费者仍然更喜欢与人类交流，而不是聊天机器人。
当被问及原因时，受访者在三个关键领域对人类的评价比聊天机器人更高：
人类能够回答各种各样的问题。
人类能够理解复杂的情况。
人类能够更好地理解访客的意思。
现在，我们来看看最喜欢的统计数据：25% 的消费者愿意与人类或聊天机器人交流，只要能给他们带来想要的结果即可。
此外，消费者承认聊天机器人具备独特优势。消费者认为聊天机器人胜过人类的三大原因是：
全天候可用。
缩短联系时间。
快速分流到正确的团队。
简而言之，大多数消费者对聊天机器人还是有所期待的。他们通常仍然更喜欢与人类交流，但在少数情况下，他们并不在乎人类与聊天机器人的区别。这对企业和聊天机器人开发者而言，这意味着聊天机器人体验的门槛比以往任何时候都要高。那么下一步我们该怎么走呢？
展望未来
聊天机器人在网络商业的未来扮演着不可或缺的角色，这一点在聊天机器人的 炒作巅峰期 之后的短短几年之后就变得非常清楚了。只是，与许多聊天机器人开发者最初设想的并不一样，比如取代人类、赋予聊天机器人人格等等。
相反，消费者希望聊天机器人能够尊重他们的时间，并引导他们尽快得到想要的结果。这听起来可能有些高深，但在过去我们已经看到了这副蓝图，并发挥了作用。例如，自动取款机。20 世纪 60 年代末，当自动取款机问世时，当时，企业并不确定消费者会不会接纳自动取款机而不是银行柜员，而且每个人都担心它们会让柜员失业。但 30 年过去了，这两个担心都没有发生。实际上，我们大多数人更愿意使用自动提款机进行快速交易，比如提取现金，然后愉快地排队等候与银行柜员讨论更复杂的问题，比如申请抵押贷款。
In the end, no chat bot can beat humans in what humans do best (empathy and understanding). Therefore, the opportunity for chat bot developers is to deeply and clearly recognize the best choice for robots and humans. What is it, and develop it based on it.
What does it mean for the business
Chatbots are definitely the future of expanding business growth. Whether chatbots can bring commercial value is no longer a problem. It is just a matter of time and method.
Now, 73% of consumers want to be able to interact with chatbots on your website, and the barriers to chatbot experience are higher than ever. But now there are more than 2,000 suppliers to choose from, which one should you choose? In our opinion, the following are entry chips:
A chatbot that can seamlessly work between sales, marketing, and support. Your consumers shouldn’t have to answer the same question repeatedly just to communicate with three different teams.
A chatbot that can help your team improve efficiency. Look for real productivity characteristics. As our co-founder Des Traynor once said, a chatbot that just asks visitors a question is nothing more than "a web form disguised as an artificial intelligence-driven chatbot."
A chatbot that respects the user’s time. Chatbots should be truly useful, not distracting or annoying. They should work hard to help your human teammates succeed.
Today, companies have a rare opportunity to use chatbots to influence their bottom line and customer experience. There is nothing better than this.
Regarding the method of random sampling survey:
A brief description of the method of random sampling survey: We worked with an independent market research company to randomly sample 500 consumers and 500 business leaders. In this study, the margins of error of the 95% confidence interval of the consumer study and the 95% confidence interval of the business leader study were 4.1% and 4.3%, respectively.
