Delivering effective customer support is one of the major considerations for any business in any industry, and a big part of that is making support accessible to customers.

Everyone has been through the frustration of inaccessible support, whether it’s needing support out of office hours or waiting around on hold for unreasonable lengths of time. It ruins your experience with a company and makes you less likely to use their services in the future.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

One option is for businesses to use AI chatbots for customer support to provide an instantly accessible channel of support for anyone who needs it, at any time.

In this article, we look at how AI chatbots can improve any company’s relationship with their customers by helping to make customer support more accessible.

What is an AI chatbot?

Chatbots are computer programs designed with the specific purpose of interacting with human users, usually via a text interface but also sometimes via verbal language. AI chatbots are simply chatbots that have been built using AI and machine learning technology to enhance their capabilities. For example, specialized algorithms can enable AI chatbots to learn and improve their ability to communicate in a useful and realistic way. Also, AI can help chatbots recognize and understand a wider range of inputs, making them more useful to customers and businesses alike than more basic chatbots.

What’s the problem with customer support accessibility?

Accessibility is arguably the most important thing for businesses to get right when it comes to customer support. When customers can access support quickly and easily, their relationship with your business and brand is likely to be improved. However, if you do not invest appropriate time and effort into accessibility, then it’s inevitable that significant numbers of customers will become frustrated, damaging their relationship with your brand.

One way to make customer support more accessible is to invest in more support agents and large-scale call centers. However, this is a long and expensive process requiring the hiring, training, and maintaining of large numbers of employees, as well as the use of expensive office space that may not even be needed most of the time.

Fortunately, customer support chatbots, and specifically AI chatbots, can be rapidly and cost-effectively deployed by any business to provide an immediate improvement to their customer support accessibility.

How can AI chatbots make customer support more accessible?

More ways for customers to get in touch

One huge benefit of AI chatbots is that they can easily be integrated with various communication channels. The traditional method of communication is via in-browser text chats, but some can also be linked with other popular channels such as WhatsApp, email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and more.

These integrations give customers more options to access support. Additionally, they offer an adaptable experience for customers and match the differing preferences of the modern consumer.

Support for different languages

The internet has taken every industry globally, and this means many businesses now have access to a greater range of customers from a variety of backgrounds. This can be great news for business but can be a challenge from a customer support standpoint.

Having customers from different regions and countries means dealing with different preferences and, importantly, different languages. In the past, dealing with these customers would require hiring foreign-language speakers for your support teams, but this is an unnecessarily complex and expensive solution.

Many AI chatbots are capable of communicating in several different languages, automatically recognizing what language a customer is using and seamlessly switching to it. This helps customers feel more comfortable and can positively differentiate your support from that of your competitors.

Scalable support that isn’t impacted by demand

Periods of high demand can be some of the most challenging times for businesses, from a customer support perspective. For example, if there is a service outage for a telecom provider, there will probably be an influx of support requests from disgruntled customers. This can quickly overwhelm support staff in traditional settings, such as call centers.

Ironically, this results in the frustrating situation of customers struggling to get support when they need it the most, with long wait times and overworked employees who can’t help everyone to a sufficient standard.

AI customer support chatbots, on the other hand, are not affected by demand surges in the same way as human support workers. A customer support employee in a call center can only handle one customer at a time, whereas an AI chatbot can potentially handle thousands simultaneously without a drop in response times or service quality. This enables businesses to handle almost any number of customers effectively and affordably, even when things go wrong unexpectedly.

Round-the-clock access

Another common issue with customer support accessibility is that customers can generally only get support during office hours, This does not reflect the reality of support demands, where customers commonly need assistance at any time of day and during weekends. Even for companies that do choose or need to offer out-of-hours support, the associated costs can be massive.

A solution to this is chatbots. Chatbots can be deployed to supplement support teams and offer a line of communication for customers that is open day and night, 24/7 to deal with many issues without the need for human intervention. If a customer still requires a support agent, the chatbots can filter these automatically and either schedule a callback during office hours or escalate to a support agent.

Why choose Skil.AI chatbots to improve your customer support?

At Skil.AI, we create customized AI chatbots that help customers access the support they need whenever they need it. We create our chatbot platforms using the latest in AI and machine learning technology to give our clients a cost-effective, adaptable, and tailored upgrade to their customer support capabilities, automating large parts of the process and boosting accessibility for all customers.

All of our AI chatbots are built with accessibility as a priority, with seamless scalability to deal with business growth and demand surges, in-built support for multiple languages, omni-channel integration, and more innovative features.

Get in touch with our team today to discover how Skil.AI chatbots could transform the efficiency and effectiveness of your customer support infrastructure.

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