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Working out the value of chatbots and voicebots to your organisation
Monday, April 25, 2022
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At Disruption Works, we talk a lot about the value of chatbots and voicebots to an organisation. Generally, we speak about general benefits to the company, its staff, and its customers.
But how do these break down into numbers? What are the tangible benefits of having a chatbot as part of your communication plan? We discuss exactly this in our most recent podcast, but let's look at the three primary areas where benefits occur; costs, customer service, and staff experience.
Discussions with clients have revealed that the typical cost of having staff available to handle phone calls or reply to emails, with all the associated staff and facilities costs, runs at a pricey £1 per minute at the lower end. For most businesses, the average phone call is 4-5 minutes long, so each conversation is liable to set that company back around £5.
However, chatbots run at a fraction of this cost, at just 2.6p for the entire conversation, whether it lasts minutes or hours. Huge savings can also be applied to voicebots as the pricing is very clearly compared to a human contact team handling process driven calls.
Even when customers need to be transferred to a staff member or called back, the chatbot can save time by gathering all the relevant information and summarising it for the staff member, reducing the overall call time, thus reducing costs.
When working out the cost of chatbots per conversation, businesses can use analytics to examine how many contacts the bot has received and how long each conversation lasted. Analytics can even break down the information on peaks and troughs of communication, allowing the redeployment of staff to cover the busier times.
Phone lines are not operated around the clock for most small and medium businesses and even many larger enterprises. For customers, this can be frustrating, especially if their query is simple and they cannot find the information they need on the company website. Chatbots and voice bots, can easily pick up the small questions that might otherwise be barriers to sales, such as "Do you delivery to my country?"
These bots step into this gap, providing customers with the solutions to the most regularly asked questions and compiling information to request a call back for queries that cannot be resolved there and then.
The customer is left feeling that their time has not been wasted, as long as the call back occurs. The chatbot can help facilitate complete journeys, from answering a minor question to providing the customer with URLs to allow bookings, purchases, etc.
This is also true when unexpected incidents happen, whether it's a major influencer visiting the store out of the blue or something more serious occurring on the shop floor. Phone lines can be overwhelmed, but with a voicebot in place, scale is not an issue, so for customers trying to get the general information programmed into the bot, their journey can continue without hold up, indeed our voicebot platform can add in this new journey very quickly and effectively.
Although it is more intangible to try to assess how many sales or bookings can be directly related to the chatbot, it is possible to add UTM tags within the URLs provided by the bots to be more tangible as the referrer, which can be seen in Google analytics.
For staff, there are a number of downstream benefits. By being freed from the smaller, most repetitive queries, there is an opportunity for staff to have an increased amount of time to spend with customers that have needed to be contacted. This allows for greater opportunities to impress clients through customer service skills and more time to make sales. Also we have heard time and time again that teams are relieved not to have to deal with this mundane task to make their overall job much more engaging and interesting.
Data shows that implementing a chatbot reduces the number of calls received but increases sales volume, thus improving conversion rates.
Depending on the call centre's other functions, having a reduced call volume also permits staff to work for longer periods without interruption on other tasks, such as reports, complaint resolution, etc.
Is it time you considered a chatbot or voicebot for your business? Get in touch!
We have our podcast about a variety of subjects including chatbots, voicebots as well as customer service or self service automation, we discuss how these impact business and some specific challenges or sector stories to help anyone looking to engage with this technology.
