Conversation AI or ChatBots: Which is Better for Business?
Businesses that want to be competitive strive to provide excellent customer service to consumers to improve their experience. A major part of this effort is to have as many customer service agents as possible available to respond to inquiries and complaints. However, most times when new and existing customers contact a business, they ask routine questions.
While it is important to answer those questions, they accumulate and take up time and effort that can be spent responding to more substantive questions. To resolve this problem, businesses have turned to software.
There are software tools that they can program to communicate with people, which saves time, and resources, and ensures that people get the answers they need quickly. The two most common options for these are conversational AI tools and chatbots.
What is a Conversational AI tool?
In this context, a conversational AI tool is a software program that is trained to understand how a specific business works so it can listen to customers, understand them, and respond in ways that suit what is relevant to said business. These tools are powered by artificial intelligence models and machine learning, so they learn from every interaction and constantly improve their knowledge base.
Ever since its introduction, there has been a constant evolution of conversational AI. They were always designed to speak like a human and be available in different voices. However, their speech has improved over time to sound less robotic and more like a real person. Conversational AI tools are often integrated into business websites or can be reached via the phone number that a company provides.
What is a Chatbot?
A chatbot is an instant messaging software tool that businesses put on their website and mobile applications for customers to communicate with them in text format. This is similar to live chat, but the difference is that a bot answers the messages instead of a human. Chatbots have pre-programmed responses to every message and they use text recognition to determine what a customer is trying to communicate.
While this is an affordable option that is relatively easy to implement, communication is limited to the pre-programmed response. Chatbots are often supplemented with an option to contact a human customer support staff in case the people reaching out are not getting the answers they need.
Which is Better?
The choice between conversational AI tools and chatbots depends on how a business chooses to operate because both have their pros and cons. However, conversational AI is the preferred option in most cases because it provides more intelligent answers and can adapt better to the flow of conversation. Chatbots are less expensive, but are more restrictive.
Endnote
Conversational AI tools and chatbots are both valuable additions to companies in their effort to provide top-notch customer service. They allow businesses to save resources and time while being able to respond to as many customers as possible. Of the two options, conversational AI is more expensive to implement, but is the better option because it is more intelligent and engaging, making it easier for people to communicate with a company without needing to hear from a human.
