AI chatbots vs human agents

AI Chatbots vs Human Agents: Who Wins the Customer Service Battle?

Aayushi
By Aayushi | Last Updated on October 10th, 2024 7:09 am

Customer service, in recent times, is no less than a battle to be won by businesses to stay ahead of its competitors in the market. They can win it by enhancing their customers’ experience, be it through human agents or by incorporating AI chatbots created using software like Appy Pie’s Chatbot Builder, in their customer service strategy. But the question is, which approach helps businesses deliver the best possible experience to their customers? Let’s weigh the pros and cons of both- AI chatbots and human agents to find out.

Before starting with that, here’s a basic overview of what customer service is.

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What is Customer Service?

In a nutshell, customer service is the process undertaken by a company to serve its customers well by offering chat assistance and support to them throughout the customer journey to optimize their experience and satisfaction. It includes all activities starting from solving customer queries to guiding them through their buying journey to providing them a seamless after sales service.

Delivering a good customer experience doesn’t end with provision of high quality products and services. A business can sell a product with amazing features but if customers don’t get the required support from the company, they wouldn’t purchase from it and the efforts gone into developing the product go to waste. Thus, working on making customers feel supported and satisfied goes a long way in terms of customer retention and business growth.

Now let’s move on to discussing the role, advantages and disadvantages of AI chatbots and human agents in customer service.

Role of AI Chatbots and Human Agents in Customer Service

AI chatbots and human agents both play crucial roles in customer service and help deliver unique experiences to users. Here’s a breakdown of their roles, pros and cons:

AI Chatbots

Chatbots have now become the new normal in customer service. They can do almost anything ranging from resolving customer inquiries to booking appointments, scheduling meetings, sending updates and reminders and much more, that too in no time!

AI chatbots leverage their natural language processing capabilities to understand, analyze and respond to customer queries with accuracy. Here are some of their advantages and disadvantages in customer service:

Advantages

  • 24/7 Availability: AI-powered customer service chatbots are available round the clock to help customers get their queries answered whenever they want.
  • Handling Repetitive Tasks: Chatbots can handle repetitive and routine queries like answering FAQs, streamlining customer checkout and processing simple transactions etc. with efficiency.
  • Quick and Accurate Responses: With NLP capabilities, chatbots are able to understand user intent and respond to them in a contextually relevant manner within a few seconds.
  • Time and Cost Efficiency: Chatbots are extremely affordable as compared to human agents as the hiring, onboarding and training costs are saved. They also carry out tasks much faster than humans and eradicate the need for large customer support teams, thereby providing both time and cost utility.
  • Scalability: Chatbots can handle multiple interactions simultaneously which makes them ideal for high traffic situations where human agents might get overwhelmed.

Disadvantages

  • Complex Inquiries: Chatbots can have difficulty understanding complex queries involving slang and sensitive information, which might lead to misinterpretation and incorrect responses.
  • Lack of Creativity in Responses: Chatbots operate by accessing its existing database based on predefined rules and language models and might face difficulty adapting to unique situations to provide creative solutions.
  • Security Concerns: Customers might be hesitant to share their sensitive information with a chatbot due to data security and privacy concerns.

Human Agents

Even today, some companies follow the traditional method of customer service wherein human agents single-handedly work towards delivering a good customer experience. Even with the advent of chatbots, human-based customer service continues to hold significance. Here are the advantages and disadvantages associated with it:

Advantages

  • Handling complex Issues: Human agents are better equipped to handle complex issues which require critical thinking and emotional intelligence.
  • Personal Touch: They can provide a personalized touch to customer interactions and build strong relationships with users to bring a feeling of trust for the company in their minds.
  • Negotiation and Adaptation: Human agents have good negotiation skills and can handle situations well if they’re going out of hand. For example, providing discounts and offers to customers in case they’re beginning to lose interest in buying a product.
  • Creative Responses: Humans can easily adapt to unexpected situations and provide creative solutions without strictly sticking to a predefined script.
  • Customer Preference: Some customers might prefer talking to a human agent over a chatbot to express their concerns and get their queries resolved due to comfort and safety concerns.

Disadvantages

  • Limited Availability: Human agents are not available to provide support to customers throughout the day and need breaks from work, unlike chatbots.
  • Higher Cost: Human agents need to be hired, onboarded, trained and compensated for the work they do, making the traditional method of customer service costlier.
  • Human Error: Mistakes are bound to be made when it comes to human agents handling large volumes of work. However, these human errors can cost the company its customers due to delivery of an inefficient customer experience.

Who Wins the Customer Service Battle?

After analyzing the role of AI chatbots and human agents in customer service along with the pros and cons associated with them, it’s clear that there’s no single winner in this battle. Yes, it’s a tie! Both AI chatbots and human agents are extremely crucial parts of a good customer support strategy but none of them single-handedly provides the maximum benefit to businesses.

While an AI bot may provide responses quicker than humans, it isn’t able to handle complex queries. Similarly, a human agent can provide creative solutions but isn’t available round the clock to serve customers. Thus, chatbots and human agents complement each other and fill the gaps each of them faces to deliver the perfect customer experience.

The Ultimate Solution For Customer Service: A Human-AI Collaboration

So, the solution to the dilemma of making a choice between AI chatbots and human agents for customer service is actually a good human-AI collaboration. Here’s how to balance the upsides and downfalls of each to create the right customer service strategy for your business:

  1. Adopting a Hybrid Approach

    2. Instead of focusing on just using AI chatbots or human agents for handling customer service, it’s better to adopt a hybrid approach, wherein, the customer support chatbot can handle routine queries and frequently asked questions and the human agent can handle complex inquiries which the chatbot isn’t able to process.

  2. Focusing on Continuous Improvement

    3. The only way to keep providing a consistent, if not better, customer experience is by continuously tracking the performance of both AI chatbots and human agents, listing down the pain points and working towards improving their structure and functionalities to ensure a good quality of customer service in future.

  3. Use Feedback Loops

    4. Survey customer feedback chatbots can be utilized to obtain constructive feedback directly from the customers regarding the company’s customer service. Implementing post-interaction surveys and feedback loops allow efficient gathering of insights about customer experiences which can help make chatbots more responsive and identify training needs for human agents.

By actively working towards the above mentioned areas to optimize your customer service strategy, you can efficiently create a strong human-AI collaboration and serve your customers better!

Also Read: A Guide to Human-AI Collaboration: The Dream Team of Customer Service

Tip: It’s not necessary to incorporate both AI chatbots and human agents into your customer service strategy in every case. It also depends highly on factors like business type, goals, feasibility and chatbot ROI. Thus, before coming to the final decision of going forward with any option, make sure it aligns well with your business needs.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that AI chatbots and human agents have amazing potential to streamline customer service operations for businesses by themselves, but they are much more efficient in providing the maximum benefit when clubbed together. Where on one hand, chatbots provide quick responses, consistency and 24/7 availability; human agents provide creativity, personalization and the ability to handle complex queries. To conclude, there isn’t a one sided solution to tackle customer service and businesses need to focus on strengthening the collaboration between AI chatbots and human agents to get the desired results.

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