Reducing customer response time with a chatbot - Appy Pie

Reducing Customer Response Time(CRT) With a Chatbot

Abhinav Girdhar
By Abhinav Girdhar | Last Updated on March 28th, 2024 12:24 pm | 4-min read

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Chatbots have been rising in popularity in recent years. Given the rate at which chatbots keep improving, it is a matter of time before they become an industry standard for customer support. When compared to other customer support channels, like Helpdesk and LiveChat, there’s one place where chatbots hold a clear advantage. Their advantage lies in the fact that they reduce your Customer Response Time. How a Chatbot Can Assist Customer Service - Appy Pie

What is Customer Response Time?

Customer response time is the time taken for a business to answer back to a customer query. In essence, it is the delay in communication/response between a customer and business. For example, if a customer asks your customer support a query at 10:50 AM and your support agents respond at 11:25 AM, then your support’s customer response time is 35 minutes. However, that is the response time for one customer. A business’ CRT is an average of all CRTs for every customer over a set period of time. The lower your CRT, the better your customer service and experience. There are two variants of customer response time. There is real customer response time and perceived customer response time. Real customer response time is calculable by your analytics and is the response time that your business can see. The perceived customer response time is the response time that your customer observes/perceives. Eventually, what your customer perceives as the response time is what will matter. Let us explain that with an example. It may be your industry’s standard to respond to customer queries within 24 hours but if a competitor responds within 12 hours, your customer may perceive them as having better customer support. Reducing your real customer response time will automatically reduce your perceived CRT.

Why Customer Response Time is Crucial

Customer Response Time is a crucial metric for your business. A good customer response time leads to higher customer satisfaction and higher brand loyalty. According to various independent research & surveys, customer response time has been a factor in deciding which brands customers prefer. However, customer response time doesn’t have hard rules. CRT is dependent on the industry and the customer base. It’s all about what the customer perceives as the right amount of time to get a reply. For example, average response times in the IT industry are different from the average response times in other industries.

How Chatbots Help Reduce CRT

Chatbots are AI based bots that help respond to customer queries. Chatbots help a business in many ways, but in this blog we will be focusing their impact on the CRT of a business. Chatbots are meant to replace live chat as the definitive means of customer communication. The major advantages a chatbot over live chat is that it can work 24*7 and can help cut down the cost of manpower required to run a live chat. The fact that a chatbot can be online all the time and can significantly reduce your response times. It is an observed trend in customer support, that customer queries are often repetitive. The queries may be about certain complex features or software bugs that are yet to be corrected. This trend also applies to customer inquiries. These kinds of queries can be answered by dedicated chatbot easily. According to independent research, almost 80% of customer queries can be solved by a chatbot. The thing about repetitive queries is that they often form the bulk of customer support issues. An effective chatbot targeting such areas can reduce your customer response time drastically. According to research, chatbots reduce CRT by upto 30% on average. This can help your support teams concentrate on more pressing customer issues. A chatbot can literally automate away the bulk of your customer support. A reduced response time makes customers more likely to trust your brand and support your business ahead. Chatbots are excellent to both balance out your support by taking monotonous work away from them and dedicate more time to complex customer issues.

The Support Chatbot and Appy Pie’s Chatbot Builder

Chatbots that are meant to support customer support by taking the bulk of monotonous and frequent queries are often called as support chatbots. These chatbots are usually backed by a company made knowledge base. Machine learning may be a part of it but a simple support chatbot may not need it. How advanced your support chatbot can be comes down to the requirements of your business from a chatbot. The more AI-based it becomes, the more expensive the bot you’re making is. However, creating a simple chatbot that gives users links to relevant help articles or connects the customer to a human for complex issues is cheaper to make. Infact, you can make such a chatbot for free. Appy Pie’s Chatbot Builder has got your back. Our codeless chatbot builder allows you to create simple chat bots with a few clicks. Seriously, that’s all it takes! One of the key aspects of creating a chatbot is knowing how to make it ‘seem’ like a human. Our blog on humanizing a chatbot is great read. Try creating your first chatbot today! To know how a chatbot compares to a live chat, you can read our Chatbot vs LiveChat blog.

Is the Investment Worth it?

We finally come to the most crucial question of all. Is investing in a support chatbot worth it? The answer is ‘depends.’ The goal of investing in a chatbot is to improve your customer service. However, there is a plateau. A major point discussed in the blog is that the average customer response time is different for different industries. As long as you’re doing better than your competitors, you’ve pretty much cracked the code. It’s a balance, essentially, that you should try to create. You could invest in a state-of-the-art chatbot, but if your business doesn’t need it, it is just an unnecessary investment. Try to find what the perfect balance of money to customer satisfaction is. And invest in a chatbot accordingly! But before you put in money, try creating a free chatbot with Appy Pie Chatbot Builder. You won’t regret it.

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Abhinav Girdhar

Founder and CEO of Appy Pie

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