Chatbots and Virtual Assistants: Redefining Customer Support with AI

Artificial intelligence could easily become “word of the year” in 2023. It’s simply everywhere, and it affects all spheres of life and business. One of the spheres that is impacted the most is definitely customer service: many companies want to be at the forefront of technological advances and introduce AI to their customer communication. And if done right, it can be a true game-changer both for businesses and their customers. 

However, there are many questions that need answers: what particular benefits can AI bring to customer support? What tools are available and what can they do for your business? Is human customer support dead?

This guide provides the answers and all the necessary information regarding artificial intelligence for customer support. Read on to find out. 

How AI can improve customer support

Let’s start from the most exciting part: the benefits. There are so many talks about what AI can do for customer service that it’s easy to get lost in all of them. Below we will try to help connect the dots and list the most impactful things AI can do for your customer service. 

1. AI can drastically cut your support costs

Starting with probably the most important factor for many companies: AI can indeed help you save money you spend on customer support. The truth is, employing numerous support agents is immensely costlier compared to implementing an AI customer service tool. So, AI solutions not only generate substantial revenue for your business but also result in considerable savings. In fact, in 2022, the total cost savings from deploying AI chatbots reached around $11 billion.

Usually, you don't need to spend a lot of money upfront to add AI to your website. Many AI tools have free versions to try out, let you choose only the features you need, and come with ready-made conversation setups. This means you spend much less on customer support and can accomplish more.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that you suddenly don’t need human support agents. On the contrary, it can help increase the efficiency of your support team without underlying costs. Speaking of efficiency, read more about it in the next point.

2. AI greatly improves the efficiency of your support team

Customer service powered by artificial intelligence keeps getting better. There are lots of incredibly smart tools, and many of these AI systems can learn from every interaction they have with customers.

In fact, artificial intelligence software can become a true virtual shopping buddy, working alongside human support agents to make sure customers are happy with their shopping experience. By combining the intelligence and soft skills of humans with AI's efficiency and ability to learn, customer support gets better. This means things are more organized, and customers don't have to wait as long for help, which makes their shopping experience much better. It improves your overall business workflow and enhances customer satisfaction, which, ultimately, brings you extra revenue. 

3. AI in customer support is available all the time and everywhere

Your support team, no matter how good they are, are not superhumans. They need breaks and time to learn new things. That's where artificial intelligence can be really helpful.

AI tools for customer service work 24/7, all the time, everywhere. They can also speak many languages, which is great for companies that work internationally or are growing. You won't have to worry about language problems with your customers anymore because the AI tools can handle it.

This is also fantastic news for your customers. They can get help quickly and efficiently, no matter when, where, or how urgently they need it. According to recent statistics, about 53% of respondents find waiting too long for replies the most frustrating part of interacting with businesses.This will not happen with chatbots: speedy assistance and efficiency, combined with the skills of your human support team, can make your website visitors become loyal customers.

4. AI tools for customer support collect data and give you useful insights

The capacity of AI to accumulate and analyze data is impressive. AI-driven customer support tools have streamlined the process of gathering substantial data, enabling insights into customer behavioral patterns, creation of a comprehensive customer profile, and the pursuit of hyper-personalization. Additionally, integrating product information management (PIM) systems can further enhance the efficiency of AI tools, ensuring accurate and consistent product information is available across all customer interaction points, thereby improving the overall customer experience.

In the past, businesses had to manually input data for AI to function effectively. Although this enhanced data analysis efficiency, it was a time-consuming and monotonous task. In contrast, modern AI customer service tools are autonomous in their ability to learn from customer interactions. They proficiently scrutinize customer data and patterns, and then utilize these insights to enhance their interactions with clients.

Of course, there are more benefits to using AI in customer service, but these fundamental ones should already be convincing. 

Let’s now move on to chatbots and virtual assistants - one of the most common and efficient ways to enrich customer service and AI. 

What are chatbots and virtual assistants?

Essentially, chatbots and AI-powered virtual assistants are tools designed to recognize common speech patterns and triggers in order to provide a helpful and relevant response based on the datasets they are fed. And they are doing so better and better: gone are the days of chatbots offering a frustrating experience - now, you might not even realize you are talking to a robot. 

How is that so?

Modern-day AI chatbots use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to continuously improve their interactions with customers, provide exceptional customer support, and assist website visitors round-the-clock. It feels like entering a physical store and being guided by a helpful assistant, but fully online.

Not all chatbots work the same: some are activated in one-click, some offer ready-made templates, and some need you to design conversational flows yourself. AI customer support chatbots are based on large language models (LLMs), which allows them to be autonomous and learn from their own conversations with customers in real time. 

Such bots might sound like quite complicated tools. Well, they are, but usually, it doesn’t mean they are hard to set up. Many chatbots don’t require any coding skills and can be activated in a matter of seconds. You just need to choose the chatbot provider, design  some conversation flows and/or upload your knowledge bases, activate the tool, and pre-test it. What’s left is just collecting customer feedback, analyzing the performance of the tool, and enjoying your AI-powered customer support.

However, with so many tools on the market, it might be quite hard to choose your perfect AI chatbot. Companies have different needs, and bots have different functionalities. 

We’ve got you covered. Read further for our overview of some of the tools worthy of your attention.

Top AI chatbots for customer support

How do you know if the tool is a good option? Of course, trying it out is the best way, but before that, a detailed overview will do. Below we compare some of the most interesting tools on the market, highlighting their functionality, pricing options, and key pros and cons.

Lyro by Tidio

‍Lyro is an AI-powered conversational chatbot by Tidio. It’s quite unique as it’s the first bot of its kind and with such functionality created with small and medium businesses in mind. Of course, large enterprises can also use it, but it’s still affordable even to 1-person businesses.

Lyro’s key features include One click activation, FAQ scraping, Intent analysis, Scalable learning, and Identification of popular topics. It’s a fully autonomous chatbot that learns from each customer interaction. It’s also quite safe for customer data: Lyro is powered by Claude - the most secure large language model on the market. It ensures Lyro doesn’t suffer from ‘AI hallucinations’ and remains a safe and ethical tool.

Best for:

• Everyone who is looking to automate customer service with AI.

Pros: 

• Scalable and self-learning solution with cool AI features
• Affordable for micro-businesses
• Safe and secure for business and customer data

‍Cons:

• Your website should have detailed FAQs so Lyro can instantly scrape them

Pricing:

• Freemium version available with 50 conversations included
• Customized pricing options available starting from $349 monthly

Ada

‍Ada is an AI chatbot specifically crafted for proactive customer assistance. Its primary function is to assist customer support representatives in delivering tailored support on a big scale, reducing wait times and catering to clients in more than 100 languages via a translation interface.

Ada boasts plenty of valuable integrations, offers easy installation and setup, and is simple and straightforward to use.

Best for:

• Companies struggling to cater for an influx of support requests while still willing to prioritize personalization

Pros:

• Communication in 100 languages
• The interface is simple and user-friendly
• Personalization on a larger scale

Cons:

• Poor reporting

Pricing:

• Customizable pricing plans according to individual business needs

Drift

Drift chatbots can be a valuable tool for B2B enterprises, initiating dialogues with fellow businesses and addressing their inquiries. These automated bots offer a customized user journey and smooth interaction with prospective buyers.

In addition, Drift enables the collection of customer data, enhancing insights into their behavior and facilitating more effective business-client connections. Drift chatbots also have the capability to schedule appointments with potential customers, making access to key decision-makers easier.

Best for:

• Those in need of scheduling options

Pros:

• Plenty of integrations
• Quality customer support
• Meeting scheduling feature

Cons:

• Complicated reporting features
• Low quality of videos sent through the tool

Pricing:

• Freemium plan available
• Premium starts from $2,500 per month
• Customizable pricing for Advanced and Enterprise plans

Netomi

Netomi's AI chatbot excels at voice search. It's really good at understanding what customers say and can help with questions through chat, voice, email, and social media.

This chatbot can talk in over 100 languages and works with 150+ different platforms. It's great at having a natural conversation, even when customers are not very clear in their questions. The chatbot keeps asking for more details and helps customers find solutions to their problems.

Best for:

• Those looking for great voice search options

Pros:

• Optimized for both text and voice communication
• Plenty of languages supported
• 150+ integrations

Cons:

• The bot can be quite slow in its interactions

Pricing:

• No free trial available
• Customizable pricing options

Kommunicate

Kommunicate is a platform that blends human and AI chatbot functionalities to offer small and growing businesses immediate, proactive, and customized assistance. 

Kommunicate's goal is to deliver speedy, cost-effective, and easily expandable support. By combining the strengths of both human agents and bots, Kommunicate provides a customer support solution that is proactive, real-time, and personalized to cater to individual requirements.

Best for:

• Businesses that want to use both AI and human support capabilities

Pros: 

• 24/7 customer support 
• Unlimited customization options for branding and UI/UX

Cons:

• Not many integration options

Pricing:

• Free trial available
• Lite version starts at $100 monthly
• Customized pricing for paid plans

As you can see, the options are quite abundant. It’s very important to choose the best tool for your business that will cater to your and your customers’ needs. So, carefully evaluate what features, pricing, and integrations are necessary for your business. 

You probably still have some questions hanging. Let’s move to the FAQ section to answer them.

AI customer support FAQs

Integrating AI into your customer service can seem a bit stressful, like all new things. However, if you know the basics, you are already equipped to change your customer support for the better. Let’s tackle the rest of the most burning questions.

What companies use chatbots?

All leading brands do. Most top brands are adopting AI to scale their customer communication, improve support flows, and improve customer experience. Some notable examples of big brands using chatbots include Domino’s, Sephora, Uber, H&M, and more. 

Will AI replace customer support workers?

Not really. While AI allows incredible speed, efficiency, and precision of customer service, it can be achieved best only in combination with human support agents. It’s really a win-win situation: while AI can take care of all basic support requests, FAQs, and welcoming new customers, human agents can focus on more complicated cases that require human attention, empathy, and soft skills. This will allow them to develop and grow as professionals while maintaining a high quality of support.

Is AI for customer support expensive?

It really varies. However, there are typically options available for every budget. In addition, there are AI tools that come with free trials and freemium versions so one can play around before making a purchase.

Generally, you have a lot of flexibility to tailor your spending on customer service AI to align with your business requirements.

Are there risks of using AI for customer support?

The potential risks associated with AI depend on different factors unique to your business, the purpose of AI usage, your customer base, and more. Common concerns often center around privacy issues, maintenance, and the limitations of the tools.

It's worth noting that AI technology is continually advancing, and these risks are gradually diminishing. In addition, if you want some extra protection, you can look into the tools that boost AI safety and security. 

Conclusion

As you can see, Ai is definitely the future of customer support. Chatbots and virtual assistants in particular are continuously redefining the industry, bringing immense capabilities that were unheard of even a couple years ago.

AI for customer support is not just a buzzword but a must-have. If you don’t already integrate chatbots into your customer service, consider doing it: in the end, it’s becoming a golden standard for all businesses that care about their clients.