Say you’re navigating the website of your internet provider and a small box pops up in the corner, asking “How can I help?”
You’d think most customers might let out a sigh of relief — no more long hold times with company call centers, right? After all, about 60% of customers would hang up if left on hold for more than one minute.
If you can help your clients sort out issues via chatbot, that’s a serious point for customer service.
But, as it turns out, chatbots aren’t as well-liked as generative AI enthusiasts originally believed.
One Gartner survey of almost 500 businesses found that only 8% of B2B and B2C customers used a chatbot in their last customer service interaction. Here are a few more highlights from the survey:
Chatbots confuse customers
“As generative AI makes [chatbots] more advanced, customer confusion about what chatbots can and can’t do is likely to get worse,” says Michael Rendelman, Senior Specialist, Research, in Gartner’s Customer Service and Support Practice.
This explains why only 25% of customers would use a chatbot in the future.
Rendelman sees the problem as one of triage. Businesses can do better in identifying the right situations for a chatbot versus situations where customers should seek different support.
Returns are chatbots’ forte
So, which issues should businesses let chatbots take care of?
Gartner’s survey says returns and cancellations, for which chatbots have a 58% resolution rate. This is an opportunity for businesses to highlight the chatbot pathway for customers seeking to return a product or cancel a purchase. Other items for which chatbots scored high resolution rates include:
- Orders/Purchases: 52%
- Account Information: 43%
- Payment/Transactions: 40%
Chatbots are NOT effective for billing disputes
A barely passing grade in school, a 58% resolution rate for returns is actually fair in the customer support world. But things take a turn for chatbots when it comes to billing issues. Unfortunately, chatbots only have a 17% resolution rate for billing disputes. Other low-resolution-rate items include:
- Change in product/service: 18%
- Information about product/service: 19%
- Registration: 24%
- Complaint: 25%
Here’s the kicker: despite the relatively high resolution rate for returns and low resolution rate for disputes, only 2% of customers were more likely to use chatbots for the higher-resolution item.
It’s up to service and support leaders to guide customers to chatbots when it’s appropriate for their issue and to other channels when another channel is more appropriate,” says Rendelman.
Read Gartner’s news release on the report here.
