4 Signs You Should Break Up With Your Customer Support Chatbot

McKay Borbon | Content Marketing Manager

Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, so relationships are likely on your mind. Regardless of your relationship status, there’s an important relationship you should definitely be thinking about; the one between your brand and customers.

Take a moment to reflect on the health of your customer-brand relationship. Are your customers happy? Have they mentioned your brand to their friends and family? Do you actually have a future together? And exactly how loyal are they?

With ever-rising customer expectations and an incredibly competitive landscape, the fate of a customer-brand relationship often relies on a single service interaction. After just one negative service experience, more than half of consumers will leave a company forever.

Each interaction can make or break a relationship, so it’s critical that brands put their best service forward. In many cases, the first line of contact when customers reach out for support is a chatbot. Given that 78% of consumers are dissatisfied with the service bots provide, it could be a dealbreaker for some customers and put a strain on your relationship with others.

Even you think your customer service chatbot isn’t like other bots or that we don’t know it the way you do, keep an eye out for red flags. You’ll want to break up with your chatbot before customers break up with your brand.

Break Up With Your Chatbot

These are 4 signs you should break up with your chatbot:

🚩 It lacks communication skills

Good communication is the foundation of a healthy relationship. Without it, we can’t effectively connect, collaborate, or build trust with one another. Poor communication hinders relationship growth and is ultimately detrimental. In fact, it is the leading cause of breakups.

You’re not going to waste time on Chad who doesn’t seem to listen to a thing you say, no matter how many times you say it. So, what makes you think your customers are going to tolerate it from your chatbot support? Just as communication is essential to relationships between people, it is also necessary for a successful brand-customer relationship.

🚩 It doesn't understand

While your chatbot for customer experience may be available and responsive, how well does it actually understand your customers? Understanding is a crucial component of communication and the overall customer service experience. But it’s not enough for a chatbot to understand what consumers want - that’s the bare minimum and your customers’ expectations are higher than that.

In order to deliver the support your customers need, you need to go beyond surface-level intent to understand what customers want as well as their reasons, motivations, and mood. When it comes to achieving that higher level of understanding, traditional chatbots just aren’t cutting it. That’s why many leading brands are leveraging AI that uses best-in-class Natural Language Processing to achieve a nuanced understanding of each individual customer. To avoid falling behind the competition and short of customer expectations, make sure your tech is up to date (pun somewhat intended).

🚩 It isn't supportive

A concept: when your customers reach out to your support team it’s because they are in need of support.

Chatbot Customer Support Meme

Chatbot services are commonly leveraged to deflect customers; redirecting them to a self-service tool. The best a brand can hope for is that their self-service option is enough for customers to figure out their own problems. But seeing as only 9% of support journeys are resolved solely within the self-service portal, it’s more likely that deflected customers continue to spend time and energy trying to connect your support team. Either that or they’ve moved on to a competitor.

Anytime a brand does not provide full service when its needed, they are missing an opportunity to make their customers feel valued and cared for. Support is key in any relationship, so if your customer service chatbot can’t step up to the plate then you should reevaluate.

The good news is that there are now generative AI solutions that are able to provide both self-service options and full support - depending on brands' procedures and customers' needs.

🚩 It doesn't show empathy

To meet today’s standards for service, brands need to be providing empathetic support. The bar is on the floor, yet so many companies continue to slide right under it.

The brands that are delivering empathy-driven support are reaping the benefits. Not only do empathetic service experiences increase the likelihood of customer satisfaction by 96%, but customers are nine times more likely to be highly engaged. It’s a relationship builder and essential when strengthening the connection between brands and their customers. This connection is something that companies using traditional chatbots for customer service are often missing out on.

Empathy begins with identifying how someone feels. And while a bot doesn’t have feelings, your customers do and they want to be validated. Sentiment detection is so important to the overall service experience. It is what allows agents to craft responses that make customers feel heard and valued.

While traditional chatbots have limitations, high-tech customer service solutions don’t have to lack a human touch. Some generative AI technology is capable of offering the speed and efficiency benefits of chatbots in customer service without sacrificing quality and human touch. The most advanced generative AI Agents are capable of detecting customers’ sentiment and tailoring communication and actions accordingly. Thankful's AI Agent takes high-quality human-touch support to the next level by integrating with ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer), OpenAI's groundbreaking conversational AI model. ChatGPT builds on Thankful's ability to engage with customers in a more empathetic, natural, and human-like way.

Successful relationships of any kind require communication, understanding, support, and empathy. A customer-brand relationship can’t survive on love alone. Even your most loyal customers will only give you so many chances before they jump ship; 92% of consumers will leave a company they love after just a few negative service experiences. So if your bot has any of these red flags, it’s bringing down your CX and ultimately your brand-customer relationships.

Valentine’s Day isn’t the only holiday that’s approaching. National Breakup Day is February 13th. If you need plans, consider calling it quits with your customer support chatbot.

To learn more about generative AI and how it can improve brand-customer relationships, schedule a 10-minute discovery call.

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Topics: Blog, Customer Service

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