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Chatbot vs. Human: Who Provides Better Customer Support on Social Media?

The explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has caused many companies to think about how to take advantage of technology to improve their effectiveness and efficiency. AI is already revolutionizing social media advertising. The smartest organizations are evaluating and researching the right tools and contemplating using AI with human oversight to avoid embarrassing mistakes and damage to their brand. Many companies have considered using chatbots as part of their online customer service approach. 

To find the right balance between humans and technology in your organization, it’s essential to understand the benefits each one brings to the customer support process. Then, you can choose tools that work in harmony with your team, making everyone better.

The Benefits of AI Chatbots in Customer Service

Consumers already expect to interact with companies using technology like chatbots, and they can be impatient with companies that aren’t keeping up. They can help with simple issues and with quick responses. 

Chatbots help your organization as well. You can focus on having human representatives answer more complex questions. Chatbots can also help surface answers to common questions quickly, making them vital in assisting customers in accessing your knowledge database. 

Understanding the voice of your customer will help you understand how and where to use technology and where a human would be more appropriate. For example, you can do customer interviews, talk to customers on live chat, do surveys, and talk to your customers directly on social media. 

When you do, you’ll learn what your customers expect from your company regarding customer support on social media, which can help you decide when and where to use technology solutions.

Chatbots are available 24/7, so you can serve the night owls in your customer base and better serve customers from around the world. The ability to give customers helpful information quickly, at very little cost, is what makes these tech tools so valuable. Chatbots and other AI technologies can help keep customers satisfied. 

Cautions When Using Tech Tools Like Chatbots

What’s important when using chatbots is not to go overboard with them and eliminate human oversight and interaction.

Chatbots are not an “instead” when it comes to human customer service but an “also.” They are still limited in what they can do, and chatbots are constantly changing to meet the evolving needs of AI in e-commerce operations, where customer service is essential. 

Failure to keep this in mind can lead to embarrassing results. For example, if a suicide hotline replaced all of its caller representatives with a chatbot, it could potentially risk the lives and well-being of any callers.

Customers still want the opportunity to talk to humans when necessary. A Gartner survey concluded that only 8% of customers used a chatbot during their most recent customer service interaction, and only 25% of those respondents said they would use that chatbot again in the future. However, chatbots can allow your organization to offer 24/7 instant support that answers simple questions and helps customers find information within your help database. 

The Importance of Humans in Your Customer Support

As noted, technology tools like chatbots are only part of the customer service equation, not all of it. It’s still important to have humans overseeing the technology to ensure it’s operating as intended, and you’ll still need human customer support in many situations.

One of the most important human roles on your team is a social media manager. They oversee your entire social media strategy, use social media management tools, and can help you understand how well customers are responding to your technology tools. 

These experts also use social media management tools to enrich communications between the company and the customer. For example, the social media manager can let you know if there are small tweaks you can make to the chatbot to help it be more effective. A person in this role will also have the creativity to think of ways to improve your customer service on social media.

It’s also important to have humans available to handle more complex customer service requests. Not every solution is one-size-fits-all or has a simple solution. Human customer service agents help walk people through troubleshooting, answer questions about how to use a product or service in a specific situation, and more. 

The Importance of a Human Perspective

Many people give AI more credit than it deserves. While technology is great at surfacing information based on keywords and providing straightforward answers, it’s not able to think “outside the box.” 

AI, by its nature, has been trained on information that’s already out there. That means thinking of something new or having a new perspective is not something AI can do. Instead, you need human creativity to think about things like strategy, managing customer emotions and expectations, and new ways to approach current processes.

Humans can think beyond what’s already been done. Even the best-trained AI will be constrained to existing ideas. Natural language processing (NLP), AI that uses machine learning to process and respond to humans, still lacks some contextual understanding, which means it may not understand things like sarcasm, nuance, or ambiguous statements. This, in turn, could result in poor customer service.

Balancing Chatbots and Humans For Excellent Customer Service

Chatbots and other technology tools can do a lot to improve your organization’s customer experience. It allows you to offer online customer service around the clock, giving customers instant access to simple answers. These benefits can improve your customer retention rate, save your organization money, and more.

However, AI replacing humans altogether is unlikely, even in temporary roles and in industries heavily affected by AI. Not only do customers still expect to be able to talk to a human if necessary, but humans have a level of creative thinking that technology tools cannot provide. 

The best organizations will find the right balance between technology and human interaction that helps everyone be more effective and efficient!

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