Chatbot vs Live Chat: What is the Difference?

‘Chatbot vs Live Chat’ can be a challenging puzzlement for online business owners.

Are you struggling to choose between an AI chatbot and Live Chat for your e-commerce business? Online business owners are implementing different marketing strategies to develop a customer-centric business online.

While we talk about customer-centric business, we should first understand the significance of conversational commerce in online business.

A successful online website creates affinity with customers by understanding their needs and designing their products/services based on that. Chatbot vs Live Chat is a crucial topic to understand the difference between two customer service software interfaces. This article discusses which software provides the best solution.

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Instant Responses and Good Customer Experience

Human Intervention

Availability

Deeper Understanding

Cost-Effective

Provides Best Solution

How Does Poor Customer Service Affect Your Brand’s Reputation?

Customer loyalty is significant in growing your online business. Many e-commerce site owners use different strategies to boost the sales of their sites. If your website doesn’t have good customer service and immediate responses to customer queries, then customer loyalty will decrease.

With poor customer service, you are not only reducing customer loyalty but boosting the visibility of your competitors. Your potential customers will leave your website and purchase products and services on your competitor’s site. If you are planning to build your brand’s reputation, improving customer satisfaction is one of the best ways.

Impact of Good Customer Service

Before discussing the difference between chatbots and Live Chat, let us look into the impact of good customer service. In the same way that a physical store needs essential customer service to hold and retain customers, similarly, your online store must do this.

Even if a customer is not purchasing products from your website, you want your site to feel comfortable and enticing, so that even if they don’t buy today, they will remember a positive experience, and return to your website, thus guaranteeing that in the future they may purchase products.

Good customer service online will fetch you more new customers and develop customer loyalty toward your brand. Chatbots and live chats are used in online websites to greet customers and develop a healthy conversation, creating a feeling of trust and comfort with your brand and your site.  This will:

• Increase the efficiency of the brand
• Escalate customer satisfaction and bring happiness to both customers and online business owners.
• Good and creative customer service will not only build trust and return sales to your site, but increase the trust in your brand; customers will feel increasingly secure that you are able to meet their needs, and this will build your business.

Ways to Increase Customer Satisfaction

There are various ways to increase customer satisfaction and provide excellent customer service on an e-commerce website, including:

• Increase customer engagement
• Research more about your target audience
• Reduce response time on the website
• Provide omnichannel support to customers
• Engage website visitors in conversation

Customer Service Teams vs AI Chatbot

Live chat support has a customer service team behind it and fulfills customer expectations by answering their relevant questions. On the other hand, AI chatbots can outpace live support agents with a speedy response.

If an e-commerce website doesn’t answer customers’ questions faster, then they will leave the website to search for another one. This is the reason why most e-commerce websites prefer AI chatbots to live chat.

Chatbot vs Live Chat

What is Live Chat Support?

Live chat encourages the customers to communicate with the human agents via chat. Chatbots are different from live chat, the live chat option doesn’t have Artificial Intelligence technology behind it. The live chat option either initiates the conversation with a human or allows the customers to ask for assistance.

Human agents behind the live chat option converse with the customers and identify their pain points. What are the pain points? If a customer visits a website and doesn’t find any assistance, they tend to leave the website immediately. In this case, live chat agents offer assistance and solve complex customer issues that may not be resolved by a programmed or AI chatbot.

• The conversation with human agents behind the live chat is very natural and provides a real-life shopping experience to customers. These real-life experiences boost customer satisfaction.
• Live chat is easy to implement on a website and customers can get a personalized response.
• Human agents behind the live chat can understand the emotions of the customers and there’ll be no mechanical response.

Advantages of Using Live Chat

Online business owners can generate good revenue in their business by implementing live chat on their websites. Some of the advantages of using live chat for an online business are,

• E-commerce sites don’t have to worry about the mechanical response in the conversation.
• Human agents behind live chat easily empathize with customers. Live chat agents can increase customer engagement by giving the human touch in live chat conversations.
• Conversation with the live chat has a personal touch and customers don’t get frustrated because of scripted responses.

Disadvantages of Live Chat

The Live Chat option on the website has a few disadvantages that can push the customers away from your business objective.

• An e-commerce website should be mobile-friendly to allow the customers to navigate through the products. Some live chat options are not available on mobile platforms.
• Live chat can give personalized responses to the customers, but human agents cannot answer repetitive questions.
• Online business owners need more support tickets to handle multiple conversations. Support tickets cost increase exponentially while using live chat.
• Human agents can only handle the questions of the customers during business hours. If a human agent is not available, the website looks dead.
• Using the live chat option on the website may not be feasible for small business owners because of the cost of employing a live human.

What is AI Chatbots with Human Support?

The artificial intelligence behind chatbots does multiple tasks and automates the business process interactions between you and your customers. AI chatbots are the best example of artificial intelligence and its usage in online business.

AI-powered chatbots use natural language processing to understand the intricacies of human language. Chatbots with Artificial Intelligence can give instant responses to the customers and develop the conversation naturally. AI can also predict the customer’s behavior through the previous conversation data. More than 50% of the customers expect 24/7 customer support online. AI chatbots are available 24/7 and reduce customer support costs and increase customer engagement.

Advantages of AI Chatbots

Artificial intelligence in chatbots eliminates the scripted response of non-AI chatbots and acts like human agents in the browser conversation.

• AI chatbots perform the tasks of both machine and human agents. Artificial intelligence analyzes the data faster than human agents, in many respects.
• Human-supervised AI chatbots don’t commit machine errors, AI chatbots can understand the emotive questions with HITL (Human-in-the-loop)
• AI chatbots benefit different e-commerce industries in converting website visitors into customers and generating leads for B2-B businesses.
• Chatbot uses artificial technology to link customers’ questions and predicts relevant answers fast.
• Chatbots with lead generation templates are beneficial in generating leads for the business.
• AI chatbots will provide both instant responses and personalized support for your customers.

Disadvantages

• Machine learning technology in AI chatbots without human support can give inappropriate answers to customers.
• AI-based chatbots are quite expensive for online business owners compared to live chat software.

• An e-commerce website should be mobile-friendly to allow customers to navigate through the products. Some live chat options are not available on mobile platforms.
• Live chat can give personalized responses to customers, but human agents cannot answer repetitive questions.
• Online business owners need more support tickets to handle multiple conversations. Support tickets cost increase exponentially while using live chat.
• Human agents can only handle the questions of customers during business hours. If a human agent is not available, the website looks dead.
• Using the live chat option on the website may not be feasible for small business owners because of the cost of employing a live human.

What is AI Chatbots with Human Support?

The artificial intelligence behind chatbots does multiple tasks and automates the business process interactions between you and your customers. AI chatbots are the best example of artificial intelligence and its usage in online business.

AI-powered chatbots use natural language processing to understand the intricacies of human language. Chatbots with Artificial Intelligence can give instant responses to customers and develop conversations naturally. AI can also predict the customer’s behavior through previous conversation data. More than 50% of customers expect 24/7 customer support online. AI chatbots are available 24/7 and reduce customer support costs and increase customer engagement.

Advantages of AI Chatbots

Artificial intelligence in chatbots eliminates the scripted response of non-AI chatbots and acts like human agents in the browser conversation.

• AI chatbots perform the tasks of both machine and human agents. Artificial intelligence analyzes the data faster than human agents, in many respects.
• Human-supervised AI chatbots don’t commit machine errors, AI chatbots can understand emotive questions with HITL (Human-in-the-loop)
• AI chatbots benefit different e-commerce industries in converting website visitors into customers and generating leads for B2-B businesses.
• Chatbot uses artificial technology to link customers’ questions and predicts relevant answers fast.
• Chatbots with lead generation templates are beneficial in generating leads for the business.
• AI chatbots will provide both instant responses and personalized support for your customers.

Disadvantages

• Machine learning technology in AI chatbots without human support can give inappropriate answers to customers.
• AI-based chatbots are quite expensive for online business owners compared to live chat software.

Chatbot Vs Live Chat – Which One Provides Real-time Assistance?

1. Instant Responses and Customer Experience

Live agents can enhance human interaction in the conversation, but chatbots give an instant response with Artificial Intelligence technology behind them. Online business owners don’t have to worry about customers leaving the websites without having their questions answered immediately, waiting on hold for a human to finally talk to them.

• Chatbots with NLP (Natural Language Processing) replicate human conversation and respond like a live agent.
• If a chatbot is not able to answer the questions, it can determine and ask if the customer would like to talk with a live agent, stating the potential wait time to talk to a person.
• Chatbots can be more efficient in answering questions and giving the best solutions to complex questions. Artificial Intelligence technology predicts customers’ questions and can solve even complex issues, reducing the need for live intervention.

2. Human Intervention

AI chatbots will engage customers with personalized responses and relevant answers to their questions. By training an AI chatbot with business objectives, e-commerce sites will be able to resolve basic questions as well as complex issues. Online business owners don’t have to worry about mechanical responses with Human-in-the-loop in AI chatbots. Human intervention reduces the mechanical response and rectifies the errors efficiently.

• The Human-in-the-loop concept in AI chatbots allows bots to converse with customers without machine errors.
• Human intervention enhances customer satisfaction in conversations. Online business owners don’t have to depend upon a live chat agent and hire so many live agents to give a human touch to the conversation.
• Chatbots instantly respond to every question with human intervention. So, there are no human or machine errors in the conversation.

3. Availability – Live Chat agents vs Chatbots

Customers visit an online website to purchase a product or service as quickly as possible. If they want to know more about a product and they don’t find that information quickly on your site, they’ll leave the website and browse elsewhere. This is where AI chatbots come into the picture.

• Chatbots are available 24/7 and engage website visitors with conversational elements.
• AI chatbots will answer all repetitive questions of the customers tirelessly.
• Support agents cannot answer and are available 24/7 like chatbots.

4. Deeper Understanding – Boost Customer Satisfaction

Live chat agents can understand customers’ questions but they may not be able to link their answers to every previous question. AI chatbots can link one question to another and deeply connect with previous conversations.

• With the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technology behind them, AI chatbots will be able to connect thousands of previous questions by customers.
• AI chatbots don’t make customers wait, they redirect them to solve their questions.
• Chatbots understand customer behavior and use upsell and cross-sell strategies, the same as a live agent would.

5. Cost-Effective

Setting up an AI chatbot is expensive and time-consuming for online business owners. On the other hand, rule-based chatbots are cost-effective.

AI chatbots reduce customer service costs by mostly fulfilling the need of a human agent, because of their artificial intelligence capabilities, which are superior to those of programmed chatbots, also known as rule-based chatbots.

While considering the cost and time-consuming process of setting up an AI chatbot, online business owners should also understand the multitasking capacity of Artificial intelligence.

Investing in AI chatbots might be quite expensive at first, but eventually, they’ll provide value to your business, excelling at tasks unachievable by rule-based chatbots, and emulating human performance for a positive customer experience that is time to build your bottom line.

6. Provides the Best Solution

Some website visitors prefer to talk with a human agent to chatbots. If you have an AI chatbot, it will engage multiple customers and redirect them to the live chat agent when they need it.

Even if your customers struggle to find a product on the website, AI chatbots will instantly recommend relevant products. With instant answers and solutions, your target audience will not leave your website. Online business owners can also integrate their AI chatbots into social channels such as Facebook Messenger to reach more potential customers.

Who is the Winner ?- Chatbot vs Live Chat

AI chatbots are the winner in the Chatbot vs Live Chat competition. in giving real-time assistance like a real person in a physical store. E-commerce sites will be able to enhance their response time and save money by adding chatbots.

Live Chat doesn’t deploy customers to sales funnel strategies whereas chatbot does that task efficiently. Online business owners will increase their sales organically by adding AI chatbots to their websites. Customers will get immediate answers to their questions with relevant solutions and product recommendations.

E-commerce sites need not depend upon the sales team for developing customer-centric business. AI chatbots can help online business owners increase sales by understanding customers’ preferences.

Final Thoughts

Better customer engagement is one of the best ways to understand more about your website visitors. Relying solely on human support is not a good option for e-commerce sites. Your AI chatbot should provide instant answers and connect you with a live chat support agent when needed.

It is never too late to implement a chatbot on your website. Ochatbot is one of the best AI-induced e-commerce chatbots with better pricing plans. Click here to view the pricing plans and get your own AI chatbot.

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