Botco.ai Survey: 76% Of Contact Centers Leverage Chatbots To Improve Performance

Tasked with supporting customer interactions across a range of channels, contact centers have come to rely on intelligent chat solutions as one of the primary ways of increasing the speed that they can respond to customer inquiries and the effectiveness of their interactions. Specifically, 76% of contact centers leverage chatbot technologies and, among the 19% who don’t, 31% said their contact centers plan to soon.

The most common benefits contact centers receive from using chatbots include:

• Reducing customer call times (46%);
• Facilitating smooth handoffs to human representatives (46%);
• Deflecting calls and reducing the workload for humans (44%);
• Cutting costs related to third-party contact center outsourcing (29%);
• Reducing burnout for contact center team members (28%); and
• Helping improve key metrics, such as average time to answer and customer satisfaction (24%). 

More than 85% of respondents stated that chatbots effectively deflect at least 10% of calls to their contact centers, with nearly half (47%) saying chatbots help their contact centers deflect between 20% and 30% of inbound calls. Sixteen percent of respondents say deflection rates — the rate at which chatbots fulfill demand that would otherwise have needed to be taken care of by a call center agent — exceed 30%. 

When asked how chatbots affect the makeup of a contact center team, respondents provided mixed replies, with 44% stating that chatbots replace some contact center team members and 43% stating that chatbots augment a team’s capabilities but do not replace humans, while 9% reported that chatbots have had no measurable effect on their team. 

The most common barrier to entry for using chatbots was that chatbots are too expensive, cited by 40% of respondents, followed by the fact that integration and onboarding is too complex or time consuming (24%) and that they don’t believe automation and AI can benefit their business (22%).  

“Contact centers are increasingly turning to AI-powered conversational marketing solutions in order to complement their team of live agents,” said Rebecca Clyde, Co-founder and CEO of Botco.ai, in a statement. “As our survey results show, contact centers are deriving a number of important benefits from working with chatbots, from easing the burden on live agents by deflecting many of the calls that agents would normally be required to process to delivering a better, faster and more streamlined experience for customers. We expect to see even more contact centers incorporating chatbots in the coming years, with even greater results as the algorithms continue to get smarter and more informed.” 

To download the full report, click here.