With customer service becoming digitally-driven, traditional strategies are no longer effective. Artificial intelligence has added a novel touch to interacting and engaging with clients.

As businesses shift towards a customer-centric model, companies must, however, be careful not to rely on AI interacting with clients too much. For companies to deliver outstanding service, they must offer the nuanced support that AI is not yet capable of.

Live chat support, therefore, plays a fundamental role in delivering a superior customer experience. With the help of support experts and AI-powered business solutions, your company can cover customer inquiries in mere seconds and reinforce customer engagement.

Why use a hybrid model?

As conversational marketing enters the digital era, AI-powered technologies are at the cutting edge of a personalized approach for every consumer. Automated chatbots are improving and providing a viable alternative to live chat support. The bots cannot reproduce human interaction yet, but they can produce a reasonable facsimile.

This leaves us with two equally strong tools for connecting with clients. If we wish to build meaningful relationships with them, it is essential to consider the opportunities that each of them can offer.

Team A: Live Chat Support

Live chat is considered the most commonly used option among various customer service channels. It is a crucial website feature that serves both the company and its clients. Live chat solutions are exceptional for delivering customer support by real humans.

However, is the human-led service powerful enough to surpass digital technologies? Let’s see what live chat services are capable of:

• Resolving complex customer queries

Live chat agents are more competent at handling the intricate problems that constitute the majority of client requests. With a more in-depth, human approach to customers, live chat reps can solve any issue through collaborative discussions. Such a smooth problem-resolution process produces prompt and efficient results.

• Accuracy and customer psychology

Using live chat can be alluring if your company seeks accurate solutions. The competitive advantage of human agents at customer support is their ability to decipher the psychological context of the conversations.

Moreover, live chat agents can establish emotional attachment with the clients to determine the suitable resolution model and provide appropriate advice. Automated AI-based services can never serve with empathy.

• Human touch

The customer-centric business models need to be managed by humans first. With live chat, your company can achieve a balance between hybrid real-time support and human contact. This way, customers are satisfied with a natural and personal conversation flow.

Team B: Automated Chatbots

Despite the lack of real interaction with the human representative of customer support, chatbots offer a great deal of benefits over live chat. With technology on the rise, it’s getting harder to manage client relationships without digital assets. Here’s what AI-powered chatbots can do for your business:

• Cost-effectiveness

One of the main reasons for dynamic technology integration is the profitability of automated services. Cost-effective solutions for modern businesses are crucial for increasing gross sales and reducing expenses.

By saving customer service costs, chatbots are expected to help companies save over $8 billion per year by 2022. Companies also save because automated business activities are scalable and free employees to tackle more important tasks.

• 24/7 availability

AI-enabled chatbots are always available for simple and repetitive customer inquiries. Being there for your clients at any given time is a fundamental necessity for any modern enterprise.

Customer lifetime value can be significantly improved with an effective, 24/7 support strategy. Round-the-clock client service also promotes increased sales and accelerated business success.

• Scalable AI mechanism

Live chat services require ongoing training and hiring more human resources to deal with customer issues overload. With AI technology, there is no need to face such challenges.

Chatbots help to scale the conversations and deliver fast solutions. This way, AI considerably boosts your business performance. The chatbots’ ability to manage limitless conversations ensures increased customer engagement and satisfaction rates.

Who is the Winner?

In modern, digitally-driven marketing, customers’ demands are becoming more complex. Therefore, addressing client-related concerns becomes more intense. Keeping customers satisfied and loyal is more complicated than before.

Both live chat agents and automated chatbots are equally powerful solutions for your business, as they complement each other in a meaningful way. Since AI technologies and humans work best in collaborative codependency, your business gains a competitive advantage faster by employing both.

AI can never exist without human input. Humanity now can never evolve without digital performance. Make sure to consider this while choosing between the best customer support option for your business growth and long-lasting success.