4 Chatbot Customer Service Use Cases for Every Industry

Digital customer engagement is always evolving. Just as live chat was a technological leap over telephone communication and is proving to be the most essential of all channels, chatbots are the latest technological milestone in customer support. Chatbots allow brands to offer cost-effective 24/7 support, while improving efficiency through automating up to 80% of all support queries.

If you’re on the fence about introducing chatbot software to your organization’s digital support strategy, here are four common chatbot customer service use cases, alongside customer stories that show the best chatbot use cases and how they can be used in practice.

1. Automate frequently asked questions to better use agent time

Introducing a chatbot allows organizations to fully automate the responses to their most common queries. This can be done more easily than you might think as organizations can build a chatbot using their existing knowledge base and support materials. By doing so, chatbots can resolve the most frequently asked questions that are simple yet repetitive and time-consuming – and do all this without any agent intervention.

With the common questions handled by a chatbot, agents can make better use of their time by giving more attention to complex issues, creating new support resources, or even improving the chatbot’s response capability. Customers benefit from an immediate response to simple problems from the bot, while also receiving the necessary care and time from agents for more complex issues. For a great chatbot customer service use case, let’s look at how Canadian Blood Services adopted Comm100 Chatbot.

Canadian Blood Services

Canadian Blood Services (CBS) first launched Comm100 Live Chat on their website in 2018 to connect with digital-first customers that were being missed by traditional phone support. Introducing live chat allowed CBS to reach new donors and saw excellent feedback from customers. Within months of launching live chat, CBS had 60 agents handling 7000 chats per month, with an excellent CSAT score of 4.5 out of 5. While the benefits of live chat were clear, CBS saw that their support operations could be made more efficient with the introduction of a well-designed chatbot.

With guidance from Comm100, Canadian Blood Services set up a chatbot in less than a month. The chatbot is designed to handle the basic requests that were taking up significant amounts of agent time. Today, more than 70% of live chats are routed to the chatbot, with 68% being resolved without any human interaction. Agents can now spend more of their time responding to sensitive and complex queries, as well as completing other tasks.

“Customer service can be a tough job for frontline agents, so it’s really important for us to make sure that we are doing everything we can to improve their everyday experience. Comm100 Live Chat helps a lot, and the chatbot even more. Before the chatbot, our agents were having to answer the same simple questions over and over again. With a chatbot now handling the vast majority of these questions, this is no longer an issue and our agents feel more engaged and fulfilled in their roles.” – Denny Michaud, Customer Relations Manager at Canadian Blood Services

Read more: Canadian Blood Services Improves Customer & Agent Experience with Comm100 AI Chatbot

2. Provide cost-effective 24/7 support to improve customer engagement

One of the greatest chatbot use cases is the ability to introduce cost-effective 24/7 support. With chatbots handling the majority of simple requests as we saw in our last chatbot example, they allow support teams to expand service hours without hiring additional agents or expanding agent hours.

Today’s customers want an immediate response when they need help. In fact, 90% of customers rate an immediate response from businesses as “important” or “very important” for support issues. By introducing a chatbot, businesses can ensure that customers get this instant support at any time of day. This improves customer satisfaction (CSAT), but it also helps to increase engagement with potential customers who can reach out whenever it suits them. Thompson Rivers University provides an ideal chatbot use case of this 24/7 support in action.

Thompson Rivers University

Thompson Rivers University (TRU) introduced Comm100 Live Chat in 2019 to meet student expectations for digital, fast, and convenient support, adopting it across five departments. While live chat was well-received by students and faculty alike, TRU recognized that many students wanted to connect with them outside of the typical 9-5 business hours. In light of this, they decided to set up Comm100 Chatbot to provide 24/7 support.

Thompson Rivers University worked with Comm100 to import their support FAQs into Comm100 Chatbot, enabling them to automate the most common questions. This has allowed TRU to provide around-the-clock support, ensuring that students receive an immediate response at any time of day. TRU’s chatbot now handles 83% of chats in the Future Student department without any human intervention.

“I don’t have a computer science or programming background so finding a chatbot that was simple to build and code-free was crucial – and Comm100 Chatbot delivered on this. With a little learning and guidance from Comm100’s bot architect team, I built our bot from scratch with no technical knowledge. I think anyone who has a social media account can build a Comm100 Chatbot.” – Lachlan Todd, Communications & Systems Coordinator at Thompson Rivers University

Read more: Thompson Rivers University Adopts Comm100 Live Chat & Chatbot Across 5 Departments

3. Handle high support volumes during peak periods

Businesses often have to deal with inconsistent support volumes, peaking during certain times of the day, month, and year. This can make scheduling agents for peak periods very difficult. Whether it’s colleges handling admissions in the fall or retailers facing increased traffic during busy shopping seasons, businesses have traditionally needed to hire seasonal or temporary workers to handle busy periods. During these peak periods, chatbots can be launched to handle the influx of queries without temporarily increasing team sizes.

Unlike human agents, chatbots have an unlimited capacity, which means that their capability scales with your customer needs in ways that traditional support can’t. Let’s look to Tangerine Telecom in Australia for an excellent chatbot customer service use case.

Tangerine Telecom

Tangerine Telecom began using Comm100 Live Chat in 2015 to bring their broadband customers more convenient and accessible support. In 2019 however, they launched a new customer-facing product, which meant a huge increase in their customer base. Live chats surged from 500 in March 2019 to 2,227 in May 2019, and Tangerine saw that a chatbot would allow them to effectively handle the increased volume.

With help from Comm100, Tangerine introduced Comm100 Chatbot to Comm100 Live Chat, targeting technical support, general customer service, and sales queries. Because a large number of the requests that Tangerine receives are repetitive and have simple resolutions, they’ve found that a chatbot is perfect for handling their skyrocketing chat volume. As of December 2019, the chatbot was handling 84% of chats without human involvement, and on some days the number of chats handled rose as high as 91%. Tangerine’s growing customer base now receives improved service availability, and thanks to the chatbot, Tangerine’s support costs haven’t ballooned to meet the growing demand.

“The bot has allowed us to not only effectively manage the increase in chat volume, but it’s also saved us a considerable amount of money by not having to hire a lot more agents.” – Richard Branson, COO of Tangerine

Read more: Comm100 Chatbot Resolves 91% of Assigned Live Chats for Tangerine

4. Reduce waits and resolution times to improve CX

We’ve seen that customers today expect a response at any time of day, and this extends to wait times as well. Surveys show that 57% of people find long hold times frustrating when calling a business. While live chat can help to reduce wait times seen in traditional phone support thanks to chat concurrency and its fast nature, chatbots are the best way to reduce wait times for customers.

Chatbots can enable around-the-clock support with unlimited capacity, and we shouldn’t overlook the fact that chatbots also handle these interactions with an immediate response. For customers with simple problems, this means an immediate resolution with zero wait time. And because chatbots can handle these simple queries, customers with more complex questions will also see reduced wait times for agents.

Chatbots can also be used to capture customer information and then route chats to an appropriate agent, reducing waits and facilitating a smoother support process. For our last chatbot use case, we’ll look to Alberta School Employee Benefit Plan.

Alberta School Employee Benefit Plan

The Alberta School Employee Benefit Plan (ASEBP) introduced Comm100 Live Chat in 2016 to reduce reliance on phone systems that saw frequent transfers and long hold times. As ASEBP looked for other ways to improve their customer service operations, in late 2020 they decided to introduce a chatbot as an internal agent-facing tool to reduce wait times even further.

Rather than forcing the agent to spend long amounts of time manually searching through a spreadsheet to find the answers to client questions, the agent can type the question into the chatbot interface hosted on an internal web page. Connected with their internal system, the bot automatically pulls the relevant information and provides it to the agent. The agent can then confidently and quickly pass this answer on to the client, improving the experience for both.

Since implementing live chat and chatbot, ASEBP has seen wait times reduced from 24 seconds to 14 seconds, and a very impressive CSAT score of 4.8 out of 5. With their chatbot, ASEBP has not only improved the speed of their response, but the quality as well.

“We have been so impressed with the positive impact that Comm100’s tools have had for our staff. Our staff love it – it’s really easy to use and makes them feel so much more confident in their role, with far less chance of error. This then trickles down onto our members who receive quicker and more accurate support and trust in us – I’m not sure what we would do without it now!” – Katherine Gaetz, Manager, Member Experience at ASEBP

Wrap Up

Introducing a chatbot for your digital customer engagement is the best way to boost your service availability, capacity, and quality. To see how Comm100 Chatbot can help you achieve this and implement any one of these chatbot customer service use cases, book a demo with one of our chatbot specialists.