How can chatbots ensure better service quality?
Whether you’re running a chain of retail stores, an online bookshop, a food delivery service, or an organization providing software solutions, chances are that your customers need help and support at various instances. At certain times of the day or the year, based on the nature of your work, the volume of requests, complaints, and orders from the customers can strain your resources. What is more, your customers expect you to be responsive, helpful, and available whenever they need. If they do not get the help they are looking for, or if they do not get help when they need it, you might lose them and, in some cases, forever.
Customer satisfaction, therefore, is not only dependent on the quality of the product your audience ends up with. It also depends on the quality of service the customers receive. It will not be wrong to say that customer satisfaction has a strong relationship with customer service or, in other words, the quality of customer service. Service quality, in simple words, is a measure of the extent to which a service can meet the expectations and needs of the intended audience. Almost all aspects of service quality depend on customer service. However, looking at some key dimensions of service quality helps in clarifying this relationship.
Needs and expectations of customers make it hard for service quality to maintain its standard. This is where adopting new technology can help.
Dimensions of service quality
According to the SERVQUAL theory, formulated by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry, the quality of any service can be determined by analyzing the following five dimensions.
Responsiveness
The aspect that deals with timely responses and prompt service to meet the needs of the users. Responsiveness is greatly affected by wait time — the time customers have to wait, on average, to connect with a representative.
Reliability
This dimension ensures the delivery of a certain service in an accurate and dependable manner is a measure of its reliability. Reliability has a strong influence on the trust level of customers.
Assurance
Assurance deals with the provision of accurate information and also the presentation of information ina trustworthy and credible manner. If the customers believe in the information they receive and perceive it to be credible, this adds value to the service.
Empathy
Humans do not just want solutions to their problems, they want to be understood. If a certain service understands the problem, makes the customers feel special, and takes care of their feelings, that leads to greater empathy and thus more trust in the service.
Tangibility
Tangibility deals with the physical appearance of service and the way(s) in which customers interact with it. This can be in the form of physical contact or an online chat.
The dimensions, as it can be seen, demand a lot from customer service and the customers are, indeed, the top priority for any service. The burden, however, can be reduced, if not completely withdrawn, if chatbots are introduced in the customer service.
Chatbots to the rescue
A chatbot can serve as an alternative and an extremely effective solution when it comes to customer service. With the ability to hold conversations with multiple people at a given time, a chatbot can improve your service quality in a remarkable manner. The utility of chatbots in customer service and their impact on customer satisfaction can be better understood if each dimension of the SERVQUAL model is considered separately.
Responsiveness
Chatbots can greatly reduce the response time of any service. Since a chatbot is available 24/7, so it is never dependent on time. Whenever the customers need help, they know they have a service ready to help them out or at least give them some feedback at that very moment. This way, your customer service never sleeps and a chatbot is ready to answer the basic questions within no time. If the queries are unique, the same chatbot can direct the customers to the support personnel as soon as they are available.
Reliability
Since the chatbots are designed carefully, considering all the possible scenarios with extreme levels of complexity, the errors are minimized. It is true that the design of chatbots needs a lot of time and excessive testing, but once that phase is completed, you have a foolproof, error-free system. A chatbot, therefore, is guaranteed to provide accurate information or to direct the customers to the concerned people, if some information is not available.
From financial and medical assistance to placing online orders, chatbots have proved their utility.
Assurance
When the customers receive accurate information in minimum time, the trust level in the service is enhanced. Where a human representative would take a lot of time to look up for the correct information and might also falter sometimes, the chances of such mistakes are minimum with a chatbot.
Empathy
Empathy is one of the two factors that are highly dependent on the way a chatbot is designed. You can choose to give your chatbot a specific, anthropomorphic personality or you can choose to keep it more robot-like. Both of these choices have their own pros and cons, where the nature of business plays a vital role. Nevertheless, a chatbot can prove to be highly sympathetic towards humans, if needed.
Tangibility
Tangibility, once again, depends on the design of a chatbot. The user interface can be made aesthetically pleasing and highly interactive with a smart design — and, of course, more budget. However, focusing on the way information is organized and presented to the audience can improve the user experience, thus improving the quality of the service.
A number of organizations, these days, are making use of chatbots. From financial and medical assistance to placing online orders, chatbots have proved their utility, and continue to do so. For better service quality, therefore, picking chatbots is a smart choice.
Sources:
- IGI Global. What is service quality.
- Theories Used in IS Research Wiki. SERVQUAL.
