A new AI-powered bot will answer common customer questions automatically. The aptly named Answer Bot from Intercom promises to resolve 29% of customers’ common questions instantly and improve all-important response times by 44%.
It’s good news for small businesses as their client base grows exponentially with people who demand near real time responses. What’s more, this latest bot arrives as Gartner predicts 85% of these interactions will be done without humans by 2020.
How Your Business Can Benefit
Small Business Trends contacted Brian Donohue, Director of Product Management at Intercom to find out more about how small business can benefit from this latest innovation that combines a machine learning engine with a curation tool and some other features.
A Look at the Intercom Answer Bot
Donohue started by outlining one of the common issues that businesses face as technology and humans mesh.
How You Can Scale Conversations and Stay Personal
“Small businesses today need a way to scale customer conversations and stay personal,” he says. “As business has migrated online, there’s an ever increasing amount of website traffic and businesses are struggling to provide a personal experience to every customer and website visitor.”
How Bots Help Answer Customer Queries
In a word, humans can’t handle all the traffic generally and the flood of customer queries specifically. According to Donohue, bots close the gap. In fact, he believes the current crop that are suffused with AI and automation will change messaging and be as disruptive as predecessors like, email, phones and websites.
Answer Bot Includes Apps with its Answers
The newly released Answer Bot bears this out with some interesting innovations. Intercom’s recently released Messenger platform allows the bot to include apps with the answers it gives. These provide a series of actionable steps.
For example, it can give customers personalized answers to queries about their order status. Want to know where that Shopify order is? Answer Bot can include the Shopify order status app with the answer.
Bot Helps Keep Track of Queries
The bot also has a reporting feature that allows a small business to keep track of how many queries are handled successfully. There’s also a Zendesk Chat importer that curates conversations to identify the most common questions.
Uses AI to Free Up Your Team
Donohue stresses the software is user friendly, making it easier for humans running small businesses to see the advantages to bringing AI onboard to handle customer questions.
“So many of these conversations are simple, repetitive questions. Bots free up your team’s precious time, and give your customers the answer they’re looking for right away. The technology is finally here to deliver on this simple promise.”
Image: Intercom
This article, “Answer Bot Expected to Resolve 29% of Small Business Customer Questions, Company Says” was first published on Small Business Trends