A Guide to Service Desk Chatbots: Features and Pricing
Service desk chatbots are transforming customer support. Customer support was a human centric job but with advances in chatbots, the landscape is changing.
According to Gartner, over 75% of inquiries will be handled by chatbots and conversational AI platforms by 2025.
Service desk chatbots offer a wide range of benefits like 24/7 availability and personalized support to cost savings and process automation that can transform your customer support.
In this guide, we'll explore the key features, pricing models, and use cases of service desk chatbots, helping you make informed decisions as you navigate this rapidly evolving landscape.
Here’s a snapshot of what you can expect:
- What is a Service Desk Chatbot?
- What are the benefits of using a service desk chatbot?
- Use Cases for Service Desk Chatbots
- Alltius as your next Service desk chatbot
- Embracing the Future of customer support
What is a Service Desk Chatbot?
A service desk chatbot handles customer queries, provides resolution or helps the customer connect to relevant customer support agents.
It streamlines and automates customer support processes within an organization. Customer service chatbot leverages natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to understand user inquiries, provide relevant information, and guide users through various account based tasks, all while integrating seamlessly with existing customer support tools and knowledge bases.
What are the benefits of using a service desk chatbot?
A service desk chatbot helps in automating routing and frequent customer interactions, thus allowing customer support agents to focus on more complex tasks. Along with this, service desk chat bots also help in providing round the clock assistance in multiple languages.
24/7 Availability
One of the most significant advantages of implementing a service desk chatbot is its ability to provide round-the-clock support to users. Unlike human agents who work in shifts, chatbots can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without any breaks or downtime. This continuous availability ensures that users can get immediate assistance whenever they encounter an issue or have a question, regardless of the time or day.By providing instant support, service desk chatbots can significantly reduce response times and improve user satisfaction.
A leading digital lender used Alltius’ self-serve AI assistants to slash their wait times from 4 hours to just 5 minutes! With an easy to use interface, Alltius handled over 1M customers requests and over 3K emails each day smoothly.
With Alltius, users no longer have to wait for extended periods to receive help, which can be particularly frustrating when dealing with urgent or time-sensitive issues. With an AI chatbot, users can get quick answers to common questions, troubleshoot minor problems, or receive guidance on how to proceed with more complex issues.
Improved User Experience
The 24/7 availability of service desk chatbots not only enhances the overall user experience but also helps to manage user expectations. When users know that they can rely on the customer support chatbot for immediate assistance, they are more likely to feel supported and valued by the organization. This can lead to increased user satisfaction, loyalty, and trust in the customer support system.
Reduced Workload for Customer Support Staff
43% of customer support agents said their biggest challenge is having no time to complete all their assigned tasks in a day.
A service desk chatbot can significantly reduce the workload of customer support staff by automating repetitive tasks and handling common inquiries. Many customer support requests involve simple, frequently asked questions or routine issues that can be easily resolved without human intervention. Customer support chatbots can handle these routine queries, thus freeing up valuable time and resources for their support staff.
51% of agents without AI say they spend most of their time on mundane tasks and suggest AI can help reduce repetitive workloads. (Salesforce)
Service desk chatbots can contribute to improved staff morale and productivity. When staff members are not overwhelmed by repetitive tasks and can dedicate their time to more engaging and challenging work, they are more likely to feel satisfied and motivated in their roles.
AI customer support platforms like Alltius can be really beneficial in improving support agent productivity by at least 20%+. Alltius can handle routine queries, provide pre-drafted answers and also update knowledge bases frequently, helping customer support agents do more in less time.
This can lead to lower turnover rates, increased job satisfaction, and a more positive work environment overall.
Cost Savings
One of the most compelling benefits of implementing an IT service desk chatbot is the potential for significant cost savings. AI customer service chatbots can automate a large portion of customer support tasks, thus reducing their operational costs.
Service desk chatbots enable organizations to scale their customer support services without incurring the costs associated with increasing headcount. As the organization grows and the number of users increases, the chatbot can handle the additional volume without requiring a proportional increase in support staff.
This scalability allows organizations to maintain a lean and efficient customer support system while still meeting the needs of their users.
Long-Term Return on Investment
While implementing a service desk chatbot may require an initial investment, the long-term cost savings can be substantial. By reducing labor costs, increasing efficiency, and enabling scalability, chatbots can deliver a significant return on investment over time. Organizations can reallocate the saved resources to other areas of the business, such as innovation, growth, or customer experience improvements.
Alltius has helped customers like Angel One deflect 65% tickets, improve employee productivity by 30% while increasing cross selling by 3 times! With these strides, Alltius can become ROI positive within 2-3 months of implementation.
Improved Data Collection and Analysis
Service desk chatbots can serve as valuable tools for data collection and analysis, helping organizations gain insights into user behavior, common issues, and support trends. As chatbots interact with users, they can automatically capture and store data on the types of questions asked, the frequency of certain issues, and the effectiveness of provided solutions.
This data can be used to identify patterns, highlight areas for improvement, and inform decision-making processes. For example, if the AI chatbot data reveals a high volume of inquiries related to a new feature, the product teams can investigate the root cause of the issue and take proactive measures to address it, such as providing additional user training or updating the application.
Enhanced AI Self-Service
Service desk chatbots can empower users to resolve issues independently through enhanced AI self-service capabilities. Service desk assistants can be deployed on help pages which can be used by users 24/7. By providing users with access to a knowledge base of frequently asked questions, troubleshooting guides, and step-by-step instructions, AI customer support chatbots can enable users to find solutions to their problems without requiring direct assistance from support staff.
AI self-service approach not only reduces the burden on customer support teams but also promotes a sense of autonomy and self-reliance among users. When users feel empowered to solve their own issues, they are more likely to develop a positive attitude towards the platform.
Use Cases for Service Desk Chatbots
Service desk chatbots offer a wide range of applications within an organization's customer support ecosystem. Let’s take a look at them one by one.
AI-Powered Self-Service
One of the primary use cases for service desk chatbots is enabling AI-powered self-service.
81% of customers prefer using a self-service option before contacting a customer service representative.
By providing customers with a self-serve option, we can help customers resolve their queries without contacting customer support. This not only empowers users to solve problems independently but also reduces the volume of tickets submitted to the customer support team.
Escalating Complex Issues to Human Agents
While service desk chatbots are capable of handling a wide range of inquiries, there may be instances where the complexity of an issue exceeds the bot's capabilities. In such cases, the customer service chatbot can seamlessly escalate the conversation to a human agent, ensuring that the user receives the necessary assistance.
During the escalation process, the chatbot transfers the conversation history and context to the human agent, allowing them to quickly understand the problem and pick up where the bot left off. This smooth transition minimizes the need for users to repeat information and ensures a more efficient resolution process.
24/7 Customer Support
Like we discussed earlier, service desk chatbots provide round-the-clock support unlike human agents who are limited by working hours and shifts, customer service chatbots can operate 24/7, ensuring that users can access assistance at any time, regardless of their location or time zone.
51% of customers expect 24/7 customer support availability from businesses.
This continuous availability is particularly beneficial for organizations with a global presence or remote workforce, as it ensures that all employees have equal access to customer support services. By providing instant assistance and reducing downtime, service desk chatbots contribute to increased productivity and user satisfaction.
Multi-Lingual Support
Providing support in multiple languages has become increasingly important. Service desk chatbots can be trained to understand and respond in various languages, enabling organizations to cater to the needs of their multilingual user base.
By offering support in users' preferred languages, chatbots can break down language barriers and ensure that all employees have access to the same level of assistance, regardless of their native tongue. This inclusive approach not only improves user experience but also fosters a sense of belonging and equity within the organization.
58% of non-native English speakers are willing to wait longer to access customer support in their local language, and 62% are more likely to put up with product issues if they can access support in their native tongue. This highlights the importance of providing multilingual support to cater to the diverse needs of a global workforce.
Ticket Deflection
Deflecting tickets is one of the major use cases for IT help desk chatbots. Customer support agents can’t spend all of their time answering routine questions, because that leaves little room for building relationships and actually focusing on complex queries.
Customer service chatbots handle complex tasks and can help customer support agents build deeper relationships with customers.
Case in Point: AngelOne uses self-serve AI assistant for 65% ticket deflection
AngelOne is a listed stock and mutual funds brokerage house in India with 18 million users & average daily turnover of almost $400 billion.
With over 1,000 support agents, the contact center now handles more than 500,000 tickets per month, which led to high wait times. Users had to wait 30 minutes to a few hours to receive assistance & this led to bad customer experiences. Angelone used Alltius' self-serve AI assistants to deflect at least 20% of tickets. Additionally, they wanted to decrease the median customer query resolution time from 2-4 hours to just a few minutes.
Alltius' AI assistant was trained on over 20,000+ multilingual web pages, user account APIs, canned responses, Google Drive documents & other documents. In just a few months, Alltius has already powered over 1 million conversations and recorded over 100,000 sessions per week. It especially helped the company manage peak capacity up to 10 times the median hourly conversation volume during critical events such as market opening hours, IPOs, and buybacks. Thus, reducing adverse customer experience.
Customer Experience Impact: Median wait time for resolving issues is now slashed to a few seconds from a few hours earlier with AI self-serve options. This led to an increase in NPS scores.
Alltius - Customer Service Desk Chatbot for Enterprises
Chat-GPT wasn't made to improve customer experiences. Alltius is.
Alltius is a platform created as a result of decades of research at Carnegie Mellon and Wharton focused on one goal: Improve customer experience across all touchpoints.
Alltius is an all-in-one AI customer service platform for enterprises looking to deflect incoming tickets with self-serve AI options for customers & reduce customer wait times with AI assistants for agents.
Alltius' AI assistant is trained on your company documents like FAQs, product documentation, tutorial videos, previous customer tickets, customer information and more. It has the capabilities to perform multiple tasks like answering questions, debugging, and drafting responses. Performing actions like calculating account balance or taking action on behalf of customers, raising tickets, adding information into CRM or more. It is completely customizable as per your needs.
Think of it as an additional support employee who can be trained to do anything you'd want.
Conversational AI assistant for your customers
Self-Serve AI is a customer-facing AI assistant that can be deployed on a website, in the product, Slack, zendesk, or any other customer-facing channel. It can understand customer intent, instantly, acknowledge customer queries, identify customer needs and solve customer queries within seconds. This reduces customer wait times, increases ticket deflection and improves customer satisfaction.
Conversational AI assistant for your support agents
Support Assist AI is a support agent's AI assistant that curates information from multiple sources so the agent spends more time building relationships with customers. Support AI helps your customer support agent:
- Understand customer intent - like happy, angry, dissatisfied
- Solve customer query - with drafted responses
- Identify up-selling opportunities - with tailored pitches and best products to cross-sell
- Update customer information in CRMs - with easy integrations
With features like customizable CUIs, version control, and seamless ecosystem integration, Alltius enables businesses to fine-tune AI applications for maximum efficiency and innovation.
It has been used by major brands to revamp their customer service & reduce their customer support costs by $50k per month. In case you're interested in implementing conversational AI for customer support, experience Alltius in one of the 4 ways:
Embracing the Future of customer support
Service desk chatbots are revolutionizing the way organizations handle customer support, offering 24/7 availability, personalized assistance, and streamlined processes. By integrating AI customer service chatbots into your customer service management framework, you can enhance user experiences, reduce costs, and empower your team to focus on high-impact projects.
Implementing a service desk chatbot is not just about keeping up with the latest technology trends; it's about investing in the future of your organization and the satisfaction of your users. As you evaluate your current customer support strategy, consider how a chatbot can help you achieve your goals and drive long-term success.
Are you ready to take the next step in modernizing your customer support? Start by assessing your organization's specific needs and exploring the various service desk chatbot solutions available in the market. With the right approach and a commitment to innovation, you can unlock the full potential of AI-powered support and position your organization for success in the digital age.
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