Good customer service is essential for any business’s success, and being available at all times to provide swift replies to customer queries is intrinsically linked with a good experience. 

Customers' willingness to wait more or less time for a reply from customer service depends on the channel through which they’re contacting a business. As a benchmark, let’s take these numbers from the Zendesk Blog:

• Email: less than 12 hours (good), less than 4 hours (better), less than 1 hour (best)
• Social media:  less than 5 hours (good), less than 2 hours (better), less than 1 hour (best)
• Live chat: less than 1 minute (good), less than 40 seconds (better), instantly (best)

If this seems like a challenge, it might be, especially when customers expect instant replies when contacting a business through a live chat channel. 

The good news is, that you can overcome this challenge by providing 24/7 customer service with a messaging chatbot. 

Benefits of Providing 24/7 Customer Service

Implementing a messaging chatbot for your customer service operations can help revolutionize the way you interact with your customers, since you’ll be one step closer to meeting the expectations mentioned above in terms of availability and reply speed. 

24/7 availability is key to providing a good customer experience, especially when it comes to global businesses that have customers in different time zones than the one the support team works from. Unlike human agents, chatbots are always available, ensuring that customers can get assistance at any time of the day or night. 

Messaging chatbots can handle a wide array of tasks, such as answering frequently asked questions (FAQs), guiding users through troubleshooting processes, and even assisting with complex tasks like booking appointments or processing orders. This not only improves customer satisfaction but also frees up human agents to focus on more complex issues.

In addition to improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, using a chatbot for 24/7 customer support can significantly reduce operational costs. By automating FAQs and other routine tasks, you can minimize the need for large customer service teams to cover night or weekend shifts. Thanks to their ability to handle multiple conversations simultaneously without compromising on response quality, messaging chatbots are a cost-effective solution for scaling customer support operations. 

So, providing 24/7 assistance through a messaging chatbot is not just a technological upgrade — it’s a strategic move that can improve your customer service and turn it into a powerful driver of business growth. 

Setting Up a Messaging Chatbot for 24/7 Customer Service

Before diving into the specifics of setting up a messaging chatbot for your customer service operations, let’s define what we’re talking about when we mention a messaging chatbot. 

A chatbot is a conversational software that enables businesses to communicate with their audiences instantly and in a personalized way—in this case, through a messaging platform like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. 

Chatbots can be:

• Rule-based: these chatbots work on a structured flow principle often portrayed as a decision tree. They follow predefined rules and scripts.
• AI-based: these chatbots use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to understand and respond to customer inquiries. 

Before choosing the right type of chatbot for your customer service operations, you should first identify the key customer service needs you’re facing and then choose the right chatbot platform to build and deploy your chatbot. 

For the sake of this article, and as a use case example, we’ll show you how to quickly build an AI FAQ chatbot using Landbot. 

AI-Based FAQ Chatbot

Landbot’s AI-powered FAQs use the power of ChatGPT to allow you to:

• Build a stand-alone AI FAQ chatbot, or
• Integrate the AI FAQ feature inside a multi-functional customer service chatbot.

Setting it up takes just a few minutes, as is as simple as copying and pasting your FAQ data into the bot. The AI will then use this information to respond to common customer questions using its own wording while remaining true to the facts.

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The input you give to your chatbot doesn’t have to be in the question-answer format. It will be just as effective if you provide it with a uniform text with all the relevant information. The only limitations to take into account are that the field only accepts plain text, and the character limit is 50.000. 

After you have input all the data, click “Feed the Bot” to allow the chatbot to analyze your input. You can test it instantly by using the test space on the right side. Finally, if you are happy with the results, click “Share & Publish” in the top right corner of the builder. And that’s it!

Best Practices for Effective 24/7 Customer Service with Chatbots

Well, that’s not entirely true. If you want to provide the best customer service possible through your chatbot, you need to follow a few best practices. 

• Monitor your chatbot’s performance: Even though Landbot’s builder offers you a testing space to ensure that your chatbot is answering the right FAQs, you should still assess its performance and make any needed adjustments. 
• Update the chatbot’s knowledge base: Are you releasing a new product, or did you make any changes to your current offering? An AI-based chatbot is smart, but it still needs your support when it comes to these updates. Make sure to regularly feed it with new information regarding your products, services, and policies. 
• Make handoff to a human agent easy: an AI-based chatbot is likely to be able to reply to a lot of customer questions, but in certain cases, it might need to hand the request over to a human agent. Make sure it’s easy for customers to request this to avoid them getting frustrated by your chatbot. 

Landbot Customers Winning at 24/7 Chatbot Customer Service

There’s no better way to understand a customer service chatbot’s capabilities than to show it in action. Below you’ll find two examples of Landbot customers who have successfully implemented a customer service messaging chatbot in a time of crisis, and were able to maintain customer satisfaction. 

Hotelbeds

Hotelbeds are global leaders in the travel tech space, whose cloud-based technology platforms receive 4 billion daily searches and offer access to a global network of travel products.

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hotelbeds’ focus shifted to its customers and partners, and, like most travel operators, it started announcing COVID-19 travel updates and policies on its website. However, they quickly saw a need to be able to provide customers and partners on a more immediate level, since the number of requests being sent to the support team was getting too much to handle. 

So, Hotelbeds partnered with Landbot to deploy chatbots for WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, allowing its customers to initiate a conversation on either platform. Even though requests were surging, the team used the chatbot to self-serve support requests and reduce the service backlog, while maintaining customer satisfaction. 

Kayros

Another of Landbot’s clients, Kayros, also automated support operations via WhatsApp to support customers during the pandemic. 

The Argentinian startup provides support for clinical analysis patients through digital channels such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Similarly to other business sectors, it was struggling with a flood of incoming requests when the pandemic began, which put a lot of stress on its Support Team. Kayros’s agents worked round the clock, responding to a lot of repetitive queries. 

With Landbot’s solution, Kayros implemented FAQ and self-serve WhatsApp chatbots that were able to support customers while reducing the team’s backlog. 

Conclusion

Messaging chatbots offer a practical solution for providing 24/7 customer service. They improve customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs, and give you a technological advantage over your competitors. 

And as chatbots continue to evolve, businesses can expect even more sophisticated and effective customer service solutions. So, make sure to keep embracing the future of customer service with messaging chatbots and transform your customer interactions today.