“The State of Chatbots in Contact Centers” research shows how today’s contact centers are using chatbots to reduce call time, deflect calls, and improve customer satisfaction

More than 75% of contact centers rely on intelligent chat solutions to improve their team’s performance, according to a new study published today by Botco.ai, the leading HIPAA-compliant conversational marketing platform. Titled “The State of Chatbots in Contact Centers,” the report is based on a survey conducted in November 2022 of 1,000 contact center professionals, aiming to understand how and why they use chatbots in their interactions with consumers. Tasked with supporting customer interactions across a range of channels, contact centers have come to rely on intelligent chat solutions as one of the primary ways of increasing the speed with which they can respond to customer inquiries and the effectiveness of their interactions.

“Contact centers are increasingly turning to AI-powered conversational marketing solutions in order to complement their team of live agents,” said Rebecca Clyde, Co-founder and CEO of Botco.ai.

Other key findings from the report include:

• 76% of contact centers leverage chatbot technologies: Among the 19% who don’t use chatbots, 31% of those respondents said their contact centers plan to implement chatbots in the near future.
• Chatbot benefits to contact centers are abundant: The most common benefits contact centers receive from using chatbots include reduced customer call times (indicated by 46% of respondents%) and a smooth handoff to human representatives (46%), followed by the fact that chatbots can deflect calls and reduce the workload for humans (44%), cut costs related to third-party contact center outsourcing (29%), reduce burnout for contact center team members (28%), and help improve key metrics such as average time to answer and customer satisfaction (24%).
• Chatbots deflect a large number of calls: Over 85% of respondents stated that chatbots effectively deflect at least 10% of the calls to their contact centers, with nearly half of (47%) saying chatbots help their contact centers deflect between 20 and 30% of inbound calls. 16% of respondents say deflection rates — the rate at which chatbots fulfill demand that would otherwise have needed to be taken care of by a call center agent — exceed 30%.
• Chatbots both augment and replace human agents: When asked how chatbots affect the makeup of a contact center team, respondents provided mixed replies, with 44% stating that chatbots replace some contact center team members and 43% stating that chatbots augment a team’s capabilities but do not replace humans, while 9% report that chatbots have had no measurable effect on their team.
• Reasons for not leveraging chatbots involve price and time: The most common barrier to entry for using chatbots as stated by respondents is that chatbots are too expensive, cited by 40% of respondents that claim their business does not use chatbots, followed by the fact that integration and onboarding is too complex or time consuming (24%) and that they don’t believe automation and AI can benefit their business (22%).

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“Contact centers are increasingly turning to AI-powered conversational marketing solutions in order to complement their team of live agents,” said Rebecca Clyde, Co-founder and CEO of Botco.ai. “As our survey results show, contact centers are deriving a number of important benefits from working with chatbots, from easing the burden on live agents by deflecting many of the calls that agents would normally be required to process to delivering a better, faster, and more streamlined experience for customers. We expect to see even more contact centers incorporating chatbots in the coming years, with even greater results as the algorithms continue to get smarter and more informed.”

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