Thirty years ago, computers changed the way we worked and processed data. Companies started the process of moving from manual methods to more digital ones, laying the foundation for paperless working to come in the future. Offices were suddenly filled with screens and connected to a mainframe in the basement, where two or three IT guys, whose jobs at the time were unknown, would hibernate for five days a week, only surfacing for food and home time. Suddenly, data entry clerks and typists were in demand and every company had an entire team just for each of these roles.

Fast forward to the mid-2000’s, cloud storage and software as a service, or SaaS, became so affordable that locally hosting your own data no longer made sense and software licensing became antiquated. So, companies jumped into the cloud and made “going paperless” a mission of itself.

In the 2010s, we developed social media, websites, content marketing, and an always-online lifestyle. No matter what time of the day you log into your social media, someone is still awake and posting online. The world has gone from an 8 to 5 world, to a 24 hour mad rush. Employers expect emails to be responded immediately, regardless of the day or time. Family and friends stare at your WhatsApp window to see if you’re online to read the very (un)important message they have sent, even when you’ve turned off those annoying blue ticks. Existence today has an innate communication immediacy pressure.

But what does this have to do with your client offering?

“If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.” ? Terry Pratchett

In order to know where you are going, you need to remember where you came from. To appreciate the leaps and bounds of technology, you need to remember where we were 30 years ago, when ‘paperless’ was not a buzz word.

Artificial intelligence is the ruler of the 2020s. Most companies who already use live chat on their website are familiar with the headache of having someone online around the clock, or missing a message sent, and possibly a sale, after midnight as no one was online to engage this customer. How many of these customers are falling through the cracks? Do you know if your clients are losing potential revenue due to being offline outside normal working hours? What does your clients’ website activity look like when they are offline? Will your client have a sharper competitive edge by being ‘online’ 24/7?

An artificial intelligence, or AI, chatbot can help in this area. Click4Assistance’s AI chatbot, Artie, is a 24 hour virtual assistant who can offer basic support when your client’s team is asleep. This will massively improve your client’s customer service, while potentially increasing their conversions and in turn, their revenue, strengthening your relationship with them. This will also give them the benefit of being ‘always online,' supporting the lifestyle of many of today’s customers who shop when the traditional business world is normally shut.

Having an AI chatbot on your client’s website means that you improve their view in a customer’s eyes. Artie does not sleep and can chat with an unlimited number of website visitors at a time, instantly engaging every customer online, so no more customers waiting in a queue. An AI chatbot can easily collect basic information from a customer and pass that along to a human agent, speeding the process up for both the customer and the agent. And while their human agents are helping customers with more complex issues, the AI chatbot can assist with basic enquiries that don’t require human intervention, like opening hours, locations, and website navigation. The benefit of this is increased productivity, as your client’s customer service agents will not be bogged down by questions that the AI chatbot can answer, and they will not feel pressured to engage every website visitor as Artie has already done that, thus increasing their quality of work.

If you’re interested in deploying Click4Assistance, the UK’s premier GDPR compliant live chat software solution and best live chat provider, to make your clients more efficient and productive for 2020, give us a call on 08451235871 or send an email theteam@click4assistance.co.uk and one of our team experts will be with you right away.