Live Chat Vs Chatbot: Which Is Right For Your Business?

A site speed and instant response are two key contributors to a great customer experience. Technological innovations such as live chat and chatbots have evolved to empower businesses to offer better customer services.

According to the reports of Grand View Research, the global chatbot marketis expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025 at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 24.3%. And 45% of people prefer chatbots for customer service inquiries.

On the other hand, according to Forrester, more than a 40% boost in overall website conversion rates can be achieved using live chat.

So, both live chat and chatbots have myriad benefits. However, the choice between live chat vs chatbot is an ongoing debate.

Let’s dive into their basics before we discuss chatbot vs live chat.

What is live chat?

The interaction with customers will be carried out with humans i.e. chat agents. Both customers and live agents will have a real-time chat or conversation.

Pros of live chat:

Live chat offers various advantages while serving customers. The live chat benefits include:

• Customers can have a live conversation with humans i.e. chat agents or customer service representatives.

• Live chat provides a personal touch with customers.

• Live chat can resolve complex customer problems.

• Live chat lets chat agents explore customer issues in-depth and help them gain a better understanding.

• With the help of live chat, chat agents can handle 5-6 chats at a time. Thus, it allows multitasking.

What is a chatbot?

Chatbots are considered the next generation of intelligent customer service. In chatbots, the interaction with customers will be carried out with a machine.

Pros of chatbots:

Chatbots have different levels of intelligence. So, they offer several advantages over live chat.

• Chatbots can be available 24*7*365

• Chatbots can multitask. Unlike live chat, they can handle an unlimited number of chats.

• Compared to live chat agents, a chatbot can respond to customers’ queries quickly.

• It saves time and support/operational costs.

Now, let’s have a glance at live chat vs chatbot and where they excel.

Where chatbot knocks out live chat?

These are some scenarios where opting for a chatbot is a good idea and chatbot excels. Read on.

• All-around availability:

  If businesses want to offer customer service 24/7 throughout the year, they must be available round-the-clock. Integrating chatbots for your business will meet this and help you not to lose any customers. Otherwise, your time, money, and efforts will be spent on hiring a number of support or chat agents. Besides, to be available round-the-clock, chat agents or sales representatives must work rotational shifts.

• Bots never get tired!

  As a human, we all will get tired of replying to the same question for an unlimited time. In the case of chatbots, it is not like that. They won’t get tired of answering a question unlimited times. Human agents can’t beat chatbots in speed and accuracy.

• Chatbots help in cutting down support costs!

  By automating half of the work in business operations such as sales and support, chatbots cut down operational costs to the maximum.

• Multitasking:

  It is a key feature for opting a chatbot software for businesses. Especially, for large businesses, it will be a great help. In the live chat, chat agents might fail to handle several customers at a time. They might make some customers wait or hold. If so, your customers will get tired or frustrated being on hold and there will be chances they switch to your competitors.

• Real-time attention and faster response time

  Unlike live chat agents, these AI-powered chatbots do not delay to answer a chat, instead, they can respond very quickly to all chat requests within seconds.

• Availability of multi-lingual chatbots

  Hiring support agents for your global customers will be tough. And they are both time and money-consuming. With the advent of technology, AI-enabled bots are programmed to speak in several languages.

Where live chat knocks out a chatbot?

Though chatbot is more powerful than live chat, we can’t ignore the personal touch the live chat provides. These are some scenarios where live chat can’t be replaced.

• Live chat offers empathy and personal touch

  Customers, at times, require empathy or emotional response, also called personal touch for their frustrating queries. It can’t be given by bots. This is where live chat excels and its place can’t be replaced.

• Live chat understands spelling and other errors on chat

  As the live chat can be performed through humans, they can understand typo errors made by customers or website visitors. On the other hand, chatbots can only understand the pre-defined keywords and if customers fail to type the exact keyword, bots fail to provide answers to the customer’s queries. Thus chatbots fail to understand what customers are asking or looking for.

• Live chat handles all complex queries

  Chatbots can answer only predefined questions and FAQs. They lack the ability to think through and adapt to complex questions where clients may require quick responses. Even if we apply machine language (ML) and NLP (Natural Language Processing), chatbots can’t answer complex questions. This is one of the disadvantages of chatbots.

  However, the human agents through live chat can provide related assistance or advice or real-time support. They can understand what their customers expect and what they require. With a machine, it can’t be possible.

• Chatbots won’t have problem-solving skills

  Unlike a machine chatbot, human agents are thought to be more efficient at addressing and resolving client issues quickly and accurately. So, humans are highly efficient at resolving queries and solving difficult problems.

Is web chat and live chat the same?

Along with chatbot vs live chat, it is one of the FAQs by many customers. But web chat and live chat are not the same. A web chatbot is extremely similar to live chat, with the exception that it automatically responds to questions for which it has answers.

Who wins the battle – live chat vs chatbot?

Hope, you got everything related to Chatbot vs live chat. As mentioned earlier, chatbots can help answer customers’ queries without bogging down. However, they lose personal touch with customers which is crucial to building trust in your brand. Nothing beats human-to-human interaction. So, live chat beats chatbots here.

Let’s have a glance at the table below to have a quick tour of Live chat vs chatbot.

So, choosing between live chat vs chatbot can be difficult. We can’t say either a live chat or chatbot is the best for businesses. Some businesses use live chat software while others chatbots. It all depends on the unique requirements and size of the company. However, the ultimate goal of both is the same- improving customer service. A successful business blends the two. So, take the help of experts, consider all your requirements and budget, and adopt the right software.

The choice between Live chat vs chatbot: Key takeaways

Many businesses put their efforts into team collaboration software or tools and marketing but fail to meet customer satisfaction. Boost your team’s productivity with instant messaging software and boost your CX with the combination of live chat software and chatbot software.

However, understanding the advantages and disadvantages of each of these options is critical to making a choice between live chat vs chatbot. For many businesses, combining a chatbot and live chat yield benefits. So, we suggest you implement the blend of both live chat software and chatbots to reap the best of both worlds. Leverage their benefits wherever they are required, improve customer service, and reap profits. According to Lisian Ajroni, CTO of Ajroni Web Agency, live chat provides a more personalized and human connection that a chatbot cannot provide. Thus, if possible, always choose live chat over chatbot." 

Conclusion:

To sum up, outstanding customer service is crucial for all businesses to survive and thrive. Live chat and chatbots are two great avenues to earn customers and their satisfaction and improve customer services. Debating the live chat vs chatbot is not the aim of this article but to help you understand where live chat and chatbot are useful at their best and where not.

If you are yet to adopt these customer support tools, we are here to help you. We offer a reliable, fast, and efficient AI-powered super live chat solution through Click2magic. Being the best live chat software, it is tailored to meet unique business needs -sales, support, and marketplace. With enterprise-grade features, our customer support software lets you acquire more customers, increasing conversion rates, and sales.