Chatbots will become a primary customer service channel within 5 years — Gartner
Technological research and consulting firm Gartner, Inc. said that chatbots are set to become the primary customer service channel for roughly a quarter of organizations by 2027.
Gartner Customer Service & Support practice Sr Director Analyst Uma Challa said that chatbots and virtual customer assistants (VCAs) “have evolved over the past decade to become a critical technology component of a service organization’s strategy.”
He added, “When designed correctly, chatbots can improve customer experience and drive positive customer emotion at a lower cost than live interactions.”
A Gartner customer service and support (CSS) survey of 50 respondents conducted online in January and February 2022 revealed that 54% of respondents are using some form of a chatbot, VCA, or other conversational AI platform for customer-facing applications.
“CSS leaders have a positive future outlook for chatbots, but struggle to identify actionable metrics, minimizing their ability to drive chatbot evolution and expansion, and limiting their ROI,” said Challa.
That is why Gartner said that CSS leaders seeking to effectively deploy and measure chatbot performance as part of their service and support channel strategies should create an appropriate chatbot deployment strategy, reduce customer effort, adapt the metrics to their desired chatbot metric performance level, review chatbot metrics, and against the established baseline.
