Chatbots vs Sales Reps: Which is More Effective?

Automation and artificial intelligence are on the rise and many companies are finding ways to implement these new technologies to use to their advantage. Service isn’t the only department benefiting from the use of chatbots, marketing and sales have also been using them to gain an edge. With the use of artificial intelligence and chatbots, companies can more effectively lead customers through the sales funnel.

What is the impact for sales reps? As we’ll discuss in-depth in this article, chatbots and sales reps each excel in different situations and prove the benefits and effectiveness of working as a team.

What Can a Chatbot Do?

Chatbots are a mix of automation and artificial intelligence. They answer user queries through chat interfaces like text messaging, Facebook Messenger, and web chat on a business’ website. Chatbots are able to provide fast answers to common questions, and they’re proactive so customers can get help before they hit a snag. As bots continue to learn, they’re ability to preempt customer inquiries and offer more and more helpful solutions will only grow.  

Chatbots are sometimes confused with live chats, but there’s a difference. In a live chat, there’s usually an actual person on the other end, while talking with a chatbot is essentially chatting with a robot.

Advantages of Using Chatbots

Using chatbots will offer your company many unique benefits that can help improve your business. For example, chatbots automatically capture and qualify leads on your website. If a consumer is looking for more product details or wants to inquire about pricing, a bot can capture their information and route to the appropriate agent queue. People are more apt to engage with chatbots when they know they can find what they are looking for more easily. Consumers are looking for fast answers and chatbots help them get on their way. 

Chatbots are also designed to reduce administrative tasks so agents can spend more time answering the tough questions or giving extra special care to customers or prospects.

Disadvantages of Using Chatbots

One major disadvantage of using chatbots is that at first, they typically can only provide limited responses. Conversation rules determine what messages are sent in response and those can only be built over time. Although, it doesn’t take long before they are able to have much greater depth in contextual conversation.  

While chatbots are gaining in artificial intelligence, today, they still have to be maintained and improved upon. It is important to not let your chatbot go stale to keep up with changes in the business and continue to improve customer engagements and enhance the experience.

Benefits of Using Sales Reps

Sales reps are essential to the process of bringing users further into the sales funnel and providing them with answers to higher-level questions about your company and its products and services. Context and emotional intelligence are crucial to meaningful conversations that will turn into sales, and the ability to emote and understand emotions is unique to your sales reps.

Each sales rep also brings their own unique personality to the exchange, which helps them form a personal connection with users that today is more difficult to achieve from a chatbot.

Disadvantages of Using Sales Reps

A significant disadvantage of using only sales reps is there are lots of engagements with customers that can be easily automated to help them more quickly. Administrative tasks take away time that could be spent having one-on-one interactions with customers to generate more sales.

How Can Both Be Used Collaboratively?

When it comes to a chatbot vs. a conversational agent, each has unique strengths that address the other’s weaknesses. When they’re used together, chatbots and sales reps can create an exceptional user experience that maximizes performance and increases sales.

Using Quiq’s chatbot feature will allow your call center to improve efficiency and reach optimal service rep effectiveness. For more information about our chatbot, contact us today to see a demo.