When companies consider using voice and chatbots, this question is usually on the table:

Do our customers even want to use a virtual assistant? 

According to the report "The New Rules of Customer Engagement" the answer to the question is a clear "yes". 69% of customers are willing to interact with a chatbot. However, they only want this for simple problems. Obviously, the answer is not quite so simple after all.

In this blog post, we therefore want to take a closer look at when people are willing to interact with virtual assistants and what they want to use chatbots for.

In which situations are people willing to talk to virtual assistants?

If you look at the results of various chatbot studies, one thing in particular stands out: Users want an answer quickly. 

For example, 69% of respondents to the Chatbot Survey 2017 said they would rather contact a bot than a human agent if it meant they would get their answer immediately. 

In the 2021 Chatbot Study, 75% of respondents answered the question "What did you like most about interacting with a chatbot?" that they liked the speed with which they got their answer.

Furthermore, the majority of people want to solve their problem themselves. In the CX Trends 2022 report, 76% of people said they would prefer to use a self-service solution to tackle their problem themselves before contacting customer support. Just 24% of people stated that they would contact customer service immediately.

Virtual assistants are therefore particularly suitable for uncomplicated queries where users want a quick answer or want to solve something independently.

In these studies, the willingness of customers to interact with a chatbot was examined. However, the results can be easily transferred to chatbots for internal communication. Here, too, employees want to get their problems solved quickly and do not always need to interact directly with the IT department or HR.

When do customers prefer to talk to human employees?

For more complex issues, however, people prefer contact with human employees. The same applies if they are upset, angry or in any other emotional state that requires empathy and sensitivity.

In such cases, it is essential that the chatbot is able to easily transfer users to a human employee. This is done via a human handover. If the user's choice of words suggests that a takeover by a human employee makes sense, the conversation is transferred from the chatbot to a human.

Sentiment analysis is used for this purpose. Sentiment analysis classifies certain words as positive or negative. The chatbot analyzes the words used by the users. As soon as a certain percentage of negatively categorized words is exceeded, the conversation can be taken over by human employees.

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However, it is also possible for users to trigger the human handover themselves by asking the virtual assistant to be forwarded to an employee.

Virtual assistants can therefore be a great support for customers and employees alike. They just need to be used in the right situations. Then they will also be gladly used.