Customer service is moving more and more into the future and that’s true for automotive service advisors as well. Chatbots are increasingly becoming a trend in customer service, including in the automotive industry. These chatbots are a powerful example of how artificial intelligence is changing the automotive sector.
With AI-powered chatbots becoming more sophisticated, it seems likely that they will play a bigger role in your career as a service advisor. Here are three things to know about the rise of chatbots in automotive customer service.
1. Chatbots Are Helping to Streamline Customer Service
As a service advisor, your responsibility is to communicate with customers, schedule appointments, estimate the necessary time for repairs and manage complaints and concerns from customers. With chatbots, many of these same concerns and complaints can be addressed—or at least attended to before being redirected to a human expert—through machine learning algorithms, language processing, and without the need for human intervention.
Chatbot services can also be available 24/7, and can redirect customers to certain resources almost instantaneously when real-life customer support employees are out of the office. It can be an especially attractive option for companies whose customer bases are expanding, who utilize technologies such as phone apps, and who offer customer support through their website and social media channels. Given how efficient and cost-effective this type of customer service can be for businesses, it’s a tool that can help them not only improve their capacity for addressing customer issues, but also for assisting multiple customers simultaneously.
2. Chatbots Are a Trend the Auto Industry is Also Latching Onto
The automotive world has been starting to embrace chatbots. This is particularly the case for when customers want to buy new vehicles. For example, a chatbot can help pre-book test drives, schedule appointments, give customers details about the car, remind them of any servicing needed after purchasing, browse the company’s inventory, and even check customers’ credit scores.
Chatbots can also be a boon to auto dealers because they can help reach potential buyers through whichever device they prefer. Chatbots can also increase traffic online, respond to social media messages, and generate new leads. In other words, they’re a mechanism through which the dealer-consumer relationship can be improved.
3. Chatbots Can Help the Service Advisor Without Replacing Them
While chatbots are a fascinating technological advancement for customer service, it’s not a method that can fully replace a service advisor or other human customer service representative. Although it can help streamline the process of effectively addressing customer concerns and save valuable time in the process, it cannot address more complex inquiries in ways that a real-world advisor can. When it comes to these kinds of concerns, or instances where the customer is visibly upset or frustrated, these scenarios are best left to a real-world professional who is likely to be more empathetic.
Chatbots are most certainly a fascinating development in artificial intelligence and modern technology, and they can be trained and developed in order to better recognize and answer questions. However, they aren’t a substitute for a human representative. Instead, they can help cover the more routine aspects of customer service while you focus on the tasks—such as customer relations, which you will learn about in your service advisor courses—that require a human touch.
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