Chatbots vs. Live Chats

Whether you have been in business for years or your website is still new, you have probably seen a big change in the way customers are asking for help. No one wants to fill out a laborious Contact Us form and wait two days for a response these days. They sure as hell don’t want to drill down through 3 pages of nested menus for a fast delivery response. The moment visitors land on your site they need help.

That’s why you see those little chat bubbles on nearly all modern web pages. But as soon as you start to configure chat for your own brand, you’re presented with the option of a bot vs. live chat with real people.

The short answer is that human care and technology are doing very different things. A chatbot is a computer program that is built to quickly answer simple questions. Live chat lets your visitor talk to a real person on the other side of a screen.

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It is easy to think that one is naturally better than the other, but this is not the case. The best choice will depend on your customers, their questions and how involved you need to be in your business. In fact most growing businesses find a mix of the two works best.

At VA Staff we often help business owners make these types of daily decisions. A great way to grow while maintaining the individual touch is to find a balance between fast automation and real human connection. Here’s how both work so you can choose the best option for your website.

1. Chatbot: What is that?

A chatbot is basically a software that talks to your website’s users through text messaging. Rather than relying on a teammate to check in and type a response, the bot responds immediately with pre-written scripts or basic AI rules.

Some chatbots are really stupid. They offer users a series of clickable buttons or simple menus to navigate through. Other people can read a typed question and use simple language processing to pull the correct answer out of a database.

Chatbots are generally used for simple tasks such as:

• Typical questions include delivery charges, returns and office hours.
• “Contact information collection” is the process of obtaining a visitor’s name, phone number, and email address.
• Sorting Leads: Asking a few short questions to determine what a prospect is looking for.
• Basic Troubleshooting: Teach consumers how to troubleshoot common issues with their accounts and websites.
• Check the tracking numbers or current status of your order to verify updates.
• Calendar – appointment booking Your clients can choose a time to meet, no back and forth emails.

Providing shortcut links to some items or help pages can guide customers to where they are headed.

2. Live chat: what is it?

Simply put, live chat is a text conversation in real time between a user on your site and a member of your team. A message can be typed in a chat window and sent to an agent on a laptop or phone. Then the agent establishes contact and provides a straight answer.

It’s the Goldilocks zone of phone and email. Email is often too slow when a buyer is ready to buy and many customers do not want to get on the phone whenever possible. Live chat allows everyone to multi-task and offers the quick, natural interaction of a phone call.

When is live chat most effective:

• The question is tough situations with lots of moving parts or unique specifics.
• Closing the deal means helping a reluctant customer resolve their concerns before they check out.
• When someone is upset the best way to handle complaints is with real empathy and plain old common sense.
• It can be a pain in the ass to give someone step-by-step instructions for a complicated setup, you know, technical support.
• People want recommendations: help them make the best decision for their particular needs.
• You need to apply human judgment to decide whether to waive a fee, give a discount, or make an exception.

3. Live Chat vs. Bots

What’s the Difference? Here’s a brief summary of their biggest problems on a daily basis:

• Live chat is a real person having a real conversation.
• Chatbots are scripted using pre-written rules or AI.
• Availability: Live chat is available only during working hours of your team, chatbots are available 24/7.
• Response Time: Your support staff is already busy so chatbots can respond instantly.
• Tough Questions: Live agents can handle complex issues when they arise, while chatbots tend to flounder when a question strays from the script.
• Humans are able to empathise, can change their tone of voice, while chatbots are constrained by a small amount of consumer data.
• Staffing needs: Chatbots can be set up and run themselves, but live chat needs real people to monitor the queue.
• Scalability Chatbots can serve hundreds of users simultaneously. Live chat agents can only take on a certain number of chats at one time.
• Overall vibe: Live chat creates real relationships. Chatbots are transactional, quick.
• Best for: Chatbots are great for short repetitive questions. Live chat is most helpful to customers when they really need help or guidance.

4. Time to respond

For those who use the internet, speed is everything. When people visit your site with a quick question and can’t find the answer in a minute or two, they’ll usually click away to find it somewhere else.

This is a place where chatbots excel. They are automatically programd to respond to messages immediately upon receipt. The bot will respond to you immediately even at 2 o’clock p.m. at three o’clock Tuesday morning. Sunday. That quick answer keeps people on your page and lets them know they’re in the right place.

Of course, live chat takes a bit longer because you have to read the message and type the answer. The best teams can still take 30-60 seconds to get into a conversation, especially when it’s busy and there’s a backlog of messages building up.

You need to respond quickly to catch leads while they are hot. But you also need to think about your industry. “When you are selling basic items, they expect quick answers. If you are selling upscale professional services, customers are usually willing to wait a minute to talk to a real expert.

5. Availability

Another important aspect is to keep the lights always on.

Chatbots don’t take holidays, lunch breaks or sleep. They simply run silently in the background, so your website is still useful long after your office has closed for the evening. People in different time zones can still leave their information, ask simple questions and get links without waiting for the morning business hours.

However, your team’s schedule is closely linked to live chat. To offer true 24/7 live chat, you would need to hire people in different time zones, set up weekend rotations, and staff midnight shifts, which can all get very expensive very quickly for a developing company. Because of this, most live chat features go offline when the staff punches out for the nite.

6. Ability to Answer Tough Questions

Chatbots are fast but struggle in strange or erratic conversations.

Bots are easy to use and work well. If you have a simple question about shipping times, the bot will answer immediately. But human speech is awkward. There is slang, long winding paragraphs are typed, three questions are combined into one sentence, or mistakes are made. Chatbots often get stuck in annoying loops, giving the same useless answer over and over, and they are bad at answering questions they weren’t meant to answer.

Live chat agents offer real common sense and good listening. A real person can read between the lines, sense mild annoyance, ask insightful follow up questions and determine the true needs of the client.

If your work involves sensitive customer issues, complicated installations or special estimates, you want a real person there. You can still use a bot to greet them and get the basic information, but keep a human around to handle more complex situations.

7. Customization

But more important than just putting their first name into an automated template, is changing your tone and showing that you actually care about someone’s circumstance.

Live chat agents naturally have the skill to pick up on how a customer is feeling, whether it’s professional and buttoned up for business clients or relaxed and friendly for casual shoppers. They can sympathize with someone having a bad day, suggest ideas, and help people feel seen.

If your chatbots are linked to your account database, they can provide some basic personalization. They might say, “Sarah, welcome back!” or pull up recent order numbers, but at the end of the day, it’s still automated logic. A chatbot has no empathy or ability to change tone when a consumer is under duress.

8. Cost components

When considering expenses, look at the long-term cost of operating the software as well as the initial cost of the software.

In general, to build a chatbot you should:

• Software Subscription platform fee (monthly or annual).
• Initial set-up: The set-up of chat paths and writing answers is time-consuming and costly.
• Integrations: Add a bot to your Store, Calendar or CRM.
• Maintenance: Checking chat logs for broken paths, fixing old answers if necessary. The biggest cost of live chat is people.
• Compensation & Benefits – Support team members are paid on a full-time, part-time or contract basis.
• Training time: Familiarizing new hires with your tools, products, and brand voice.
• Management: Supervision of work schedules and quality control of chat.
• Agent software seats: Live chat platforms with fees.

Chatbots take time and money to set up but they don’t really cost more to handle more messages. As your business grows, live chat becomes more expensive and you will need more staff to keep up with the volume of messages that are flooding in.

9. Scalability

Scalability is your website’s capacity to handle an unexpected increase in messages or traffic.

The nice thing about chatbots is that they are easy to scale . So let ‘s say you have a big sale and 10,000 people hit a page , or 10,000 people visit your website . The bot will handle them all at the same time without slowing down . It will service the thousandth visitor just as quickly as the first .

Scaling live chat means hiring more people, and that takes time, money and effort. Most agents can manage 2-4 chats simultaneously without errors or slowing down. Once messages start to stack up beyond that, wait times increase, customers get angry and team members get burned out.

10. Customer Experience Management (CEM)

Opinions of site chat vary from person to person and their preferences tend to depend on what they are trying to achieve.

When someone needs to verify your return window, they don’t want to wait for an agent to say hello and begin typing. They want a quick answer so they can get on with their day. People often prefer a bot.

Conversely, nothing makes a client close a tab faster than being stuck with an unhelpful bot when they have a real issue. If the bot can’t fix the issue, and there’s no way to contact a human, people get very angry very quickly.

The best thing to do is to give people options, but there always needs to be a simple, straightforward way for users to get to a real person, if the bot runs into a problem. Also, consumers shouldn’t be forced to wade through endless automated menus just to get basic assistance.

11. Lead Capture

Chatbots and live chat both do it differently but they’re both really good at converting website visitors into potential leads.

Chatbots can also act as automated gatekeepers, entering, greeting users and asking a few questions to get important information like:

• Contact information (phone number, email address, name)
• What good or service they’re looking for
• Their budget in general
• When they want to leave?

Live agents have conversations that are real and helpful to get leads. They can identify when a customer is prepared to buy, zero in on particular pain points, and push hesitant leads to book a call or buy.

Chatbots talk to everyone automatically, so they are more likely to get a bigger share of the leads by default. Live chat may generate less leads overall, but the quality of these leads is better as there is already rapport built with a real human.

12. Customer Services

You will be able to see what works best for you, look at those types of support queries you get on a daily basis.

Chatbots are perfect for high volume repetitive tasks such as:

• Answering basic questions about features, costs and regulations.
• Order status and shipping information.
• Helping people with a simple, reliable solution.
• communicating basic information, like addresses or company hours. collecting data for bookings.

Live chat is much better for high touch situations like this:

• Calming down angry clients, issuing refunds or allowances.
• Solving unique and hard technical problems.
• Pick one particular account or billing problem.
• Helping clients with bulk or out of the ordinary purchases.
• Handling sensitive situations with real empathy and plain common sense.

13. Limitations of Chatbots

Chatbots are great but they have also limitations that you should consider.

First of all, it will be very annoying for visitors if they cannot easily transfer the chat to a human, because bots do not understand human language at all and get easily confused by typos, slang, long questions, etc.

Plus, chatbots have to be maintained all the time; you can’t just install them and leave them alone. You have to watch chat logs, update outdated info, and fix broken paths. And finally, you shouldn’t be trusting a bot to do anything sensitive or high stakes without a human supervisor.

14. Downsides to live chat

Live chat provides a sense of intimacy, but there are major operational challenges.

The biggest problem is the hiring, training and management of personnel to keep the chat up and running. As one person can only handle a few messages at the time, visitors will have to wait longer during busy hours.

A longtime team member can provide great service, but a new hire may take longer or make mistakes. Consistency takes ongoing coaching, detailed documentation and good management.

15. When Is the Right Time for a Company to Use a Chatbot?

If it’s normally a chatbot that’s best

• Your team spends half the day typing the same answers on shipping, hours, or basic features because you get asked the same questions over and over.
• You need help when you’re not on business hours, because you have traffic on the weekends and at nite, but you don’t want to pay for support people to work the nite shift.
• You want to interact with the thousands of people who visit your website every day without having a large support staff.
• You can easily qualify leads by asking three or four simple questions to see if a lead is a good fit.
• You are very direct. Normally, consumers do not want to spend a long time talking just to buy something.

16. When does a company start using live chat?

When should you use live chat?

• You sell expensive things or business-to-business services that need to be justified.
• People buy from you and not your competitors because you provide personalized, hands-on service. Your brand is great service.
• Trust is a must when closing a deal. Your prospects have to feel comfortable with a real specialist before they make a decision.
• Questions are unpredictable, because nearly all of them are different and require specialized problem solving.
• The stakes are high: a bungled automated response could lose you a big client or contract.

17. Why both can be used by firms

In fact you don’t even have to choose; often the best way to grow your business is with a hybrid model that combines actual human support with automation.

In the hybrid model, the chatbot does the front desk work and human workers come in as needed. The normal workflow is:

• Welcome: the chatbot greets the visitor when he arrives at the page.
• fast Help: bot can answer simple FAQs or give fast links.
• Basic info – If the visitor needs more help, the bot will ask for some basic info to get their contact info and context.
• Handoff: A human picks up the conversation and has access to all the bot notes.
• Human Care: The agent arrived without issue and resolved the problem.
• All your conversations are recorded to your CRM so your team has a clear record for the future.

So you get the best of both worlds – real people to help you out when it gets tough, and fast solutions to simple problems.

18. How is the model integrated with a virtual assistant?

A hybrid model sounds great but then who’s going to handle the live chat side without pulling you or your core team away from your main job?

This is the reason why it can be so much easier to have a trained Virtual Assistant (VA) as a dedicated human backup for your chatbot setup.

After the bot has sifted through the repetitive queries, your VA comes in to handle the conversations that need human care, common sense and personalized attention. A support VA can assist with:

• Queue monitoring: Log in during business hours to keep wait times low and take over conversations quickly.
• Hot leads are tough to deal with. You get tough questions, you give information, you get people to book calls.
• Update your CRM: + Note conversations, tag leads and update customer files.
• Check back with users who dropped out of the conversation before they received a complete answer to their questions.
• Escalate major problems: Escalate complex account or technical issues to your internal experts if necessary.
• Better bot: Look at the bot’s unanswered questions to see if you can add any new responses to your scripts.

Pair up a simple chatbot with a VA Staff virtual assistant for a responsive, seamless support system that keeps site visitors happy and doesn’t eat up your entire working day.

19. Choosing the Right Option for Your Company

Here are a few quick questions to help you decide on the best mix for your website:

• Message Volume How many messages do you send in a week’s time?
• Types of questions: How many are simple FAQs vs. complex problems?
• Expected Speed What speed of response do you expect from people in your industry?
• Support Hours: Need support in the evening and/or outside of normal business hours?
• Team Capacity: Is anyone on your team available to do live chat monitoring, or are they already busy?
• Budget: What is cheaper for you right now, continuing staffing hours or the cost of a software platform?
• Sales style: Do your customers buy from your website, or do they need to talk it through first?

20. Things to Consider Before Starting Chat Support

Before you buy software or hire help, assemble your team and ask some useful questions:

• What Are the 10 Most Asked Questions From Our Clients Every Week?
• What is the average number of chat messages in a day?
• And how many of those messages will need a human touch?
• Are our prospects really in need of help after hours?
• What is the chatbot supposed to do by itself?
• When to bring in a human to take the chat?
• Who is going to be on the lookout for follow-ups and missed messages?
• How is the conversation data stored in our CRM database?
• How do we engage new chat-based sales leads?
• How will we know if this set-up really works for us?

21. Tracking of metrics

Track a few key performance indicators on both sides to make sure your chat solution is really doing your business any good.

Chatbot Instructions:

• Total Chats Handled: This is the number of messages the bot can handle by itself.
• Completion Rate: The percent of queries the bot completes.
• The “handoff rate” is the frequency with which the bot must forward a conversation to a human.
• Lead Capture Rate: The percentage of conversations that successfully capture valid contact information.
• Drop-off Rate: How often users leave a chat without receiving a response.
• Customer Rating: Simple post-chat comments from the bot

See: Live chat

• First Reply Time: The duration of time taken by an agent to send a first message in response.
• Resolution Time – The amount of time it takes to fully resolve an issue.
• Chats per agent: The total number of chats your agents can handle effectively.
• The agent’s helpfulness is measured using feedback from clients.
• Lead conversions are the number of live chats that turn into actual sales or scheduled calls.

22. Errors to avoid

When you first get going watch out for these common errors:

• Automate everything . Making people use a bot for complicated problems that are clearly a human problem .
• When human help is hidden, users find it hard to locate a button that leads to a real person.
• If you go live with a bot and don’t do test chats to see what weird responses it might give, there is no testing done before launch.
• Information not updated: Your bot scripts might be linking to old prices, policies, etc.
• Volume focus only: Focusing on the number of conversations you automate, not on whether clients are getting quality assistance.
• Do not look at chat transcripts or real logs to see where your visitors are stumbling or confused.
• Leaving chat: not bringing customer data from your chat tool into your CRM.

How To Strike The Right Balance For Your Company

At the end of the day, there’s a lot to be said for both chatbots and live chat. Chatbots offer instant speed, 24/7 availability and easy scalability for simple tasks, while live chat offers empathy, common sense and the ability to build real connections when it really matters.

Most growing brands are looking for the sweet spot where real humans come in when a consumer needs real attention, and technology takes care of the quick, repetitive tasks.

Combine a simple chatbot with a specialized virtual assistant from VA Staff, and you’ll have a system that keeps your website visitors happy, increases your leads, and gives you the essential time to focus on growing your business.

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