Customer expectations have changed. Many customers now expect help at the moment they need it, rather than only during the hours your business is open. A survey by HubSpot found that 90 percent of customers rate an immediate response as important when they have a support question, and 60 percent define immediate as 10 minutes or less.
For most businesses, providing 24/7 support with staff is too expensive. Paying even one support agent to work nights and weekends is a large yearly cost, and covering every shift takes several agents. An AI chatbot (a program on your website that answers visitors' questions in a chat window) can answer common questions at any hour for much less.
The After-Hours Problem
If your support is available only during business hours, you are missing many of the questions customers want to ask. Common patterns include the following.
- A large share of website visits happen outside standard business hours
- Weekend traffic often makes up a meaningful part of each week's visits
- International customers may be in time zones where your business hours are their middle of the night
- Mobile browsing peaks in the evening hours when people are at home
When an after-hours visitor has a question and cannot get an answer, you may lose that customer. The visitor might be ready to buy, need help with a problem, or want information that would help them decide.
What AI Chatbots Can Handle After Hours
After hours, a well-prepared AI chatbot can answer many of the questions a staff member would answer during the day, provided it has complete, accurate information about your business.
Product and Service Questions
Visitors browsing your site in the evening often have questions about what you offer, how it works, and whether it fits their needs. The chatbot gives detailed, accurate answers based on the product and service information you have written for it.
Pricing and Plan Information
Pricing questions are among the most common inquiries at any hour. A chatbot can explain your pricing tiers, compare plans, and help visitors understand which option is right for them.
This article is part of our guide to AI customer support.
Technical Support
For software products and technical services, after-hours technical questions are common. A chatbot that has your troubleshooting steps written into it can walk users through those steps, explain features, and resolve common problems.
Lead Capture
Lead capture means collecting a visitor's contact details so you can follow up, and it is often the most important after-hours task. Instead of leaving because no one is available, the visitor gets answers and leaves contact information for follow-up the next business day.
Appointment and Demo Scheduling
The chatbot can help visitors request appointments, demonstrations, or consultations, even at midnight. If the chatbot is connected to a scheduling tool, visitors can book time on your calendar without waiting for a reply.
Setting Up Always-On Support
The following steps describe how to set up 24/7 support with an AI chatbot.
Step 1: Review Your After-Hours Questions
If you have any existing support records, look at what types of questions come in outside business hours. Check your email timestamps, contact form submissions, and any voicemails. This tells you what content your chatbot needs to cover.
Step 2: Build a Complete Knowledge Base
The chatbot's ability to help after hours depends on the quality of its knowledge base, which is the written business information the chatbot answers from. Include your common questions and answers, product details, pricing, policies, and common troubleshooting steps. The more complete this information is, the more questions the chatbot can answer on its own.
Step 3: Set Up Staff Follow-Up
Where a lead goes after the chat
- A visitor opens the chatThe widget appears on every page where you pasted the snippet.
- The bot asks your questionsOne at a time, with buttons for the common answers.
- Alma saves the leadIn your Leads inbox, with tags from the visitor's answers.
- You get an emailAs soon as the visitor leaves an email address or phone number.
Where else the lead can go
- Every plan
- Email notification
- Growth and up
- Zapier, CampaignCNX+ and CoreCNX
- Agency and up
- Webhooks to your own systems
Set up your chatbot to handle conversations on its own at all hours. When the chatbot encounters a question it cannot answer, it should collect the customer's contact information and assure them that a team member will follow up. After hours, that follow-up usually happens first thing in the morning.
Step 4: Set Up Notifications
Set up notifications for important after-hours conversations. If a conversation shows an urgent problem or a likely large sale, you will want to know about it even outside business hours.
Step 5: Review Morning Reports
Start each business day by reviewing the overnight chatbot conversations. This tells you what customers needed, what the chatbot handled successfully, and what requires follow-up. Over time, this review process helps you improve the chatbot's knowledge base and reduce the items that need human follow-up.
The ROI of Always-On Support
There are several financial reasons to offer 24/7 support through a chatbot.
- Cost savings. A chatbot usually costs far less than paying staff to work overnight.
- Revenue capture. Leads collected after hours are sales that might otherwise be lost. If your chatbot collects even a few additional leads each week, it can easily cover its own cost.
- Customer retention. Customers who get help when they need it are more likely to stay with you. The hours your support is available affect how many customers you keep.
- Competitive advantage. Many of your competitors still offer support only during business hours. Offering help at any hour sets your business apart.
Getting Started
You can set up 24/7 customer support with Alma in less than an hour. Build your chatbot's conversation steps with drag-and-drop tools, match its look to your brand, and add the chat window (often called a widget) to your website. With the optional AI answering add-on, the chatbot can also answer from business information you paste into a field. Visitors can then get answers at any hour.
Related reading: AI-Powered Help Desk: Modernize Your Customer Support, Chatbot vs Live Chat: Which Is Right for Your Business?.
To see how Alma works for this kind of business, read about Alma for home services businesses.
