In life, there are certain “tells.” Little things that give away the game. We have all seen those movie scenes where the gambler scratches their nose when they get nervous. This is their ‘tell’, alerting the other gamblers and leading them to lose all their money.

In business, a tell can come in many forms. A company has restrictive return policies; what does this tell you? That they do not have a high degree of confidence in their product. What about a product or feature capability that is “bundled” into the deal at no cost? It seems like an added little bonus for you, the customer, but what’s the tell? Be skeptical - if the business does not value the solution, then why should you?

The best things in business are not free.

We get it - the thought of gaining a free customer service chatbot as part of a CRM platform deal can be enticing. After all, customers have more questions than ever, and a chatbot can help take some of the volume off your customer service agents. That seems like a win-win.

Free can cost you.

In light of COVID-19, businesses have increased their focus on agility, digital transformation, and automation like never before.

For many, the intense pressure to take decisive action drives this process, while examining the short and long-term implications of a “free” solution takes a back seat. But every leader should interrogate this decision.

The urgency to find a CX solution is understandable, but don’t let the pressure rush you into a subpar solution.

IT leaders need to ask what the real cost of free is. What are you getting in terms of features, functionality, and future development? What will the chatbot cost you two or three years down the line?

What comes next is a case study on the hidden cost of free.

Examining the hidden cost of “free”

Free CRM Platform chatbots rely on your IT team for deployment, and most IT teams are stretched for bandwidth, especially right now. Most free interfaces cannot easily build answer flows and don’t have the ability to leverage rich multimedia to format customer experiences. When it comes to complex flow creation (e.g. personalizations, integrations) it requires heavy customized development coding and technical resources to implement and maintain. Foreign language capabilities, as you would expect in a free solution, are extremely limited.

It can take 3-6 months to deploy the first phase “FAQ” bot and when looking to create deeper integrations for personalization. It can take an additional 3-6 months to roll out additional functionality. Even with full and prompt IT support, most free chatbots struggle to achieve inquiry containment beyond 30%.

And what about support, once you get the free solution deployed? This massive global CRM company with hundreds of thousands of customers and a business model built around seat licenses and multi-million dollar subscription deals devotes as much time to customer service for the free chatbot as you would expect…Read between the lines. You’re on your own.

What's on the line

Customer relationships are more valuable than ever. At the same time, maintaining good customer service has never been more challenging. According to Forrester Research, 63% of customers will leave a company after just one poor experience, and almost two-thirds will not wait more than 2 minutes for assistance.
Free is enticing, especially when teams are being asked to do more with less. What free cannot deliver, however, is the rewarding self-service experiences that customers have come to expect today.

According to PWC, “Every year, $62 billion is lost through poor customer service—a loss that continues to increase with every passing year.” Those upfront cost savings can look puny real fast when you factor in the cost of new customer acquisition.

With so much on the line for the business, and for your CX team, a custom, purpose-built conversational AI chatbot from Ada can check all the boxes that were dreamed about with the free solution AND deliver far greater cost savings along with dramatically higher CSAT scores.

Time to value

Ada’s no code conversational AI chatbot does not require involvement from the IT team. Because it is a purpose-built solution, and our obsession frankly, Ada allows non-technical individuals (Customer Support) to leverage the power of automation by leveraging an easy-to-use, drag and drop editor to create complex content in mere minutes. No dependencies on the backlogged IT team. You are in control. This includes the ability to add multimedia (text, link, picture, video) to create visual customer experiences. Your team can easily pull information from any existing API URL to access personal information and answer customer questions in a more personalized manner.

Conversational AI is what we do, and you better believe we support our product and our customers. In chatbot benchmarking tests, Ada has outperformed the likes of Google and IBM by 14%.

Conclusion

Reach out to us to learn more about what a purpose-built chatbot can do for your business.