Top 22 benefits of chatbots for businesses and customers

Bots and chatbots have been around for decades, but the benefits of AI chatbots are more apparent than ever to businesses and customers alike. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2025, 86 percent of customer experience (CX) leaders believe CX will be utterly transformed over the next three years. Intelligent bots like AI agents are at the forefront of that change.

Businesses offer improved customer service by providing 24/7 support with more accuracy, efficiency, and access to customer insights than traditional bots offer. For customers, AI chatbots offer convenience and accessibility, allowing them to get the information they need quickly and easily, without having to wait on hold or navigate complex phone menus.

Let’s explore the benefits of AI chatbots for customers and businesses and see how those benefits stretch across different industries.

More in this guide:

• Benefits of chatbots for customers
• Chatbot benefits for businesses
• Chatbot benefits by industry
• What are the disadvantages of AI chatbots?
• Smart decisions start with AI

Benefits of chatbots for customers

Bots are often customers’ first support interaction with a business, greeting and engaging with them in a friendly, convenient way. Until recently, there were two main types of bots:

• Rule-based, or decision-tree chatbots, are easy to set up and provide a high level of customer service, responding to questions with predetermined answers.
• AI chatbots use natural language processing (NLP) or machine learning to understand customer requests and improve with each interaction.

Both types of chatbots can help businesses provide great support interactions. Businesses still use rule-based chatbots, but AI chatbots are the industry standard and will only continue to grow in popularity. Here are the benefits of chatbots for customers.

1. Provide fast, 24/7 customer service

Customers want fast and easy service, even during peak hours. When bots step in to handle the first interaction, they eliminate wait times with instant support. Because chatbots never sleep, they can provide global, 24/7 support at the most convenient time for the customer, even when agents are offline.

Photobucket, a media hosting service, uses AI agents to provide 24/7 support to international customers who might need help outside of regular business hours. With these advanced, intelligent bots, customers can find information on their own or get answers to FAQs in minutes. Since implementing a chatbot, Photobucket has seen a three percent increase in customer satisfaction (CSAT) and improved first resolution time by 17 percent.

2. Offer more personalized experiences

When AI-powered chatbots are integrated with your other business systems, like your customer service tool, marketing automation software, or CRM,they can use relevant information to deliver personalized experiences. Here are a few examples:

• Adapting messaging so it corresponds with the phase of their customer journey

• Recommending relevant products or services based on their preferences, behaviors, or demographics

• Presenting information about new products or services

• Asking if customers have questions about items in their shopping cart

• Providing the status of an order without asking for order information

Customers understand that bots collect personal data, but want them to use it to create a better CX. It’s an effortless task when you incorporate human-centered AI in your customer service operations.

3. Deliver multilingual support

With online shopping, customers are no longer limited to shopping at local brick-and-mortar businesses. Customers can buy products from anywhere around the globe, so breaking down communication barriers is crucial for delivering a great CX. Chatbots can offer multilingual support to customers who speak different languages.

At the start of a conversation, chatbots can ask for the customer’s preferred language or use AI to determine the language based on customer inputs. Multilingual bots can communicate in multiple languages through voice, text, or chat.

You can also use AI with multilingual chatbots to answer general questions and perform simple tasks in a customer’s preferred language with empathetic, people-centric language.

4. Ensure more consistent support

Customers who frequently interact with your business rarely talk to the same support agent twice. Because the level of expertise and training varies from agent to agent, customers may experience inconsistencies when connecting with support teams. Although most businesses continuously work to improve their customer service training, chatbots function on predetermined frameworks and pull answers from a single source of truth every time, resulting in consistent customer service experiences.

Chatbots are also programmed to provide level-headed guidance, no matter how long the conversation lasts and how the customer acts.If a customer is rude or dismissive, AI can deliver an empathetic CX by recognizing language indicative of frustration or anger and responding appropriately.

5. Offer convenient self-service options

Chatbots can help mitigate customer frustration by providing self-service options so customers can take care of basic issues independently or quickly find information when it’s most convenient.

Zendesk bots, for example, can direct customers to community forums, FAQ pages, or help center articles. They can also pull information from your existing knowledge base to answer common customer questions. Because chatbots learn from every interaction, they provide better self-service options over time.

6. Provide proactive customer service

Businesses can use a chatbot to help them provide proactive support and suggestions to customers. By monitoring user activity on their websites, businesses can use chatbots to proactively engage with customers to answer common questions and help with potential issues on that page. For example:

• An e-commerce company might use a chatbot to greet returning website visitors and notify them about a low stock of merchandise in their cart.

• A financial services company could use a bot to get ahead of common questions on applying for a loan with tailored information to help them complete their applications.

Chatbots can also understand when a handoff is appropriate and proactively ask customers if they’d like to connect with a support agent or sales rep to help answer any questions holding up a purchase.

7. Deliver omnichannel support

Customers turn to an array of channels—phone, email, social media, and messaging apps like WhatsApp Business and Messenger—to connect with brands. They expect conversations to move seamlessly across platforms so they can continue discussions right where they left off, regardless of the channel or device they’re using.

But many businesses aren’t offering this type of experience. To stand out from the competition, you can use bots to answer common questions that come in through email, your website, Slack, and your various messaging apps. Integrate your AI chatbots with the rest of your tech stack to connect conversations and deliver a smooth, consistent experience. Your customers will get the responses they seek, in a shorter time, on their preferred channel.

Chatbot benefits for businesses

How do chatbots help businesses? Interactions between chatbots and consumers are a standard business practice that is crucial to creating satisfying, AI-driven CX. Customers are already familiar with AI-driven interactions, and the earliest adopters have now been using AI agents and intelligent bots for years because it’s not simply a tool to benefit the customer—it also boosts the agent experience. Here are a few ways businesses benefit from implementing chatbots.

8. Improve service with every interaction

Here’s an overview of how chatbots use AI to provide better support over time:

• Tracking: AI customer service bots track how people respond to every answer they provide.
• Collecting: As chatbots gather customer data, they’ll continuously analyze it to provide more accurate and personalized responses.
• Learning: Your chatbot will gain knowledge to determine which response is best in each type of situation.
• Refining: The chatbot will improve its ability to determine which questions it can answer and which to pass on to an agent.

Chatbots are getting better at gauging the sentiment behind the words people use. They can pick up on nuances in language to detect and understand customer emotions and, based on those insights, provide appropriate customer care.

9. Collect customer feedback

You can program chatbots to ask for customer feedback at the end of an interaction. The bot can send a single survey question in the chat to ask how the support interaction went. The customer can select a rating from one to five, with an option to include a written response for additional comments.

To encourage feedback, chatbots can be programmed to offer incentives, such as discount codes or special offers, to maximize survey participation. Companies can also search and analyze chatbot conversation logs to identify:

• Problems

• Frequently asked questions

• Popular products and features

These insights from customer interactions provide invaluable data that helps businesses enhance the overall CX without requiring additional customer effort.

10. Reduce customer requests

Chatbots intercept and deflect potential support tickets, easing agents’ workloads. They handle repetitive tasks, respond to general questions, and offer self-service options, helping customers find the answers they need. This allows agents to focus their expertise on complex issues or requests that require a human touch.

These requests can vary based on a business’s product, service, or industry, but commonly include:

• Providing order status and tracking information

• Offering product details

• Assisting with returns or refunds

• Balancing accounts and identifying payment issues

• Collecting feedback

• Offering self-service

By automatically addressing these frequent inquiries, chatbots significantly reduce ticket volume, allowing your human agents to dedicate their expertise to more complex customer issues requiring personal attention.

11. Detect customer intent for added context

Advanced bots powered with AI can understand intent and customer sentiment based on phrasing and language. In reference to AI, these terms mean:

• Customer intent: AI can detect the customer’s needs, such as what their question is about.
• Customer sentiment: AI can detect if the message is positive, negative, or neutral.

AI can pass these details to the agent, giving them additional context that helps them determine how to handle an interaction after handoff. The agent can also use these customer insights to personalize messaging and avoid future escalations.

12. Boost customer engagement

Chatbots can be an important tool to increase customer engagement and interactions in the following ways:

• Sending proactive messages about order statuses, tracking numbers, or payment issues

• Collecting customer feedback after an interaction or a resolved issue

• Engaging in real time or holding continuous conversations across channels, meeting the customer where they are

• Sending reminders and appointment confirmations

• Customizing messaging to match your brand’s voice and tone

Chatbots can provide a deep level of personalization, prompting customers to engage with products or services that may interest them based on their behaviors and preferences.

They also use rich messaging types—like carousels, forms, emojis and gifs, images, and embedded apps—to enhance customer interactions and make customer self-service more helpful.

13. Streamline service with routing and triage

Chatbots can deflect simple tasks and customer queries, but sometimes a human agent should be involved. With AI, bots can collect important information at the beginning of an interaction, using routing and intelligence to get the conversation to the best agent based on skill, availability, capacity, and issue priority.

These seamless handoffs from chatbots to agents can help streamline service, save time, and enhance experiences.

14. Boost sales

Use chatbots to do manual, time-consuming sales tasks. They can collect information and qualify leads, schedule product demos, and engage website visitors.

Chatbots can also nurture prospects and potential customers through your sales funnel by proactively communicating with them, answering questions, and educating them about your product or service. As a result, they can help:

• Decrease bounce rate

• Boost conversion

• Reduce abandoned shopping carts

• Automate cross-sell and upsell strategies

Given all the real-time guidance they offer, chatbots can be the deciding factor in a customer’s purchase.

15. Increase lead generation

Natural conversation can help businesses generate leads. AI-powered chatbots can use customer data, machine learning (ML), and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize voice and text inputs to create a conversational flow, otherwise known as conversational AI.

Rather than directing a customer to a form, AI bots can mimic human interactions and engage in a natural conversation to answer questions while capturing customer data. The information that chatbots can collect includes:

• Pages a customer visited

• Abandoned shopping carts

• Languages

• Geolocation

• Preferences

Chatbots can then send the data collected during these interactions to marketing teams. These teams can gather consumer insights and identify customer trends and behaviors to use in targeted marketing campaigns.

16. Enhance conversational commerce and marketing

Chatbots deployed across channels can use conversational commerce to influence the customer wherever they are, at scale. That means businesses, like e-commerce sites, use conversational technology like AI and bots to boost the shopping experience.

For example, online retailers can deploy bots to act as virtual assistants, answering product questions on demand or offering proactive support about products in a customer’s shopping cart to nudge them to make a purchase.

20. Lower employee churn

Of course, many of the things we’ve already covered contribute to a better employee experience (EX) that can reduce churn, including:

• Simplified workflows

• Automated tasks

• Deflected tickets

• Streamlined onboarding

Bots can also engage with employees by offering feedback opportunities and internal surveys. This allows your business to capture satisfaction ratings and understand employee sentiment. Additionally, it helps you understand where you’re excelling with the employee experience and where you need to make changes.

21. Reduce business costs

In order to thrive, businesses need to keep costs under control while delivering more value. Though customer service chatbots may require an investment upfront, they can help you save money over time. Chatbots can handle simple tasks, deflect tickets, and intelligently route and triage conversations to the right place quickly. This allows you to serve more customers without having to hire more agents.

Additionally, choosing a no-code, click-to-configure bot builder, like the one offered by Zendesk, lets you start creating chatbot conversations in minutes. Zendesk bots come pre-trained for customer service,saving hours from manual setup. This helps you see a return on your investment faster.

22. Serve more customers at scale

Customer service managers can deploy chatbots to increase productivity and efficiency. Because chatbots can handle simple tasks, they act as additional support agents. They can also address multiple customer questions simultaneously, allowing your service team to help more customers at scale.

Use chatbots to avoid the struggle of attempting to grow proportionally to the number of customer interactions you’re supporting. If your ticket queue is constantly clogged with simple requests, your operational costs will likely keep rising. Chatbots intercept most of these low-level tasks without involving human agents, leading to better and faster support for more customers.

Chatbot benefits by industry

While the core benefits of chatbots apply universally, certain industries enjoy unique advantages tailored to their specific needs and challenges. Let’s take a look at the importance of chatbots to these six industries.

Customer service

Chatbots revolutionize traditional customer service by providing instant responses to common inquiries, reducing wait times, and freeing human agents to handle complex issues.

For example, LATAM Airlines implemented Zendesk to manage the surge in customer service requests during the pandemic. The airline experienced a 90 percent reduction in response times and successfully resolved 80 percent of customer inquiries without human intervention, dramatically improving customer satisfaction scores.

HR and IT

In IT and HR management, chatbots are virtual assistants that handle routine employee queries about benefits, time-off policies, password resets, and technical troubleshooting. These bots can onboard new employees, schedule interviews, and provide instant access to company policies 24/7.

By automating these repetitive tasks, HR and IT teams can focus on strategic initiatives that require human expertise and creativity, resulting in more efficient operations and improved employee satisfaction. Just look at Tesco—the British multinational grocery retailer has seen a 43 percent uptick in self-service since 2020, ensuring employees have the time and resources to do their jobs as efficiently as possible.

Retail and ecommerce

Retail chatbots can provide personalized product recommendations based on browsing history and previous purchases, significantly increasing conversion rates. They function as personal shopping assistants, helping customers:

• Find products

• Check inventory

• Track orders

• Complete purchases

• Initiate returns

The best part? Customers don’t need to leave the chat interface to do any of these tasks.

During peak shopping seasons, chatbots ensure all customers receive immediate attention regardless of website traffic volume. This way, businesses lose fewer sales due to avoidable customer frustration.

Financial services

In the financial sector, chatbots provide secure, convenient ways for customers to check account balances, transfer funds, pay bills, and get answers about financial products without waiting on hold for a representative. They can also help customers with more complex tasks, such as loan applications, by gathering necessary information upfront and guiding users through the process step by step.

Siemens, Europe’s largest manufacturing company, adopted Zendesk AI agents in its Financial Services division as an enterprise chatbot solution for efficiency and accuracy. The AI agents autonomously field high-volume requests and can even proactively send customer invoices—leading to double-digit productivity increases across multiple regions and an impressive 86% CSAT score.

Healthcare

Healthcare chatbots assist with appointment scheduling, medication reminders, symptom assessment, and providing general health information to patients. They can complete tasks like:

• Collecting patient information before appointments

• Answering insurance coverage questions

• Directing patients to appropriate care resources

By handling these administrative tasks, chatbots allow healthcare providers to dedicate more time to actual patient care— boosting both efficiency and quality of care.

Real estate

Real estate bots can collect visitor preferences and match clients with available properties. Agents and businesses use chatbots to:

• Qualify leads

• Schedule property viewings

• Answer questions about listings

• Provide virtual property tours

Bots help create a personalized experience for potential buyers and renters—a key factor in driving conversions in the industry.

Compass, the U.S.’s leading tech-powered real estate brokerage, leveraged Zendesk AI to intelligently route customer support inquiries to the most appropriate agents. They improved resolution speed and accuracy—resolving 65 percent of requests in a single interaction and boosting resolution rates by 9 percent overall.

As Amy Velligan, director of support at Compass, puts it:

“We have a lot of specialists who can provide very high-touch service, but that only works if you get directed to the right specialist… It’s really about knowing who your customers are when they’re contacting support so that you can get them to the right person and answer them the right way.”

Smart decisions start with AI

AI bots won’t replace customer service agents—they are a tool that enhances the experiences of both businesses and consumers.Customers will always want to know they can talk to another human, especially regarding issues that benefit from a personal touch. But customers can get the answers they need faster with human-centric, AI-powered self-service options like chatbots.

To start experiencing the benefits of chatbots, integrate AI bot solutions into your customer service solution and see how the technology takes your CX to new heights.