13 Chatbot Statistics Reshaping Customer Service in 2024
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The age of the robots is here. According to the latest chatbot statistics, companies are increasingly replacing their customer service with chatbots.
The benefit is easy to see:
Customers can skip the most annoying part of customer service – waiting – and immediately talk to a bot to see if they’re able to find an answer to their problem.
What’s more:
The actual real customer service agents on the company side can skip the most annoying part of their job – dealing with repetitive issues that the users could have easily handled themselves.
But are chatbots really that beneficial to everyone? To get a better perspective of the chatbot industry, let’s take a look at some intriguing stats to keep you informed!
Fascinating Chatbot Stats (Editor’s Choice)
- 1.4 billion people use chatbots globally.
- 80% of sales and marketing professionals will use chatbots in 2020.
- $9.4 billion is the expected chatbot market size by 2024.
- Asia-Pacific is experiencing the fastest growth in the chatbots market with a 31.9% CAGR between 2019 and 2026.
- Chatbots can handle 80% of customer queries.
- 69% of customers associate chatbot uses with getting quick answers to simple questions.
General Chatbot Statistics
Chatbots are at the forefront of technology in the workplace trends, helping organizations improve efficiency and productivity while providing customers with excellent service by giving them what they want when they want it. Of course, talking to robots and getting answers does sound like something apt for our 21st century.
Let’s see what the figures have to say:
1. There are 1.4 billion chatbot users worldwide and counting.
(Acquire)
Today, while we’re still far from flying cars, technological advancements have brought us fun and exciting tools to increase our quality of life. Chatbots are at the forefront of AI technology, as more people turn to chatbots in search of information.
More specifically, the number of people using chatbots worldwide is at 1.4 billion and counting. Additionally, chatbot technologies are improving to be more efficient and even more human-like.
2. According to a survey for chatbot statistics 2020, 80% of sales and marketing professionals said they will use chatbots.
(CMSC Media)
In a survey of 800 sales and marketing professionals covering Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), the overwhelming majority stated they will use chatbots by 2020.
In fact, 36% of them were already using chatbots to boost their businesses. While this adoption rate is arguably low, chatbots have been included in the majority of these enterprises’ four-year tech adoption plans, which suggests a promising future for the industry.
3. By 2024, the chatbot industry is expected to hit $9.4 billion.
(Business Insider)
Chatbot statistics for 2019 showed that the industry had a market size of $2.6 billion. With this figure, projections have been made to predict that the chatbot market size will continue to grow at a whopping 29.7% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2019 and 2024 reaching an impressive $9.4 billion.
These projections illustrate tremendous growth, as chatbots help organizations reduce operating costs while giving customers great customer service experience. This rapid growth is also in line with the rapid expansion of ecommerce and m-commerce.
4. Chatbot usage statistics in the Asia-Pacific region show the fastest growth with an expected CAGR of 31.9% between 2019 and 2026.
(Reports and Data)
Chatbot usage is rapidly expanding in Asia-Pacific, alongside with the overnight improvements in internet infrastructure in developing nations like India and China. The Asia-Pacific region is expected to have a CAGR of 31.9% in the period from 2019 to 2026.
5. Customer service statistics show 80% of basic customer questions can be handled by chatbots.
(IBM)
Another reason for the popularity of chatbots is that they can be trained to handle up to 80% of standard customer inquiries. Because of this, customers can get their answers instantly without having to wait for chats with real people.
What this also means is:
Companies can save on customer service costs or at least free up more time for agents to deal with more complex inquiries.
6. Customers expect businesses to reply to their online inquiries within 10 minutes.
(Tidio)
Unfortunately, the average response time for online stores is 2 hours 40 minutes and 44 seconds. Usually, only around 56% of the millions of online stores will reply within 10 minutes.
With the use of chatbots that can have many conversations at the same time, chatbots for customer service can definitely reduce customer waiting and response time to only a few seconds.
7. Companies in the US can save up to $23 billion by employing chatbots.
(Business Insider)
In the US, Chatbots Magazine found that around 29% of customer service positions can be automated using chatbots and other technologies. Based on this percentage, the estimated cost of savings on personnel salaries can go up to a mind-blowing $23 billion. This figure is impressive, as it has yet to include other significant personnel costs like health insurance.
8. 36% of chatbot users come from the US.
(Chatbots Life)
Chatbot engagement statistics between late 2017 to early 2019 by Collect.chat showed that 36% of their customer engagement comes from the US. In second place comes India with 11%, followed by Germany with 4%, the UK with 3%, and Brazil with 2%.
The other top countries on the list are are:
- France
- Italy
- Australia
- Canada
- Spain
- United Arab Emirates
9. 69% of customers associate chatbot use with getting quick answers to simple questions.
(Drift)
According to recent customer service trends, customers enjoy using chatbots mainly for quick and prompt responses. The 2018 State of Chatbots Report compared chatbots with other channels, including apps, emails, and phones.
Here’s the thing:
Customers associate chatbots with five out of ten benefit categories, with the majority preferring chatbots for getting quick answers to simple questions.
10. 68% of consumers say messaging is the easiest way to connect with businesses.
(Reve Chat)
One of the main drivers of chatbot statistics is their use on messaging platforms. 68% of consumers agree that the most convenient way to communicate with businesses is through messaging platforms.
Now:
Knowing this, more brands are using chatbots as a method to increase customer engagement and build customer loyalty. In fact, 47% of customers are even open to shopping items online through a bot.
One of the examples of bot integration onto messaging platforms is the well-known online booking app in India called Book My Show, which uses messaging platform WhatsApp to send ticket confirmations to customers.
11. 60% of Millennials have used chatbots, chatbot stats reveal.
(Forbes)
Millennials are a generation that prefers solving their customer service issues themselves. So, it’s understandable that 60% of Millennials have used chatbots.
What’s more:
Among the Millennials who haven’t used a chatbot, more than 50% stated that they are interested in using them. Finally, 70% of Millennials who use chatbots reported having good experiences.
12. The real estate industry is the most profitable field for chatbots.
(Chatbots Magazine)
Almost 30% of real estate businesses now use chatbots. Companies in the industry have realized that chatbots are ideal at taking over the time consuming daily tasks agents usually face.
The real estate messenger bot costs much less to operate than an agent. So, if it enables the agents to spend their time on more important things, it’s well worth having one.
13. According to Facebook Messenger stats, there are over 300,000 active bots on Facebook Messenger.
(Hootsuite)
Facebook Messenger is the third most-used app globally, with 68% among app users. As of 2018, there were 300,000 active Messenger bots on Facebook, which was three times the number of bots three years before.
Facebook Messenger chatbots are found in Facebook Messenger, and they have conversations with 1.3 billion people every month.
Conclusion
If you had told someone back in the 1980s to imagine a world in which people talk to machines, they would have probably laughed at you, Terminator fans aside. Nowadays, it has already become our reality. Chatbots have taken over a lot of the online world for a very good reason.
The thing is:
They are practical for both the users and the companies using them, especially chatbots for customer service. They save valuable time on both sides and create more effortless communication between a company and its customers, which is one of the biggest benefits of chatbots.
As for the future of chatbots, these chatbot statistics show that they are certainly here to stay.
Now, the next big step will be moving them from text-based to voice-based. Google anticipates that voice search will be the next big trend shaping the development of the internet.
So, it won’t be too long until we can do most things in our daily life simply by talking to a machine.
FAQ
Q: What are chatbots used for?
Chatbots are the latest creation of software applications that can mimic human speech interactions to converse or communicate with real people. Because of this, chatbots are used in online chat conversations either via text or text-to-speech situations. Chatbots are used in many sectors, including customer service, real estate, retail, entertainment, and many more.
Now:
A typical chatbot you have probably encountered yourself is the dialogue box that opens on pages of online stores or the immediate replies you will receive when contacting some Facebook pages. Those are examples of chatbots in action.
Q: Does Amazon use chatbots for customer service?
No. Despite Amazon being one of the biggest websites of the entire internet, it seems to not have hopped onto the chatbot train yet. However, the site features an FAQ section that serves the same purpose and tries to answer the users’ questions before they are eventually forwarded to a real customer agent. This is not a chatbot per se, but the function is the same.
While Amazon does not have a chatbot on its own website, it does develop its own chatbot in-house as part of its Amazon Web Services portfolio. Amazon is also the developer and producer of Alexa, basically a real-life chatbot for your home. And Alexa runs on Lex, the technology Amazon owns and sells to people looking to create their own conversational interfaces.
Q: Which companies are using chatbots?
Chatbot statistics show that some of the biggest and most prominent companies on the internet are using chatbots, either on their own homepage or at least on their Facebook or Instagram pages as a way to interact with customers.
Spotify, for example, has a great Facebook chatbot that allows you to find and share music from within the Facebook chat. It will even recommend playlists based on your mood.
And that’s not all:
Other companies, like Lyft, have gone so far as to implement a chatbot into their app. Lyft allows you to book a ride using only a chatbot. Quite useful for people who need some guidance in the world of technology.
Some other big companies that make excellent use of chatbot technology are Staples, Mastercard, Fandango, Sephora, Whole Foods, Pizza Hut, and The Wall Street Journal.
Q: What percentage of internet users are actually robots?
In 2019, about 40% of internet users were bots. Obviously, that does not mean there are actual robots sitting somewhere browsing the internet, it just means that 40% of the traffic on the internet was generated by bots.
The bots creating this traffic can be the good or the bad kind. Good bots would for example be ecommerce chat bots or the Google bot, which analyzes and ranks websites based on their content and how well it fits your search query, or the bots comparison websites use to scrape prices from all over the internet.
Malicious bots are the kind that is used for hacking and other illegitimate activities such as denial-of-service attacks, essentially shutting down someone’s internet, personal, or in some cases on a state level.
This number might seem high, but it is actually a decrease to the previous two years. Just in 2016, bots made up almost 52% of all internet traffic, chatbot statistics reveal.
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