What are conversational AI chatbots? 

Conversational AI chatbots are advanced chatbots that use Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Machine Learning (ML), and speech recognition to offer a personalized experience that mimics human-like engagement. The term AI (Artificial Intelligence) chatbots is often used for both traditional rule-based and conversational AI chatbots, but there are critical differences between the two, from their capability to understand intent and learn from user behavior, as well as the experience offered to your customers on the front-end. 

What is the difference between traditional and conversational AI chatbots?

Traditional Chatbot 

Traditional chatbots are basic rule-based chatbots that answer FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), and basic and common queries. 

These basic chatbots have pre-defined conversational flows, are keyword-based, and perform only limited tasks. 

 

- Button/keyword focused navigation

- Scalability is limited

- These bots only understand text inputs and commands. 

- Does not support omnichannel capabilities and can only be integrated with the chat interface. 

- The resolution rate will vary depending on the keyword input by customers. 

 

Conversational AI chatbots  

Conversational AI chatbots are advanced bots that mimic human conversations to resolve and offer a better customer experience.

On the contrary, these do not follow any predefined rules but leverage AI to understand the intent and offer solutions.  

 

- Intent-focused navigation 

- Easily scalable and improves with time. 

- They can understand text and voice inputs and commands. 

- Can be integrated with multiple channels, including websites and voice assistants.

- Delivers consistent high-resolution rate. 

How do conversational AI chatbots work? 

Conversational AI chatbots use ML, NLP, and intelligent analysis to understand customer intent and offer relevant solutions to customer queries in a conversational tone. Now let's jump deeper into how each of these technologies works together. 

Natural Language Processing: NLP allows the chatbots to understand customer input, be it text or voice, to understand our own natural language. This includes abbreviations, mispronunciations, typos, sentence structure, etc. 

Machine Learning: ML enables these chatbots to learn from previous interactions. It then uses the learnings from these interaction patterns to deliver a better conversational experience to the customers. 

Intelligent Analysis: This technology lets the AI chatbot analyze information and offer customers relevant recommendations, solutions, and suggestions. 

What are the benefits of conversational AI chatbots? 

 

69% of consumers already prefer to use chatbots because they deliver quick answers to simple questions. A single chatbot can resolve thousands of customer queries at a single time. Combined with conversational AI, these chatbots can resolve queries quickly and improve your customer experience by engaging with customers. They do not follow robotic scripts. Instead, they engage in small talk with customers. Implementing these chatbots in your conversational interfaces like mobile apps, websites,s, and messaging channels can improve engagement and bring down customer retention.

Conversational AI chatbots can be made available on all your channels 24/7 to assist your customers. No matter which part of the world your customers are reaching out from, these AI bots are there to engage with them. If it's a simple query, conversational AI chatbots can not only handle them, they can follow up with further information to delight customers. For instance, if a customer wants to return a product, a conversational AI chatbot can extend the conversation to ask the customer what the problem with the item was. This delivers a superior experience to customers and offers instant feedback to your team as well.

If the customer reaches out with a more complex query that the bot is unable to resolve, these chatbots can either hand over the conversation to a live agent or collect information for agents to follow up on. This ensures that your customers aren't left unattended and sets the right expectations for when the agent reverts. 

These conversational bots can also be integrated into your messaging channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc., making it easier for customers to reach out on channels of their choice. 

It is a well-known capability that chatbots can resolve customer tickets/issues. But conversational bots are also capable of upselling to customers. These bots understand customer preferences and customer context and offer the best recommendations to customers for upselling and cross-selling. They leverage cart information, purchase history, and inquiries to suggest the right products or services to customers. 

Offering support in the native language of your customer can increase the likeliness of repeat purchases by 73%. As your company grows, you’ll start receiving customers from different geographies. You cannot hire agents from across the world to cater to different customers. Conversational AI chatbots have translation software that lets you offer multilingual support to your customers. With most businesses having a digital presence today, global audiences are within easy reach no matter how big or small a company is. Multilingual support becomes even more critical in this case.

Conversational bots can be great assistants to your support agents and are a great addition to your support teams. They are capable of solving simple issues with zero human contact. This frees up agents’ time and lets them focus on more complex issues. Since they are capable of resolving multiple issues simultaneously, it helps your support team stay on top of their metrics and SLAs. 

Features to look out for in a conversational bot 

Accuracy 

Conversational bots should deliver precise and accurate answers to the customers. It should understand user intent to deliver the best possible resolution to the query. 

Efficiency: 

These conversational bots should help you minimize your support team’s load, boost customer satisfaction, and improve agent productivity. 

Scalability 

Conversational AI bots should learn and improve with each customer conversation. As your business expands, it should also be able to integrate with third-party tools easily. 

Instantaneous 

Chatbots should offer rapid resolutions to customer queries. It should eliminate wait time and deliver instant responses even during surge times. 

Cost-effective 

These conversational bots should bring down your support and business costs and save you from hiring extra agents to cater to customer queries.

Why choose Freshchat for conversational AI chatbots? 

Deliver faster resolutions 

Customers no longer have to wait in chat queues to get their queries resolved. Freshchat chatbots understand user intent and instantaneously deliver the correct resolution to your customers. 

Proactive customer engagement

Don't wait for customers to initiate a conversation with your agents. Take a seat back and let your conversational bots take the lead to automate engagement based on customer activity on your website proactively. 

Learn on the go 

Freshchat AI chatbots powered with AI and ML learned continuously from each customer interaction to offer the best resolution to customers. 

Seamless agent transfer 

No more getting stuck in an endless chatbot conversation loop. Our intelligent chatbots can detect the issue's complexity and transfer the conversation to a human agent at the right time. 

Personalize customer conversations 

Our conversational bots can pull out customer data from your CRM and offer personalized support and product recommendations. 

Third-party integrations

You can easily integrate our smart chatbots with messaging channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, and other tools for a unified support experience.

Optimize bot performance 

With a real-time dashboard and custom reports, you can analyze your chatbot performance against various metrics and optimize it to perform better. 

Read more about chatbots