Did you know that 69% of customers prefer chatbots for their ability to provide quick replies to common queries? FAQ chatbots are becoming increasingly popular and are now being used by businesses worldwide to automate interactions with your customers and website visitors.
What are FAQ bots?
Bots created to answer Frequently Asked Questions are FAQ bots. In other words, FAQ bots are a type of chatbot powered by AI that answers the most commonly asked questions.
While most businesses already have an FAQ page, visitors and customers often find it challenging to rummage through a sea of FAQs to find the answer they’re looking for. This often leads to an increase in ticket volumes and frustration on both the agent and customer side, as simple questions end up taking too long to address.
Having a FAQ bot in place will help these visitors find answers to their queries easily and quickly. These chatbots can pull relevant answers from your existing knowledge base or help pages or FAQ sections to offer answers to common queries and resolve customer issues.
What are the different types of FAQ bots?
1. Rule-based FAQ bots
Rule-based FAQ chatbots are the most common type of FAQ bots around. These bots aren’t powered by AI, so they have predefined questions for customers to choose from. These types of FAQ bots are less complex and are easier to create. Here the responses are mapped like a flow chart based on the keyword. Hence the conversation flow is limited. These types of bots are most suitable for businesses that do not often deal with complex products or complex issues.
2. NLP/ AI-based FAQ bots
Natural Language Processing (NLP)/ Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots are a more advanced type of FAQ bots. These chatbots process, analyze, understand, and then offer questions to users to better understand their intent. These bots also offer contextual conversations – not only can they reference a user’s previous communications and interactions to provide quick and relevant answers, but they can also be trained to learn general user patterns to predict user intent better. They do not have a predefined conversational flow but respond to customers based on keywords used by the users. For example,
Option 1: I want to know the shipping details for my order number XX23TY
Option 2: Can you let me know the shipping details for my order number XX23TY
Option 3: My order number is XX23TY. I would like to know my shipping details.
Here NLP/AI-based FAQ bots understand the main keywords in the text [shipping details] and respond accordingly. This type of FAQ chatbot can be used on all web pages and messaging channels where user input is required to initiate a conversation.
3. Hybrid FAQ bots
As the name suggests, hybrid FAQ bots are a combination of both rule-based and NLP/AI-based bots. These types of bots include both predefined answers and also user inputs. These bots are now made easy with the help of no-code bot builders. These bots are suitable for enterprise-level businesses that offer freemium and premium products/services.
What are the benefits of FAQ bots?
For customers
Interactive self-service: FAQ bots offer an interactive way for customers to get answers to common or simple questions. Customers simply have to select from the set of predefined questions and get answers quickly without having to navigate through your entire FAQ database.
24/7 customer support: Deploying a chatbot to your website helps offer customer support round the clock. These chatbots can resolve common queries 24/7, thus improving your resolution rate and first response time.
Multi-lingual support: If you have a global customer base, you can also find chatbots that allow multi-lingual capabilities. With Freshchat’s chatbot, you can upload scripts of bot conversations in multiple languages and make your bot speak your customer’s preferred language.
Personalize self-service: Having an FAQ bot in place will help you personalize the self-service experience. Rather than having your customers search for answers from your knowledge base, FAQ bots offer one-on-one personalized support to resolve common queries.
For agents
Boost agent productivity: With the help of chatbots, 64% of agents who use chatbots can spend time resolving more complex issues rather than common queries. These FAQ chatbots can resolve all common queries while leaving the agents to take care of the complex ones.
Facilitates learning: These bots capture data from each customer conversation. They collect questions and insights from these interactions which will help you update and improve your self-service offerings and even influence your product roadmap.
Suggest answers to resolve tickets: In addition to resolving customer queries, these FAQ bots are also capable of suggesting solution articles and answers from your internal knowledge base. This helps agents respond to queries easily. This can also be extended to training new agents and help onboard them faster to your support operations.
Why Freshdesk Answer Bots is the ultimate FAQ bot for your business
Freshdesk’s Answer Bot is an intelligent FAQ chatbot that offers instant and precise answers to customer questions. As it is an intent-based bot, not only does it understand what a user is asking no matter how the question is framed, it can also follow up to check if the answer was useful and offer advice or alternate options, based on its understanding of the issue, and how similar issues were solved in the past. It deflects unnecessary tickets and delights customers by engaging with them in a meaningful way.
Here are some of the ways you can use Freshchat to improve your support strategy.
1. Understands intent and resolves queries
Customers have different ways of asking questions. Not everyone might use the same language or words. A single question on payment can be phrased in different ways. For example, “How do I make a payment?” and “What are the different modes of payment?”. Both these questions have similar answers. Answer bot identifies intent and delivers the correct answer to these user questions.
Answer Bot also maps these similar questions to the existing ones. It learns from each customer conversation to deliver the right answers and enhance customer engagement and user experience.
2. Seamless agent hand-off
A smart chatbot must be programmed to transfer the chat to an agent at the right time without frustrating the customers. For example, if a customer raises a query saying, “I want to know the discounted price for bulk order.” An agent best handles this query to negotiate the right pricing. Our Answer Bots can hand over these conversations to a human agent for instant resolution and boost customer satisfaction.
3. Engage with small talk
A bot should make the customers feel like it’s genuinely listening and responding to the queries. If a customer sends “How are you,” a bot should give an appropriate answer rather than sending a message like “Sorry, I don’t understand.” which will only frustrate the customer.
4. Gather insights on the bot’s performance
Measuring your bot performance will give you insights into how well your bot engages with your customers and how beneficial it is to your business. Our Answer bot offers insights on the following metrics.
- Bot resolution rate: It is the total number of queries resolved by the Answer bot and was marked as helpful by the customer.
- Questions attempted by the bot: This refers to the total number of questions answered by the Answer bot.
- Questions the bot did not answer: This gives you the total number of questions that were not attempted by the bot.
- Bot performance: The bot performance table offers you an overview of the number of answers sent, marked as helpful and not helpful, along with the date within the filtered timeline.
Bonus: How Freddy Answers helps you improve your knowledge base
Our Ai-enabled chatbot, Freddy Answers uses Machine Learning (ML) to suggest FAQs on different topics. Furthermore, it also enables you to identify answers that need to be updated or improved. Freddy Answer’s capabilities don’t end here. It categorizes the questions on the following buckets to enhance your knowledge base.
Unanswered: This shows customer questions that do not have any answer in your knowledge base.
Improve coverage: To give precise answers to customer queries, Freddy Answers will mark the questions that are not mapped to 5 different variants (5 different ways the question can be framed) under this category.
Underperforming: Any support article or FAQs that have been downvoted five times or more will be moved to this category.
This categorization will help you identify new questions and enhance and improve your answers to make them useful for your customers.
Checklist to get your FAQ bot up and running
- Have an extensive knowledge base
- Collect all your frequently asked questions
- Write precise answers to your customer queries/questions
- Map similar questions to a single keyword
- Update your FAQs frequently
- Make your bot learn from each customer conversation
- Reflect your brand identity
Can FAQ bots replace your support team?
While FAQ bots can handle common queries and reduce the number of incoming queries, they can never replace your support team. Though these smart bots engage and resolve customer queries, there will always be those that require agent intervention. If you are a small business and primarily receive common queries, you can easily automate your customer support with these smart bots. But if you are a large business, you will need human agents to resolve queries. In this case, FAQ bots will be a great addition to your agents by resolving common queries and letting your agents worry about the complex ones in hand.
Final thoughts
As mentioned earlier, FAQ bots will be a great addition to your business to help your customers and your support team. It offers instant resolution to delight customers and also deflects all common queries and delights your agents. Deploy our Answer bot to resolve queries instantly and create happy customers and support agents for your business. Get started here.
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