What is a chatbot?

Chatbots are a one-time investment that can offer instant self-service, deflect a significant number of inquiries, and can quickly scale as your requirements grow.  So if you are evaluating the implementation of chatbots for your customer service, here are a couple of reasons to get started. 

Chatbots can increase customer satisfaction through frictionless support. It can offer precise answers to questions and point customers in the right direction. Moreover, smart chatbots can offer contextual advice and escalate conversations to a live agent when necessary.

Common questions like “What’s your refund policy?” shouldn’t need a support agent to intervene. Chatbots can understand the intent of the questions and give a direct answer. It can also help customers with troubleshooting workflows to solve their queries themselves.

The most important benefit of implementing a chatbot is that it can offer round-the-clock support. Also, chatbots are a low-friction solution as they are available on every screen and in messenger apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Apple Business Chat. 

Your business should be able to engage with your customers at every step of their journey. Chatbots can help personalize conversations, nurture your leads better, and improve engagement across your funnel by urging customers to participate in discussions that can help them build a connection with your business. 

Chatbots allow you to share updates and notifications to build brand loyalty quickly. At scale, it’s difficult for your business to engage with clients at a personal level. However, chatbots can understand your customer’s intent, order history and personalize outreach to improve engagement quality.

Chatbots close the loop with your customers. They can trigger actions and flows like booking appointments, making payments, or collecting feedback. So the visitor won’t have to leave without taking a step towards a purchase.

The very first chatbot, ELIZA, made in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum, was built as a therapy robot, to offer scripted responses to therapy-related questions. It was linear and structured and didn’t understand intent.  Chatbots have come a long way since then. 

Today, there are several chatbot software available in the marketplace, built for many reasons. When deciding to buy a chatbot, look for the features that boost your workflows, including :

Having a chatbot on your website is not enough. People are engaging more on messaging apps than on social media, and this means your business needs to engage with your audience where they prefer to communicate. Check whether the chatbot integrates with messaging services such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Chatbots can seem complex and technical, but the reality is, you don’t need an army of developers to create chatbots or write code. Find a chatbot provider who can help with managing chat conversations across platforms and has a customizable chat widget. This way, all you have to do is integrate it with your website and train it to answer your most common questions. 

Chatbots themselves are cost-saving channels for businesses, so they shouldn’t be expensive to implement either. Look for a chatbot that covers the basic features that your business will require. If all you need is a rule-based chatbot, you don’t need to invest in purchasing or building an AI chatbot.

Your AI chatbots will also need to be trained before they can interact with customers, so you need to find one that allows you to do this with ease. Unless you require it to perform highly complicated functions, find a chatbot that doesn’t require too much technical expertise. The more complicated the functionality, the more time you will need to spend writing code to train your chatbot. 

Not all chatbots are AI-enabled, but those with AI are more likely to give precise answers. They can understand the intention of the customer and learn to have better conversational flows to customer queries. Not only can they trigger actions, they also know when to handover the chat to a team member. Both these features offer uninterrupted communication flows between the business and the customer.

Find a chatbot that can analyze human intention. Chatbots should know when to interact with the customers and whether their intent is positive, negative or neutral. Customers prefer quick conversations with bots, but at times will want to talk to an agent. Your chatbot must be able to detect nuances and proceed.

The purpose of a chatbot is to improve the productivity of customer-facing teams and reduce the workload caused by live chat. This can be achieved through training an AI-enabled chatbot to spot patterns, language intent and identify the most appropriate response without human involvement. 

If this sounds technical, let’s take a step back and see how a chatbot processes a conversation.

When the chatbot is being set up, you can teach it topics you think your customers will ask about. For example, if a common customer query is, “On what days is the clinic open?”, you can program the chatbot to understand this question and similar rephrased questions like: “Will the clinic be open on the weekends?” or “When is the clinic closed?”. This helps the bot address the same concern, in whichever phrasing is used by the customer, and offer the relevant information.

The chatbot learns from emails, chats and your knowledge base to understand intent every time a visitor asks a question. From the example above, if the visitor asks, “Is the clinic open on Sundays?” the chatbot will recognize the intent, based on the information available in its database, and provide the appropriate response. 

Once the chatbot knows what the customer’s goal is, it’ll prompt them into taking the next step. In the above case, it can then ask them, “Do you wish to book an appointment on Sunday?”. This way, it nudges the visitor to take action. By offering a CTA, the chatbot not only personalizes the attention given to the visitor, it will also collect the necessary details needed to book an appointment without any agent intervening.