In today’s online connectivity, businesses have maximized a lot of innovative tools to help them stay competitive in a fast-changing digital market. One of these tools that have seen a rise in popularity in a number of online platforms is the Chatbot. This tool helps businesses in every industry stay connected to their customers and initiate an engaging establishment of relations. The artificial intelligence incorporated for these systems has helped companies reach wider audiences and integrate into different social media platforms where people spend a lot of their time.
What is a chatbot?
The commercially available sophisticated example of an AI chatbot is Siri and Alexa. But there are a lot of them that you may encounter (and immediately greet you) when you enter a website’s landing page. A chatbot essentially is an AI program that is purposed to help computers respond to an interaction with a human through verbal or typed-in inputs. It follows simple instructions derived from the keywords and input, or manages a more complicated exchange with a human within a certain scope.
Who uses them?
Virtually, all businesses that can set up a simple program for a computer to respond to can use chatbots to help them promote the flow of a business or transaction. Here are some of the most common users of this AI tool:
Customer Service
Many service providers are now using chatbots to help them accommodate, triage, and serve larger demands. The functions may range from helping people navigate through the system to reach the designated person of contact. It can also provide pertinent suggestions by asking questions with a list of anticipated answers.
E-Commerce
Online businesses have used chatbots to streamline process flow and help customers navigate to complete a cycle in the most efficient and fastest way. This has given them the capability to conduct transactions for multiple customers at a time.
Virtual Assistants
Famous assistants like, Siri, Cortana, Hey Google, and Alexa have become a household AI companion for people who are closely connected with their devices. Their comprehensive capacity has allowed them to help individuals get information, manage their calendars, book appointments, and access other applications.
How can it Benefit Your Business?
Many customers are not that fond of talking to a machine, not verbally anyway, but interacting with computers has been part of our daily lives. A simple transaction with an ATM is an interaction with a program that is designed for a specific need. When we incorporate a robot chat into your workflow, it must be able to address the customer’s needs. Because that is the only thing they’re interested in. But creating an intelligent and courteous chatbot that can keep up with the conversation will give you an edge in maximizing the value of the program. Its benefits can be seen in the following aspects:
Service Availability
One of the main advantages of using a chatbot is that it’s available 24/7 for your users. Currently, on an average day, a caller will wait for about 8 minutes for an available operator to tend to their needs. But for companies who are using bots, they are able to route certain and respond to queries 24/7 through email or chat. Since fatigue is not a known concept of machines, they will be able to keep your services open round the clock.
Capable of Extensive Customer Service
There are sites that can be difficult to navigate. Online shops aim to be user-friendly, but since not everyone finds it convenient, owners have begun using chatbots to help users with the process. The advantage of using bots for this task is that it has the capability to cater to all users at the same time. If people were doing this then it would need a lot of manpower and would cost a lot to help every user visiting the site.
Can Improve Business Scalability
Businesses find it hard to expand because of operational costs. Hiring additional staff to accommodate more load can be replaced by investing in a bot that does the repetitive tasks. You’ll only have to pay one-time and you’ll have it work for you for a long time. A mixture of hiring people that can handle higher functions and integrating bots into your business will significantly increase your capacity and may open up other ventures for you.
Proactive Engagement Capability
Today, you have to proactively engage your market in order to have sustained growth. Passively responding only when customers communicate will not cut it anymore. To help your brand you must be able to initiate contact with your customers periodically and that will be a massive undertaking for a person to do. Bots, on the other hand, can initiate a conversation with a lot of people at a time, which will make your brand always in front of the market’s eyes. Making your bot friendly and intelligent will help you build an image that your customers can trust. Using social media to contact your customers, you will be able to increase their spending by 20% or more.
Capable Personal Assistant
It has the ability to record and pull up historical activities, they can actually be a good source of advice for various things like restaurants, clubs, and other tips. Also, they have access to your apps, they can be a good hands-free tool to use.
Consumer Monitoring and Data Analytics
Because it can record consumer activity you can actually draw insights from the data gathered. Tracking the purchase pattern and behavior of your customers, you can develop strategies around the things that you can identify that needs changing. By using the responses given by the users you can direct your bot to suggest better products and services. The data will also help your marketing team to come up with a more personalized menu for the users.
What makes a good Chatbot?
The effective use of this AI program is determined by the understanding of the consumers and their needs. The program must be goal-oriented and is designed to accommodate customer experience requirements and KPI that shows its value to the user. With that said, it must be understood that not all chatbots are equal, you must learn to determine the characteristics or capabilities to make your AI an effective component of your business. Here are 3 things that make a good bot work better for you:
Good Conversational Training
A good bot should be able to comprehend the context of the conversation, even better if it can understand multiple languages. This is attributed to its natural language processing (NLP) that makes it capable to identify intent or the requirement of the user and provide a correct response. The advanced bots can seek out or clarify questions, even if its interaction with the user is not linear.
Can Work Across Channels
Your chatbot must be able to access different platforms and can hold data for seamless conversation. An example is to have your AI integrated with the CRM which is a critical system in your workflow and can handle routine requests or more complicated multi-layered flows depending on its granted permission.
Pre-Trained
A good program will be able to process its own data and come up with accurate reasoning without human intervention. This can also be achieved by its ability to look at historical requests or have it pre-trained for specific knowledge of an industry or brand.
Chatbots cannot totally replace human interaction nor can it take away jobs from people. It can only do certain tasks and unburden employees with mundane, repetitive roles and give them the bandwidth to do critical roles in business. For your chatbots to be really effective, you will have to focus on the things mentioned above which mainly boils down to improving the consumer experience.
