Chatbot

The Complete Guide to Chatbots

What is a Chatbot?

As the same suggests, chatbots are computer programs built to simulate human conversations – whether on a website, a messaging app, or a virtual assistant. With today’s customers expecting immediacy and personalization in their interactions with brands, the addition of chatbots as a communication channel has become critical to business growth. 

In its simplest form, chatbots can be programmed to answer specific, frequently asked questions, offering an easy way to engage with visitors. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence (AI) – powered chatbots can learn from user behavior and previous agent interactions to predict visitor behavior and offer relevant information. Chatbots can help automate interactions and offer instant accessibility across sales, marketing, and customer service functions.

There are a number of synonyms for chatbot, including “talkbot,” “bot,” “IMbot,” “interactive agent” or “artificial conversation entity.”

“Key Points”

• Chatbots, also called chatterbots, is a form of artificial intelligence (AI) used in messaging apps.
• This tool helps add convenience for customers-they are automated programs that interact with customers like a human would and cost little to nothing to engage with.
• Key examples are chatbots used by businesses in Facebook Messenger, or as virtual assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa.
• Chatbots tend to operate in one of two ways-either via machine learning or with set guidelines.
• However, due to advancements in AI technology, chatbots using set guidelines are becoming a historical footnote.

How do chatbots work?

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, and 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.

Step 1: Train for relevant topics

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.

Step 2: Learn from Multi-channels

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.

Step 3: Predict the next step

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.

Why chatbots can be game-changing for your business?

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.

Save Responding Time: 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 answers. It can also help customers with troubleshooting workflows to solve their queries themselves.

Available Anytime and Anywhere: 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.

Improve Customer Engagement: Your business should be able to engage with your customers at every step of their journey. Chatbots can help personalize conversations, nature 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.

Personalize Conversations Everytime: Chatbots allow you to share updates and notifications to build 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 personalized outreach to improve engagement quality. 

Nudge Towards Actions: 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.

Can Chatbots help you solve for the customer?

Just like how chatbots are beneficial to business, they also helpful to customers. As the end-users of chatbots, the success of this tool remains entirely in the hands of visitors. Customers want easy and quick solutions to their problems, and chatbots can be that tool.

Quicker Resolutions: Unlike email or traditional live chat, chatbots can give answer within seconds. Customers will be able to move forward once they get answers to what they are looking for. This also means that the customer will be able to purchase without leaving the webpage.

More Accessible: The main reason users embrace chatbot as a tool is that it is easily accessible to them. No matter which web page, platform, or app they are on, having a chatbot there makes it easier for them to interact with your business.

Comfortable Communication: Messaging tools are being used more than social media because your customer spends most of their time on mobile and is used to chatting with friends and family. By offering them a familiar communication channel, the customer has complete control of the conversation and is more likely to engage. Customers can use chatbots to get answers 24/7 from messaging platforms of their choice.

What are the Types of chatbots?

The growth in chatbot technology has been as dynamic as the evolution of chatbot capabilities. For now, chatbots can be broadly categorized into three types are differentiated by their technical complexity, namely:

1. Simple chatbots,
2. Smart chatbots, &
3. Hybrid chatbots.

The features you should be looking for in a chatbot

The very first chatbot, ELIZA, made in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum, was built as therapy robot, to offer scripted responses to therapy-related questions. It was liner 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:

1. Omni-channel: 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.
2. No code: 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.
3. Affordable: 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.
4. Teachable: 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 required it to perform highly complicated functions, find a chatbot that doesn’t required too much technical expertise. The more complicated the functionality, the more time you will need to spend writing code to train your chatbot.
5. Artificial Intelligence: 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 known when to hand over the chat to a team member. Both these features offer uninterrupted communication flows between the business and the customer.
6. Sentiment Analysis: 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.

Look for a chatbot that fits your business needs.

When implementing chatbots within the sales funnel, it’s important to find provide who offers extensive capabilities where automation can fill in online sales gaps. Your chatbot software should be able to:

Trigger Messages: Chatbots can automate trigger messages to nudge site visitors into action. Trigger messages are similar to pop-up displays that appear once you enter a website, but it’s within the chat widget. Unlike pop-up displays that end up hiding content on the page, and offer only one-way communication, chatbots are personalized and conversational without hiding the page contents.

Automatically Escalate Sales REPS: Chatbots can be trained to automatically transfer the chat to an agent based on customer intent. There are two instances where agent-off is useful First, to handle frustrated customers, and second, to resolve queries beyond the abilities of a chatbot.

Integrates With CRM: Once the chatbot qualifies leads, automatically sends the leads to the CRM. This makes keeping track of leads much easier and helps sales teams stay productive.

Automatically Schedule Meeting with Sales: With chatbots, you can add widgets of third-party apps such as Google calendar, in order to expand the capabilities of the bot, in fact, getting appointments is still the biggest problem faced by visitors when interacting with online businesses. Chatbots easily eliminate this problem. When the visitor requests to set up a meeting with the sales team, they can do it within the chat widget.

Connect Across Languages and Platforms: If your customers are globally located, then you’ll want a chatbot that can communicate in several languages and integrate with channels other than your website (like WhatsApp for Business and Apple Business Chat).

Top Chatbot Platforms

1. Freshchat

Freshchat offers Al-driven, omnichannel chatbots for customer service. It’s a great addition to your support strategy and enables your team to provide a delightful support experience every time. Here’s what you get with Freshchat bots

• Freshchat bots automate resolutions to offer instant responses to common customer queries.
• Steer clear from scripted robotic answers and boost customer engagement by responding to customers with small talk
• With the no-code bot builder, you can have your chatbots up and running on your website within a few minutes.
• Freshchat bots know when to transfer the chat to an agent. This seamless agent transfer saves your customers from getting stuck in an endless chatbot loop.
• Freshchat bots are highly scalable and support customers on messaging channels, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, and more.

Pricing plans: 21 days free trial and billed based on monthly bot sessions.

2. Drift Chatbot

The Drift chatbot is primarily focused on lead generation and is more suitable for sales teams.

Features include

• Customer engagement
• Lead generation
• Schedule meetings
• A/B bot testing

Pricing plans: There is no free trial, and the pricing is available upon request.

3. Intercom

Intercom offers chatbots for sales, support, and marketing.

Their features include

• Code-free builder
• Customizable bots
• Proactive support

Pricing plans: No free trial and pricing is calculated based on the volume of conversations.

4. Chatfule

Chatfule is a chatbot platform that is specifically designed for websites, Facebook and Instagram. 

Features include

• No code bot platform
• Templates for sales and customer support
• Triggered messages

Pricing plans: Free 50 conversations and three different plans priced on the volume of conversations.

5. Landbot.io

Landbot.io is a chatbot platform best suited for independent and small businesses. 

Features include

• No code builder
• Lead capture
• Website and WhatsApp support
• Third-party integrations

Pricing plans: Free trial and three different plans billed on the number of chats.

6. Mobile Monkey

Mobile Monkey is a mobile messaging platform that focuses on Facebook Messenger support.

Features include

• Lead generation
• Email and SMS support
• Schedule meetings

pricing plans: Free trial and three other pricing plans depending on the use case.

7. Pandorabots

Pandorabots is one of the oldest and largest chatbot service providers.

Features include

• Customer engagement
• Character chatbot
• Third-party integrations
• No-code builder
• Multi-lingual

Pricing plans: Free trial and three different plans based on the volume of messages.

8. Tidio

Tidio offers chatbots that aim to improve customer experience.

Features include

• Lead generation
• Triggered messaging
• Third-party integrations
• Triggered messages

9. Aivo

Aivo is a chatbot platform that offers both text and voice messaging for customer interactions.

Features include

• Third-party integrations
• WhatsApp campaigns
• Image, voice, and video support

Pricing plans: Free trial and four different plans billed per conversation.

10. ManyChat

ManyChat is a popular chatbot platform more suited for social media support.

Features include

• Messaging channel support
• Third-party integrations 
• Personalized messaging

Pricing plans: Free trial and two other pricing plans.

The Complete Guide to Chatbots for Websites

What is a website chatbot?

Your website is the face of your business. Consumers no longer visit a store to see products or order services: they visit websites to take action. People want to make to make educated purchases, get updates on their orders, and get easy, fast solutions to their issues. However, building a support team to handle this surge in customer engagement is difficult and expensive.

Enter chatbots. A chatbot for website is a chatbot that is specifically designed to engage with your webpage visitors. These chatbots can be easily deployed on your website to engage with customers and offer support 24/7.

Businesses have realized that websites are no longer a one-way communication channel. Before chatbots, conversion rates on websites were as low as 2%. Once early adopters deployed chatbots, they saw conversion rates rise exponentially as the conversational chatbots made their websites more engaging.

There are two different types of chatbots you can deploy on your website. One is a simple, rule-based or answer bot which can handle common and frequently asked questions. However, the second kind- those Al-powered chatbots can offer conversational engagement, proactively reach out to visitors, guide them to a purchase decision, understand user intent, and offer precise resolutions.

How to add a Chatbot to your Website?

Select a chatbot that best for your business:

There are two types of chatbots you can choose from-rule-based bots and Al chatbots, Rule-based bots are best for multiple-choice questions and Information collection. In contrast, Al chatbots are best for real-time automated conversations based on the customer’s Intent. You can choose to use a hybrid chatbot that combines the capabilities of rules-based bots and Al chatbots.

Note: If you have built your own chatbot, you can connect it with a full-fledged live chat software solution to expand its capabilities, and use conversational APIs to enable agent-facing features.

Design conversations that deliver results:

Set a goal for your chatbots and identify the best method to reach it. Your bots can simply answer frequently asked questions or undertake complex workflows that cater to your business processes. Either way, create chatbot templates that offer comprehensive solutions and the highest level of customer experience. To ensure success in the chatbot development process, understand how your visitors use your website- focus on the user experience, and you’ll spend less time tinkering with your bot later.

Test and publish your chatbot:

Once you’re done setting it up, don’t forget to test your chatbot conversations, both from a technical perspective, and a user experience perspective. Once that’s done, you can take your chatbot live.

The best Al chatbots can also be trained through Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing systems to understand a customer’s intent, identify gaps in their workflows and if necessary, either request more information or transfer to a human agent, or Come back to your chatbot regularly and fix the nooks and crannies that you might have missed out on.

Benefits of adding a chatbot to your website

• Increase Engagement Rates: 50% of website visitors are likely to engage after receiving just one response via chat. For your team to manually respond to every visitor is time-intensive, requires high effort, and often creates a bottleneck of unanswered conversations. Chatbots remove this bottleneck entirely by auto-responding to every user who reaches out through chat and guiding them closer to a purchase decision.
• Reduce Repetitive Questions: The majority of queries that come in on your website are most likely to be repetitive questions. For example, if you run a store, the most common question you could get is, what are the timings of your store? If you are a medical practitioner, you are likely to get questions about scheduling appointments. With the help of a chatbot on your website, you can transfer the responsibility of answering routine questions to your bot.
• Improve Core Messaging: Chatbots can also gather data from their interactions with website visitors, which you can use to improve your messaging strategy. For instance, if you want to offer a discount specifically to high-quality leads, the chatbot can collect information such as time spent on the conversation, page navigations, conversation history, or other lead-scoring criteria to qualify the lead. Based on this information, you can decide whether the lead is qualified for the discount, and even set up automatic triggers to offer the discount to qualified leads, with zero manual effort.
• Maximize on Localized Interactions: 

  A study records that nearly 75% of customers preferred making purchases in their non-English, native language sites, indicating that your global audiences will be more responsive if you can interact in more than one language Chatbots can be created to automatically recognize and respond in common international languages.

Chatbots for  Sales

Salespeople are always looking for ways to convert online traffic into leads. To do this, all user Interface efforts are aimed at guiding visitors to a landing page where they can choose to provide their details. And if they fit the requirements, they are qualified as a lead. Obviously, this process is long-drawn, and the end result is an average of 2.35% of website traffic converted into leads on a landing page across industries.

Today, online businesses can also use live chat to proactively reach out to visitors and convert more leads. Not only do your conversion rates increase because you have the full attention of the visitor, but you can also craft responses that speak to the specific challenges they face and therefore have a higher chance of converting them. However, live chat is hard to scale when you want to provide 24/7 availability and have limited team bandwidth. In fact, nearly 30% of all live chat conversations are left unattended.

This is where chatbots come to the rescue of sales teams.

Improve your sales process with chatbots

• Chatbots convert website traffic into potential leads: Chatbots persuade visitors to take action by proactively messaging them. Think of it as a store assistant tapping your shoulder to ask, “How can I help you?”. You are more likely to turn a window shopper into a purchasing customer by simply offering help. Just like that, the chatbot can start a conversation with a question or an offer, based on what the visitor is looking for. This way, you are engaging with site visitors before they leave your website.
• Chatbots remove friction from the lead capture process: Chatbots can bypass cumbersome forms and collect information on every page. You don’t need to direct visitors to a new page each time, and you can collect information across several sessions over time.
• Chatbots give back to sales representatives: Before chatbots, sales representatives had to go to great lengths to get find leads. But with chatbots, a big part of lead generation and qualification is automated. Sales reps benefit from the automation because chatbots hold the fort by doing most of the work, leaving sales reps to focus on converting leads into paying customers.

Chatbots for Marketing

Marketers have always been one of the first adopters of new trends and technologies. As brands try to capture the attention of their audience, it simply makes sense to reach potential customers on platforms that they are already using. From print to email, and phone calls to online chat, marketers have had to constantly evolve to keep up with changes in customer behavior.

In a 2019 survey, 57% of shoppers say they always do research before they buy to ensure they are making the best possible choice. That’s why it’s critical to proactively engage with potential customers and help them make a purchase decision. As the virtual marketing representative for your company, chatbots can solve the key concerns that every marketer faces-generating leads, offering multiple engagement touchpoints, running personalized campaigns, and making purchasing easier with plug-ins such as proactive notifications and built-in payments.

What is a Customer service chatbot?

A customer service chatbot is a computer program equipped with natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to understand and respond to customer queries and requests through a chat interface. These chatbots are designed to improve experience throughout the customer’s journey and help them with common queries. These chatbots can be integrated into websites, messaging channels, and mobile apps to provide 24/7 customer service and assist with tasks such as answering frequently asked questions, tracking orders, and troubleshooting technical issues.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Chatbot

Advantages:

1. 24/7 Availability: Chatbots can provide 24/7 customer service without the need for human intervention, which means that customers can get assistance at any time of the day or night.

2. Efficiency: Chatbots can handle multiple customer queries simultaneously, which can significantly reduce response times and improve the overall efficiency of customer service operations.

3. Cost-effective: Chatbots can reduce the cost of customer service by eliminating the need for additional human resources and training.

4. Personalization: Chatbots can use customer data and machine learning algorithms to provide personalized recommendations and responses.

5. Scalability: Chatbots can easily scale to handle a large volume of customer queries without impacting response times or quality of service.

Disadvantages:

1. Limited Understanding: Chatbots may have limited understanding of complex queries or nuances of human language and may not be able to provide accurate responses to all customer queries.

2. Lack of Empathy: Chatbots lack the ability to empathize with customers, which can sometimes lead to negative customer experiences.

3. Initial Development Costs: Developing and implementing a chatbot can be expensive, especially for smaller businesses or organizations.

4. Technical Issues: Chatbots may encounter technical issues or glitches that can impact their performance and require maintenance and updates.

5. Security Risks: Chatbots may pose security risks if they are not properly secured, as they may collect and store sensitive customer information.

The Future of Chatbots

As with all AI tools, chatbots will continue to evolve and support human capabilities. When they take on the routine tasks with much more efficiency, humans can be relieved to focus on more creative, innovative, and strategic activities.

Wherever you are in your journey as a business owner, using chatbots can help you improve customer engagement, expand your customer base, qualify leads at the outset and expand to global markets easily. With so many advantages, it makes sense to start using chatbots for your business growth right now.