Providing quick, personalized, knowledgeable, and proactive online customer support has become a prerequisite for the success of any company. Unsatisfactory support services may result in a bad reputation and lost customers for your business.
An AI chatbot, or a chatbot tool, is a digital technology solution mainly used for customer service and delivering promotional or otherwise useful content. Using artificial intelligence technology, an AI chatbot can convincingly replicate a user's chat-based interactions with another human. Initially, businesses had to create a support center, train the employees, and pay their salaries to run the customer support processes. These services were always prone to human errors and communication barriers.
Also, human-based customer support services were limited to shift timings and couldn’t be available 24/7. AI allows computer programs to simulate a user conversation with a natural language through messaging applications. More and more brands are now leveraging AI chatbots to provide service to their customers and even market their brands.
What is a Chatbot Platform?
Artificial Intelligence chatbot platforms, or AI chatbot apps, are virtual assistants communicating with people using natural language. A customer will, therefore, not have the sensation of talking to a machine. This is possible thanks to artificial intelligence and pre-set answers designed to simulate a human conversation.
Chatbot is derived from combining the two English words “chat” and “robot.” Initially, automated chatbots were available as rule-based chatbots. They were programmed for specific tasks and were limited in functionality.
Modern AI chatbots can deliver a human-like conversational experience in an instant messaging style. They can understand user intent and learn different phrasing in which questions are being asked.
They use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to simulate a user conversation. An AI chatbot platform is nothing more than software based on AI, conceived and designed to answer user questions automatically.
Main Features of AI Chatbots To Look Out For
When deciding on an Artificial Intelligence chatbot technology for your website, check out the main features of the different AI chatbot platforms. This will prevent you from missing out on any important feature your business might require. Modern customers are connected to brands through various channels across the internet and demand instant solutions to their problems.
Precisely for this reason, the AI chatbot is mainly used to offer quality customer service. This is advantageous for both businesses and customers. The best AI chatbots also offer mobile apps that can be used to access services. Your chatbot platform should offer unlimited chat history to avoid paying for extra memory.
The AI chatbot technology allows companies to cut costs by offering a 24-hour service without hiring extra staff for night shifts. This also helps the companies increase the degree of customer satisfaction and allows consumers to receive the information and support they need quickly and at any time.
Changing Customer Requirements
Customers are now connected to the brands across a number of platforms. This includes the website, social media, and the official app. Therefore, companies must determine how support can be provided across all platforms.
In addition to customer care, AI chatbots can help companies in sales processes such as lead generation, telling a story through a storytelling strategy, or supporting the purchasing process for an online shop. To understand what AI chatbots are, you need to think of the Internet, which has accustomed you to a remarkable response speed compared to the past.
Thanks to search engines that can provide us with enormous information on all our questions. For this reason, as a user, you might find yourself extremely frustrated when you find yourself immersed in offline processes - often cumbersome - which take away your time and attention. This is enough to explain the AI chatbot phenomenon, which, thanks to the advances in artificial intelligence, makes it possible to communicate with machines and obtain answers, albeit to specific and circumscribed questions.
Benefits of Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Online
AI chatbots are excellent for automating customer support and lead generation tasks. They are mainly designed to provide information or services to customers without human interference. AI allows bots to understand user requests and provide programmed and personalized responses.
It is no coincidence that these programs are used to give consumers a high-level service through different communication channels, becoming a precious aid for omnichannel marketing. In summary, it can be said that the most important benefits guaranteed by AI chatbots to customers are essential:
Generally, an AI chatbot provides information in FAQs, content regarding products or services, and everything that users can usually acquire from a customer service operator.
Using AI chatbots, companies can considerably save the time and costs associated with human resource activities. These efforts can be used to carry out other important activities. Following are some major benefits of using artificial intelligence chatbots for your business:
Round-the-Clock Availability
AI chatbot software is online and available 24/7 and at a very low cost for businesses. In short, it is like always having active customer assistance. Unlike people, once an AI chatbot is installed, it can handle requests at any time of the day. This way, the customer doesn't have to wait for help from a company operator.
Reduced Costs
AI chatbots eliminate the need for manpower during online customer interaction. This is obviously a big plus for companies that get multiple requests simultaneously. In addition to cost savings, businesses can align the AI chatbot with their goals and use it as a means to improve customer conversion.
Learning and Updating
One of the main advantages of using AI-powered chatbots is that they keep self-improving their conversations and interactions through machine learning capability. When hiring a new employee, regular training is required. However, AI chatbots "form" themselves (with some limitations).
Improved Assistance
AI chatbots can handle most of the customer service tasks and independently manage some requests for assistance. AI chatbots can be entrusted with the most common requests, such as the telephone number of the various departments, how to replace a product purchased by mistake, how to make a return, provide delivery status, and other requests that do not require human interaction.
Only the most complex requests that require more accurate explanations can be passed on to customer service. By using AI chatbots, businesses can achieve greater automation and efficiency in managing assistance requests, and no customer will be left waiting for answers to trivial questions.
Human agents can deal with a limited number of clients simultaneously. This restriction does not exist for AI chatbots, which can handle as many requests as needed at the same time. This is one of the main advantages of using AI chatbots, as no customer is left unattended, and several problems are solved simultaneously. Currently, AI chatbot companies are already working on developing voice AI chatbot services.
Seamless Transactions
AI chatbots can be used to manage simple monetary transactions and provide recommendations. For example, in online booking services, you can ask your customers questions and thus obtain all the information you need to find the best tickets or solutions for them.
By allowing customers to book services online independently, you will have satisfied customers and build a good reputation for your business.
AI chatbots can effectively manage monotonous banking tasks such as blocking stolen cards, identity verification, and confirmation of transfers.
In the future, AI chatbots could also be used in e-commerce platforms to manage the return of goods or the replacement of individual items. Customers may also be able to update or cancel their orders.
Enhanced Data collection
When a customer requests assistance remotely, several formalities are performed to verify the person’s authenticity, such as collecting the main data concerning them. For example, the authorization to manage the account remotely and other additional information such as email and telephone number is verified.
An AI chatbot application could be used to speed up the procedure before passing the request to an operator. In this way, the resolution of the problem will be faster, and the operator will immediately have all the main information they need at their disposal. It will allow you to resolve customer queries instantly.
How To Add an AI Chatbot To Your Website?
Simple integration alone is not enough to guarantee the AI chatbot's success on your website. You need to devise a strategy that must be planned to obtain excellent results. You must identify the goals you intend to achieve and the most suitable type of answer to pursue them. If the AI chatbot has to respond to user requests, you must set up responses to satisfy them. This will only be possible if you know your target and its needs.
The AI chatbot must be implemented in a larger marketing strategy as it can only prove useful if placed in a well-defined system. If your website is not easily navigable or your social pages are not taken care of, a virtual assistant can provide no added value to your customers.
It is therefore advisable to analyze and, if necessary, intervene on these aspects before proceeding with the implementation. The next step will be identifying the most suitable channels for the best performance. You can decide whether to implement the AI bot on your website or instant messaging platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, Apple business chat, and WhatsApp are the most used to date.
Personalized Customer Journey Design
It is necessary to use a personalized customer journey design service, where the processes and priorities of the service are defined. This will allow the service to establish the operating margin of the bot, the tasks it can solve on its own, or when the intervention of a human operator is necessary.
Furthermore, a system for monitoring the efficiency of AI customer service must be defined through KPIs that can be analyzed and allow for better performance to be obtained.
Furthermore, the evolution of AI must not be missing through the continuous improvement of its interaction ability. One of the paths to pursue is that of emotional analysis, which allows conversational AI to analyze the customer's feelings and emotions from the tone of voice so as to be able to offer a deeper understanding of the request and consequently respond in an increasingly efficient way.
What Is The Future of AI-powered Chatbots?
AI chatbots are expected to revolutionize customer support and be a crucial driver of business success. AI chatbots are constantly updated to provide seamless, realistic, automated conversations.
Using conversational AI for customer service opens up various future perspectives that guide toward ever-greater automation of contacts and transactions. AI is helping chatbots, and voice bots reproduce more "human" behavior. You need to focus on a "trained" artificial intelligence algorithm.
This will allow you to switch from a responsive to a predictive perspective so as to be able to positively change customer care management and consequently increase the customer's customer experience. In the future, AI chatbot adoption by businesses will likely increase rapidly.
Best AI Chatbots In 2023
All AI chatbots have the common purpose of automating customer support and sales tasks for you. Below, we will discuss some of the best chatbots you can use for your business.
Infobip
strengthened its collaboration with Microsoft by integrating WhatsApp and SMS channels with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales.
This has allowed companies to expand customer relationships, increase loyalty, improve digital communications, and increase sales. More and more customers need to send messages to companies instead of making phone calls, and it is important that brands respond to these needs.
The in-built chatbot builder also allows companies to create customized digital communication campaigns with customers using messages and benefit from WhatsApp's advanced features, such as images and videos.
It includes sending personalized coupons to existing or potential customers to increase sales. Furthermore, it can be used to collect feedback to improve products and services and send reminders of events, appointments, or payment deadlines.
Customer data from a single dashboard gives Dynamics 365 Sales users chatbot analytics. It is a complete view of digital customer communications across these new channels. It also allows you to view reports of sent and delivered messages.
Tidio
Tidio is a chat solution that offers powerful live chat and conversational AI chatbot tools. Tidio Chat provides everything you need to quickly bring live chats and AI chatbots to your website. It is best described as a relationship-building tool with CRM features allowing you to reach visitors and make new connections.
The software has received numerous accolades, including mentions from Forbes, FoxNews, and HubSpot, and rave reviews across various platforms. There are two ways to install Tidio Chat on your site. First, it can be activated as a plugin for various website platforms, including Shopify, Wix, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce.
You also have the option to add the JavaScript installation code to your site. Overall, the tool is intuitive and beginner-friendly, requiring no previous technical knowledge. Tidio automates your customer service strategy by directing customers to relevant articles on your site or providing predetermined answers to frequently asked questions.
A combination of live chat and intelligent chatbots is key to ensuring the best possible customer service interactions around the clock. You can use Tidio to equip your website with live chat functionality within minutes. You can even customize the colors of your live chat feature to fit your brand aesthetic.
Tidio provides real-time visitor tracking indicating their browser and the country they are connecting from. This makes it easier to get to know your website visitors in real-time and spot opportunities to reach them. It's also worth mentioning that the contact details of previous chat participants are saved so that no one has to re-appear.
You can also review their last visited page to determine their interest in a particular item, service, or product. This provides the information needed to provide personalized customer support.
You can filter and segment visitors in the live preview to align with your marketing goals. Finally, whenever you find a visitor you want to contact, simply hit "start chat" to ping a chat message request on your website.
You can set up accounts for each agent with an inbox search feature that lets you quickly find old messages from regular customers. Tidio comes with a shared inbox that syncs your messages from all your communication channels, including:
- Live chat
- Social media messages such as Facebook Messenger
Customer profiles include customer information such as their contact details, what pages they visited, and your notes. Also, when you integrate Tidio with your online store, you can review in real-time which products are in a customer's cart and order details.
With this know-how at your disposal, it's easier to make product recommendations that match their interests. Finally, you can add and remove visitor tags from customer profiles based on their behavior.
Ada
Ada is one of the best AI chatbots. It is an excellent option for optimizing, accelerating, and achieving your automation goals. Ada is a virtual assistant software that can automate thousands of conversation topics with every customer and employee, thus saving costs and increasing revenues. This bridges the gap between your company and potential customers who want to contact you.
It has the ability to quickly resolve the most common questions with automatic FAQs and smart search capabilities, instant ticketing, and use case-oriented reporting. This platform uses industry-leading natural language technologies. Thanks to being a low-code/no-code development platform, it is very easy to install and requires no coding knowledge. Ada can provide you with real-time analytics through ML-powered insights to ensure optimization.
Watson Assistant
IBM Watson is an application environment that makes the most of artificial intelligence. It can establish a dialogue with humans using natural language and more. Thanks to machine learning algorithms, it can recognize and classify images and sounds, perform forecast calculations, automate many routines, and make decisions.
The IBM environment is an open-source AI chatbot that is constantly evolving. Right from the start, IBM provided the APIs free of charge, and almost all of the development tools present are open source. This means that IBM Watson grows and evolves with input from a development community. It also allows you to create customized AI chatbots.
There is the Watson API, as mentioned, but there is also Watson Studio, Watson Machine Learning, Watson OpenScale, and, above all, Watson Assistant. The most obvious component, Watson Assistant, allows you to quickly build and develop AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants to dialogue with customers and automate the back office.
Zoho SalesIQ
Zoho SalesIQ is a useful tool for businesses that want to track their website visitors and chat with them in real time. It's a great way to get to know your customers and see their interests. The software is easy to use and can be customized to your needs. SalesIQ by Zoho is a sales intelligence and customer relationship management platform.
It was created to help sales teams increase their productivity and generate more transactions. Services offered by SalesIQ include lead tracking, contact management, deal management, email integration, and reporting. It also includes a mobile app that can be used to view customer data on the go.
SalesIQ has helped several companies grow sales and improve customer connections. It's a great resource for sales teams of all sizes. If you want to increase your sales and improve customer interactions, SalesIQ is a good option to consider. It helps you keep track of your visitors and lets you chat with them, giving you loads of details like customer engagement, new and returning customers, and sales opportunities.
They also provide details about your website visitors, such as their location and site behavior. They can help you with market research and planning strategies to improve product sales. Your campaigns bring traffic to your site, and it is good that it is as least static as possible to avoid "bounce."
Zoho SalesIQ monitors the impact of visitors, routes conversations to the right operators, identifies new and returning interlocutors, starts an automatic chat based on visitor activity, and automatically translates the chat. Digital consultants can perfectly adapt all the features of this software, like all the most widespread solutions in the world regarding digital transformation, to the needs of the market and your business.
Conclusion
An AI chatbot application is a digital technology solution mainly used to provide excellent customer service and deliver promotional or otherwise useful content. Using artificial intelligence technology, an AI chatbot can convincingly replicate a user's chat-based interactions with another human.
Implementing the best AI chatbot to your website allows you to provide memorable, frictionless, and engaging overall customer experiences. Advanced AI chatbots have revolutionized the interaction between brands and consumers over the last few years. Thanks to this tool and the right strategy, you can earn increased customer satisfaction and loyalty advantages.
