What is a Chatbot?
An intelligent, well-structured chatbot can seamlessly help you save costs, automate customer support, and deliver outstanding personalized experiences for your customers.
What are the types of Chatbots?
Chatbots are classified primarily into two different types –
1. Rule-Based Chatbots
Rule-based chatbots are normally used for simpler applications and processes. These bots can answer questions based on a predefined set of rules that they have been programmed for and cannot operate on a standalone basis. These chatbots are only capable of executing rule-based commands and thus can lead to poor customer experiences.
2. AI Chatbots
AI chatbots are advanced and can handle open-ended queries wisely! They can become smarter over time using NLP and machine learning algorithms. AI-powered chatbot leverages natural language processing services model to learn the context and understand the meaning from the user input.
Why does your business need an AI-powered Chatbot?
Still wondering why chatbots are important for your business. Then let’s take a look at the top 10 reasons why chatbots can turn out to be a boon for your business–
1. Round the clock availability
Over 50% of customers expect a business to be open 24/7. (Oracle, 2017)
2. Faster resolution time
69% of consumers said they would prefer chatbots over human agents for receiving instantaneous responses. (Cognizant, 2019)
3. Cost-saving
Smart Chatbots can help businesses save costs up to 30% on their customer support costs. (IBM)
4. More meaningful leads
$2.6 trillion in business value will be explored in the coming years in marketing and sales. That implies marketers who deploy AI have the ability to accelerate their companies and careers by building an upper hand with this innovation—particularly with regards to lead generation and conversion. (McKinsey Analytics)
5. Better customer support
27% of consumers were unsure if the last customer support interaction they had was with a real person or a chatbot. (PwC)
6. Personalized customer experience
71% of consumers would gladly use a bot if it could improve their customer experience. (Conversocial, 2020)
7. Increased website conversion rate
57% of executives cite that conversational chatbots enable their websites to provide personalized attention to customers. (Accenture, 2018)
8. Better ROI
57% of businesses claimed that chatbot delivers large ROI on minimal investment. (Accenture Digital)
What are the top 10 features that define the best Conversational AI Chatbot?
Chatbots have evolved over time, and so have customers’ expectations. Customers today look for an instant resolution to their problems and they are ready to switch to the other brand if they find the service provider is not actively anticipating their needs. Thus, it becomes necessary for businesses to opt-in for the best conversational AI solution to deliver excellent service and encourage customer loyalty.
Here are the top 10 features that define the best IVA (intelligent virtual assistant):
1. Emotionally intelligent
Chatbots are the primary interface between your business and customers. And thus, it is important to opt-in for a Chatbot that is emotionally intelligent to provide a human-like customer experience. Smart AI virtual assistants can help you build a relationship between your brand and your customers with the help of sentiment analysis. Smart AI-powered chatbots can pick up the underlying emotions from the user input and respond in an appropriate manner.
2. Secure
According to the wake of recent studies, AI-powered chatbots are pretty secure. Implementing a bot that is entirely transparent about what data it collects and what is it used for, can help you make most of it. Smart virtual assistants can let your customers have the option to opt-out of data collection only if desired.
3. Customizable
The biggest advantage of deploying a customizable chatbot is that it can be trained the way your customers want it to be. The customizable smart chatbots can reap insights and provide customer support that suits the audience.
4. Analytical
The analytical chatbot can help you capture and analyze your customer support data effortlessly. It can let you curate reports for quick insights. Implement a chatbot that can help you create reports on the go without having to rely on a data analyst or any external business intelligence tools.
5. Multilingual
Communicating with your customers in their preferred language is the key to achieve wider reach globally. Don’t let language be a barrier for your customer support. Increase your reach and boost communication globally with multilingual engagement using a chatbot that supports multiple languages.
6. Omnichannel
The most popular messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram have become the means of community and business survival. In this digital age, not being present on social media is like missing the opportunity of reaching out to 70% of your potential customers. It is important to go for the chatbot service provider that allows you to provide customer support across all touchpoints regardless of channel. You must look for the chatbot that can power conversations across the most used channels to cater to the most preferred gateway for your customers to connect and engage with your business.
7. Platform independent integrations
An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) allows you to integrate with your preferred 3rd-party applications like Qlik, Salesforce, Tableau, Google Sheets, and more. An enterprise-grade integration framework can help you seamlessly connect with virtually any system by providing native integrations and custom integrations.
8. Robust API
APIs allow chatbots to fetch user information from different applications. Having Robust chatbot APIs are capable of providing advanced functionality, along with documentation, data, and services. A strong chatbot API can help you keep customer engagement intact and create an unprecedented experience. It can enable solutions to become flexible and easy to use and control.
9. No code platform
You may think that building an intelligent chatbot requires a lot of effort. But what if we tell you that with a no-code bot-builder platform, you can easily build a smart virtual assistant without writing a single line of code with minimal effort! Yes, a no-code platform bot-builder can make your organization more self-sufficient as you no longer have to depend on your technical teams to deploy the bot.
10. NLP-Enabled
An NLP-enabled chatbot allows incredibly effective and intuitive communication between you and your customers. The NLP-enabled automated platform allows you to provide constructive support to your customers throughout their journey. This may result in improved consumer satisfaction, business productivity, and profitability.
Summary
There are many chatbot builder platforms are available in the market today. You need to make sure that you go for the expert AI chatbot solution provider having solid expertise in all the modern market trends.
If you haven’t adopted a conversational AI chatbot yet, you must opt for Engagely, an enterprise-grade-AI-driven-Conversational Customer Engagement platform trusted by 100+ renowned enterprises across the globe. If you are already using a standard chatbot for your customer support, you must try including these chatbot features and quantifying the business outcomes.
Sources:
1. https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/chatbot
Akshada Benke
Senior content developer- Marketing
Akshada Benke is a content marketer at engagely.ai with more than twelve years of experience in digital content marketing field. She describes herself as a Philomath. She is confident & professional in developing strong consumer-insights driven goals to build brand and relationships.
