Benefits of migrating from a Live Chat to a Chatbot ??

Over the last few months, the idea of implementing a chatbot on Essential Beauty's website was explored. The aim was to audit with the ultimate aim of improving the user experience onsite and via a live chat function. We identified few issues namely:

• Availability: 9-5 was simply not adequate as they often engaged with the chat app after 'retail/office hours'. Conversely, from our analytics data, our customers were spread quite evenly across the day.
• The answers given were often not helpful for the customer, confusing, and didn't solve their issues.
• A large number of services available made it hard to keep up with our offers and promotions, often leading to misinformation.
• We found we were losing 100 potential 'chats' on average per week. Conversely, while online the live chat was only able to keep up with the demand of chats resulting in lag time and eventually bouncing off
• Importantly the live chat was manned by a worker from overseas which created a slew of its own issues and I'd avoid for areas such as this.

To rectify the issues found above, resourcing this to its fullest with a user live 24/7 was not feasible and would become a costly exercise. Thus the most logical solution led to the implementation of a chatbot. But before doing so I tasked the worker to record all interactions for 2 months to get a gauge on the most popular questions our customers were seeking. This formulated the basics of the plan.

Having limited experience in designing a customer journey for a chatbot I grabbed a whiteboard and marker to wireframe it at its most basic level. This is one of the best ways to draft, design and to map the customer journey that would best our customer's needs on-site.

Next up was to identify a chatbot that was easy to build, as well as have seamless integration within our website. An abundance of options are available however, I landed on Artibot which is easy to implement via a snippet of code inserted into the footer. It does come with easy installation via its plugin but if you're comfortable with your CMS's backend I recommend code to ensure your site isn't slowed down by an additional plugin (my article on the number of plugins needed for Wordpress site).

Despite mapping this on the whiteboard, designing and building the parameters was another thing entirely. It took a good 3-4 weeks of testing and refining to ensure:

• the customer journey was mapped and closed off the conversation properly.
• ensured we covered as many of our main topics as possible
• keeping the information clear and to the point.
• most importantly giving the customers the answers they wanted.

The result is with every complete chat the following is sent to our inbox:

Allowing us to track and gather data with a constant stream of information including:

• Source of the chatbot being initiated (URL)
• What was clicked in process
• whether they were on desktop or mobile.

Would I recommend a chatbot for everyone? Yes but this would depend on the business as well as their needs. It can be beneficial with an abundance of benefits mostly the ability to reduce costs and time needed to devote to a chat app. However, if a brand prefers a more human approach than by all means stick to a live aspect.