How a chatbot can Impact your Business?

In a digital world, customers have come to expect businesses to be available 24/7. And?chatbots?provide an easy and inexpensive way to do just that by adding an automated live chat feature to your website that visitors can interact with to get the help they need when they need it. Not only can chatbots help take the strain off customer support, but savvy businesses are also using chatbots to expand their customer base, generate and qualify leads before passing to their sales teams and serve customers in their preferred language.

What Is a Chatbot?

At a technical level, a chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation to solve customer queries. When a customer or a lead reaches out via any channel, the chatbot is there to welcome them and solve their problems. They can also help the customers lodge a service request, send an email or connect to human agents if need be.

How Chatbots Are Helping Businesses

Chatbots are primarily used to enhance customer experience by offering 24/7 customer support, but in a cost-effective manner. Businesses have also started using chatbots to serve internal customers with knowledge sharing and routine tasks.

After all, it is much quicker to ask a chatbot for information about a product or process rather than sieving through hundreds of pages of documentation. Or, reach out to them to run virus scans rather than wait for an IT support person to turn up at your desk.

How Chatbots Work

Chatbots are most commonly used on business websites. When you have spent a couple of minutes on a website, you can see a chat or voice messaging prompt pop up on the screen. Those are chatbots.

Chatbots had a humble start as computer programs that used keywords and pattern matching to respond to users’ questions based on a pre-written script. Modern chatbots use the latest technologies including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), natural language understanding (NLU), natural language processing (NLP), etc. to provide human-like responses to queries.

How chatbots work depends upon how they have been programmed or developed. Based on their conversation style, there are primarily two types of chatbots:

• Declarative chatbots:?They work from scripted responses to hold “structured conversations” with users. You can think of them as interactive FAQs that can handle common questions about product or service features, pricing tiers or customer care numbers. They can also perform simple repetitive transactions such as asking for feedback, logging a request, etc. Declarative chatbots are the most commonly used types of chatbots currently.
• Predictive chatbots:?They are sophisticated, interactive and conversational chatbots that are also called “virtual, or digital, assistants.” They use NLU, NLP and AI/ML to understand the behavior pattern and profile of users so that they can provide contextual answers to their queries. After repeated use, these digital assistants can learn users’ preferences and provide recommendations based on that. Some examples of conversational chatbots include Amazon‘s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant.

AI and Data—Two Pillars of Chatbots

Artificial intelligence algorithms are used to build conversational chatbots that use text- and voice-based communication to interact with users. The chatbots, once developed, are trained using data to handle queries from the users.

Your chatbot will be as good as the AI and data that it uses. You must take care that the AI that you use is ethical and unbiased. Also, the training data must be of high quality so that the ML model trains the chatbot properly. Otherwise, the chatbot may perform poorly or unexpectedly.

Benefits of Chatbots

We’ve already discussed that chatbots improve customer experience. But enhanced customer experience is not the only benefit of using chatbots. An organization has many advantages of using chatbots for business growth, process efficiency and cost reduction.

• Cost-effectiveness:?A chatbot is a one-time investment. Once it has been developed and implemented, you can scale down on hiring people for customer support. Instead, people can be engaged in solving complex problems and creating strategies for business growth. Chatbots also do not make mistakes for established processes, unlike human agents.
• Save time:?Chatbots can handle routine repetitive tasks and do them much faster than humans.
• Available 24/7:?Chatbots can be available to customers 24/7 without much effort. This can, in turn, lead to more satisfied customers who wouldn’t hesitate to recommend your product or services to their network.
• Reduce customer wait time:?Each chatbot can interact with multiple customers simultaneously, reducing the size of the wait queue. People can get real-time answers to their queries when interacting with chatbots.
• Identify business leads:?You already know that AI chatbots are experts at identifying patterns and keywords. As chatbots handle the initial support interaction with customers or prospects, they can be programmed to identify leads by listening to the words and phrases used by the customers.

How Businesses Use Chatbots

Businesses are using chatbots to serve both internal and external customers and leads:

• Customer service and support:?By providing an AI chatbot on your website or via a call center application, you can direct the customers first to the chatbot to understand and help with their problems. Their routine queries can be easily handled by chatbots. And if the need arises for human intervention, the chatbots can direct the users to customer care agents.
• IT services support:?Chatbots can be programmed to troubleshoot the most common problems faced by employees when using IT infrastructure. Issues such as outage alerts, knowledge management, system status update, password updates, periodic scans, etc. can be efficiently handled by chatbots. They also encourage employees towards self service and automate processes to save time and mind space.
• Enterprise support:?Chatbots can be programmed to answer the most common queries of employees regarding any part of the business process. With time and repeated use,?conversational chatbots can evolve into employees’ personal digital agents, improving their overall working experience.
• Customer care support:?Chatbots can be used to manage incoming calls from customers. They can handle the most common queries from the customers and if needed, scale up to human agents. While chatbots take care of the routine problems, human agents are responsible for more complex issues.
• Expand to new geographical locations:?If you are already using a chatbot, it is very easy to adapt it to new geographical locations, be it timing or language.

The Future of Chatbots

As with all AI tools, chatbots will continue to evolve and support human capabilities. When they take on 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.