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A chatbot is usually integrated into websites or mobile applications and provides a more convenient interaction with the site or application through different communication methods. In customer service, chatbots are used to answer frequently asked questions and can be used as an information resource.
According to a recent eMarketer report, messaging app users will grow from 755 million to over 1 billion in the next few years.
In the field of e-commerce, chatbots help small businesses to enhance customers’ online experience by improving the speed of service during peak hours. They can also be used for targeted advertising, which allows you to show the most appropriate offer at the time when a user needs it most.
In this article, I will discuss what an AI chatbot is, its types, its benefits, and how it can help you to leverage your business.
What is an AI-Powered Chatbot?
AI chatbots are computer programs that simulate human interaction through artificial conversational or textual interfaces with no need for human interaction. These chatbots are used frequently by businesses to answer simple customer queries. It provides 24/7 customer support to customers and helps to improve the overall experience of clients.
In case a customer uses difficult words and phrases, the bot can be easily taught what to answer and how to respond in order to cope with this emergency.
The great thing about an AI-enabled bot is that you can fine-tune its personality and even add humor to make it more human-like in its responses. Your customers will enjoy talking with your bot as it will feel like having a conversation with a natural person just like Siri or Alexa.
How Do AI-based Chatbots Work?
In recent years, AI chatbots have become more and more popular. It is a growing market, and people are attracted to it because of its ease of use and effectiveness. People want it to take over a lot of the tedious work we do on a daily basis.
A chatbot is an artificial intelligence-powered software that can understand the natural language processing, and respond to it. The program responds to the queries of customers and interacts with the customers the way humans do. The chatbot was originally developed to make internet search more accessible and efficient.
A chatbot is a perfectly natural solution for businesses that need customers but find it difficult to build a strong in-person presence. One obvious option is to offer help through a live operator hotline. But live operators have a serious disadvantage – they’re not available 24/7 and still need to sleep and eat sometimes.
Chatbots are better at this because they can work around the clock, instantly respond to questions, return your messages in seconds, remember user preferences, understand conversations, and much more.
Types of Chatbots
To choose the ideal chatbot according to your business it is vital to know the types of chatbot. Now let’s take a look at the types of chatbots, so that, it will help you a lot what types of chatbots you need to fulfill your business needs.
1. Rule-Based
Rule-based chatbots are highly dependent on user input information processing. They base their responses on the data provided by their users. It uses a set of rules to determine the next steps in the conversation.
For example, they would respond to certain keywords or phrases with some predefined answer or message. The rule-based chatbots only provide conversational experiences, not useful functionalities. They are just scripts that carry out certain functions as triggered by some predefined rule.
2. AI-Based
AI-powered chatbots are a more advanced form of decision tree-based chatbots. Users’ choices or answers trigger machine learning algorithms to get better over time. It is more aware of some patterns and adjusts its answer depending on responses it receives from users.
AI-enabled chatbots work by analyzing the words used by a person when they initiate a conversation with them. This is done through pattern recognition and natural language processing.
3. Intellectually Independent Chatbots
Intellectually independent chatbots are more complicated but can be trained to behave more like a human when given a specific set of commands. They are programmed to learn from interactions and adapt their responses based on data received from their users.
These chatbots can have their responses entirely customized based on who is using them and what they want out of them.
Benefits of Deploying AI-Enabled Chatbot for Businesses
The best AI chatbot can run through thousands of iterations, which will be great for businesses that need to make multiple changes in their services or products. Now let’s take a look at the key benefits of an AI powered chatbot.
1. 24×7 Customer Service
Running a business is like tending to a fire, while it is burning, you cannot go away to rest or sit and relax. Businesses need round-the-clock support to address all customer queries, which, if missed can sabotage the company’s image and incur huge losses.
Deploying an AI-enabled chatbot can be a boon for businesses that require 24×7 support to serve customers effectively. Chatbots can work tirelessly without any break and provide assistance to customers without engaging any human resources.
In other words, customers will be happy to interact with a bot as opposed to a human being as it is more convenient and quicker as well. Chatbots will be efficient enough to understand customers’ queries, resolve them and route queries requiring human intervention to the concerned department for action.
This 24×7 support can prove a game changer for businesses that are targeting global audiences and are looking for efficient customer support at a reasonable cost.
2. Provide More With Cost Savings
The cost-saving aspect of AI-powered chatbot is one of its crucial aspects. In traditional customer service, the cost goes beyond operational expenses, including infrastructure and staff costs.
You will have to maintain the physical infrastructure such as office space, computers, and internet connectivity.
AI-powered chatbots can reduce buyers’ journey to a single interaction by making the process of booking and paying for services much simpler.
3. Smoother Customer Journey
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the world with its potential to transform communication and boost customer experience. Chatbots are an important part of the AI wave and will be a key part of shaping the future customer experience.
Using AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, you can build a chatbot AI that is:
- Natural – It understands how to speak naturally with people and understands how to be polite and responsive in conversations.
- Intelligent – It gets smarter with every interaction it has with your potential customers or clients. The more interactions it has, the more intelligent it becomes. This helps the chatbot handle a variety of queries from your customers with finesse and greater accuracy.
Key Features of AI-Powered Chatbot for Better Business Productivity
In the present digital era, every business is thinking of upgrading its technologies to engage customers through AI-powered chatbots.
AI chatbots can be beneficial for small-scale businesses to provide smooth communication and improve brand reputation in a short time. If you need a chatbot to engage your customer then focus on these features to deliver a smooth experience.
1. Visual Flow Builder
It is a feature that makes communicating easier within a bot. Instead of writing out a response message yourself, you can use the Visual Flow Builder and select templates and pictures to create a user flow that responds to the questions and answers the issues that your users will have.
This can be useful if your bot has a lot of functionality or you have an especially complicated conversation.
2. Fallback Options
Fallbacks are the default ways that a user can interact with your chatbot AI. When a bot is not able to identify the user’s input then it provides multiple options relevant to the query or hands over the coversation to a live human agent to provide a seamless customer support experience.
The best fallback is one that allows for the least amount of frustration for both parties. You want to make sure your fallbacks are as accurate as possible because your customer will think you are stupid if you don’t understand what they want to do.
It is also important for your business to consider the various fallback options when designing the customer experience flow.
3. Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is a process of extracting the polarity of sentiments from a piece of text. It used to be quite a tough task for Chatbots but with the progress in AI and its integration with Big Data and AI chatbots can now easily analyze text.
For example, when someone asks a chatbot: How are you? It should not respond with “I am fine.” Instead, it should use contextual clues to understand that the person asking is probably not looking for medical advice, but rather trying to initiate a pleasant conversation.
4. Intent Sampling
Intent sampling allows a chatbot to understand the user’s intent, which in turn allows it to provide the best possible response.
The intent is the purpose or goal that drives your conversation. It’s the reason why you’re having a conversation with a chatbot. If you’re booking a flight, for example, then your intent is to purchase that flight ticket. If you’re looking for a recipe, then your intent is to find a suitable recipe.
5. Data Sanitization
Data sanitization has become a very important component of the process of creating a chatbot for your business. This is because even if you have the best features and use cases, a bot that doesn’t work with unstructured data will not only be useless but a waste of time and money.
6. Bot Analytics
Bot analytics helps to find out the most common words and their frequency of use in the bot’s capability. It gives an insight into the way customers respond to the bots and guides the team to work on a better version of the bot.
When a customer interacts with your bot, it is considered a conversation. Bot analytics measures progress towards user goals based on a conversation viewed as a series of handovers between the bot and customer.
The credibility of the responses by the chatbot is measured with more accuracy by tracking the bot analytics.
Key Criteria to Choose the Best AI-Based Chatbot
When you are looking for a chatbot, be sure to consider this aspect. First, you need to know what your goal for having one is. Second, you need to know what you’re willing to spend. And third, you need to know how you’re going to use it. Now let’s take a look at the key criteria to choose a chatbot.
- Complexity of Dialogues
- Business Accessibility
- AI Adjustment User Interface
- Natural language processing
- Ability to bridge with the platform
- Integration
- Confidentiality and Security
1. Complexity of Dialogues
Dialogues are the most complex and significant part of the process of building a chatbot. It’s important to build a good dialogue in order to get the maximum value from a chatbot. The complexity is directly related to the number of utterances a chatbot can answer to.
To build a good dialogue with high complexity, you need to follow these steps:
- Prepare material that will help you to elicit all utterances from the user.
- Check the material for duplicates and synonyms.
- Start arranging the material in dialogues that will be used in building an AI-powered chatbot.
- Check the sample utterances for each dialogue to be sure that they are correct and free of that plication or synonyms.
This process should continue until you are certain that there is no mistake and the utterances are ready for use in building a dialogue with the chatbot.
2. Business Accessibility
Businesses of all sizes are starting to create chatbots to help their customers. As chatbots become more sophisticated, we’re beginning to see them used as customer service channels and as part of the sales funnel.
They are also being integrated with other applications, such as CRMs, WordPress, WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, Slack, etc to increase efficiency and productivity.
3. AI Adjustment User Interface
The user interface should be carefully selected in accordance with the requirements of the chatbot. Designers have to make sure that the process of interaction is convenient and intuitive for users.
If a chatbot is created with the help of artificial intelligence, it will depend on a good user interface to give customers a full understanding of its possibilities, available functions, and services.
The chat robot helps you try different styles and colors while showing the real-time image in the mirror, and you can change the styling position according to your needs.
4. Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing is now a buzzword in the tech world and it’s easy to see why. The most powerful AI of our generation should be able to understand and respond naturally to human language, right? In reality, achieving that can be very difficult.
In order to process language, including the text of a sentence, complex analysis is required. The complexity is determined by how close the language is to standard English. In other words, the more standard the text is, the easier and faster it will be for the chatbot to process it.
5. Ability to Bridge With the Platform
Customers want to go where they are comfortable and each platform offers different features and functions to meet the different needs of its users.
They also prefer customized bots created by brands and developers that create a one-of-a-kind experience for their customers. It is important that brands have the tools to bridge multiple messaging channels, convert across digital touch points, and build a relationship without having to create separate bots.
Leveraging digital technology to create an integrated experience across digital touch points can deliver a seamless experience, increase conversion, and enhance customer engagement. To achieve these goals, your brand must be able to leverage the data from all customer touch points in real-time to enable a unified experience.
6. Integration
Chatbots are rapidly becoming a powerful tool in automating business processes, translating customer inquiries into leads, and providing professional support.
In order to make chatbot implementation accessible to all businesses, we’re excited to introduce a new offering on REVE Chat that makes it easy for brands to quickly add chatbot functionality across multiple channels.
It provides a single solution for handling customer queries across channels such as Messenger, Facebook, Viber, WhatsApp, Telegram, WordPress, Slack, and more.
7. Confidentiality and Security
Why is it necessary for the chatbot? The technology of the chatbot depends on the platform of the website by which it will be built. If it is important to keep confidential any messages that you get through the messenger, you must have a dedicated channel in order to prevent information leakage.
- Data security is the protection of data from unauthorized access and improper use. Keeping data safe can be challenging in today’s digital world. In fact, the average cost of a data breach has risen to $3.62 million according to a study by IBM.
- Data security breaches are becoming increasingly common and companies are spending more money than ever on security technologies to prevent them.
- When a company takes measures to protect data it can safeguard its resources, maintain good business relationships and its reputation with customers and increase trust in the organization.
It’s important for companies to evaluate their existing security systems and make sure they are protecting sensitive information properly. Every company should also have a plan in place to respond quickly if they experience a breach.
Leverage the Best AI Chatbot for Higher ROI
In today’s digital marketing arena, more and more companies have already discovered a higher return on investment with the use of chatbots. Simply put, the most popular advantage of chatbot is that it can provide well-informed responses at a much faster speed compared to human agents.
REVE Chat is the best AI chatbot that brings artificial intelligence (AI) to every business – enabling people to focus on what they do best, while the AI intuitively handles all the rest.
It can run your whole business. Its natural language processing gives you a personalized experience for every interaction. Whether you need to make a booking, process payments, or conduct an important conversation, REVE Chat does it all. Sign up now and enjoy 14 days free trial.
