Ultimate Guide to Machine Learning Chatbots

Let me give you a scenario here. Just close your eyes and imagine that you have an excellent team member who is 24/7 available for you, does not complain about anything, always gives his best at work, and assists all your customers through the day without even getting bored. 

Bonus: You pay him much lesser than what you actually pay to the other employees. You must be thinking, “where can I get such an employee?” Well, you know him. His name is Chatbot. 

The AI-powered Chatbot is gradually becoming the most efficient employee of many companies. It can surely give you a competitive edge over others. 

Just like we learn so many new things for our own betterment, so do the chatbots. You can think of them as model students. You can teach them our human language and make them more intelligent and efficient than ever. This learning process is called Machine Learning (ML). 

The advancement of chatbots through machine learning has opened many doors to new business opportunities for companies. 

Let me present here a brief article on everything you would like to know about ML chatbot, its importance, benefits, and how it can help your business to provide the best customer service ever. 

What is Machine Learning?

Nowadays, business automation has become an integral part of most companies. We want everything to be automated. So the future of many companies depends heavily on how they are adopting Artificial Intelligence(AI) successfully.

However, don’t think it’s a very easy job. Turning a machine into an intelligent thinking device is tougher than it actually looks. Here, Machine Learning(ML) comes as a savior. Machine learning is a bit complex process. So let me give you a proper definition here.

“ML is also a type of AI that enables software applications to learn from voice or textual data and predict the outcomes more accurately without being clearly programmed.”

 You can input some predefined data and machine learning helps the software go through the old data and predict the outputs. ‘Machine Learning the term was given by the famous American computer scientist Samuel Arthur in 1959. He is also the pioneer of great Artificial Intelligence(AI).

What is Machine Learning Chatbot?

Initially, chatbots were very simple software applications used by the customer support team to provide predefined answers to specific customer queries. They configured the chatbots with some very common FAQs that they expect the customers may ask. So, whenever the chatbot was asked any of those questions, it automatically used to go through the predefined data and give a response.

With those pre-written replies, the ability of the chatbot was very limited. Because of that whenever the customer asked anything different from the pre-defined FAQs, the chatbot could not understand and automatically the interactions got transferred to the real customer support team.  

As a result, the whole customer support process got complex, leading to customer dissatisfaction and higher operational costs.

With the development of new machine learning(ML) in artificial intelligence, the whole chatbot technology has transformed drastically. ML has made chatbots more efficient than ever. It allows the chatbots to automatically learn from the voice or textual inputs by customers and provide effective replies without being properly programmed to do so.

Now ML chatbots can manage a huge number of customer requests at a time and can respond much faster than expected.

Instead of only replying from the predefined database, ML chatbots can handle several dynamic customer queries and the whole conversation resembles very close to original human conversations. 

Why Does Your Business Need a Machine Learning Chatbot?

ML has lots to offer to your business though companies mostly rely on it for providing effective customer service. The chatbots help customers to navigate your company page and provide useful answers to their queries.

You can also use ML chatbots as your most effective marketing weapon to promote your products or services. Chatbots can proactively recommend customers your products based on their search history or previous buys thus increasing sales conversions.

Apart from that, you can also embed chatbots with your company’s social media channels and allow them to engage with the consumers instead of just waiting for them to come back to your company page.

In short, there are many benefits that ML chatbots offer. But everyone’s favorite benefit would be the hard cash your company will save.

 So, let me give you here the 8 most important reasons why you should start using ML chatbots.

1. Respond Faster to Customer Queries

We don’t like to wait, and so do the customers. Whenever they come to your support team, chances are very high that they are irritated because of some issues and need instant assistance. In such a scenario, if your support agent keeps them waiting then chances are that customers get irritated and never come back to you.

Now, let’s think from the support agent’s point of view. It’s tough to provide assistance to multiple customers at a time. Here, ML chatbots can be the savior. With chatbots, the whole customer support process becomes completely automated and, response time is much faster than the human agent. 

One of the best ways to increase customer satisfaction and sales conversions is by improving customer response time and chatbots definitely help you to offer it. Machine learning chatbot’s instant response makes the customers feel valued, making your brand much more reliable to them. 

2. Available 24/7

A machine learning chatbot can offer the best-in-class scaling operations. As it is basically a software program, it is not bothered by other human limitations. 

You may have customers from all around the world. They must have different geographic locations and time zones. But, the ML chatbot can engage with them at any time. Unlike human agents, who will not be able to handle a large number of customers at a time, a machine learning chatbot can handle all of them together and offer instant assistance to their issues.

Being available 24/7, allows your support team to get rest while the ML chatbots can handle the customer queries. Customers also feel important when they get assistance even during holidays and after working hours.

Anger and intolerance all come under common human expressions but luckily the ML chatbots don’t fall into this category until you program them. So, chatbots here can handle endless customers patiently and are ready to answer the same questions multiple times. 

3. Multi-Language Customer Support

We all love to experience personalized services from companies and such experience always creates a positive impression.

I am sure, you also want to offer the same to the customers. Speaking in your customer’s language is a great way to make him comfortable and valued. It’s also an effective way of personalizing your customer support.

But different customers come from different countries and knowing all their languages is next to impossible for the customer support team. Here the machine learning technology in chatbots comes in handy. If you can program the chatbot to be multi-lingual, then it can easily understand and reply in its own language. 

4. Integration with Social Media Channels

Apart from deploying chatbots on your website and mobile application, you can also integrate them with all the social media channels of your company like Facebook, Telegram, Viber, or anywhere else. 

Nowadays we all spend a large amount of time on different social media channels. To reach your target audience, implementing chatbots there is a really good idea.

Many customers leave their comments or feedback regarding your products or services on your social media company pages. Replying to those is mandatory and can be a tiring job for the customer support team. 

Machine learning chatbots can ease this process and reply to those customers. Providing round-the-clock customer support even on your social media channels definitely will have a positive effect on sales and customer satisfaction.

5. Chatbot Reports and Analytics

Apart from providing instant customer support, Chatbots also provide relevant reporting and analytics to give an idea about how the chatbots are being used by the consumers, what are the most common queries, the number of chat transfers, etc.

You can analyze the analytics and do some modifications to the chatbots for much better performance. A good ML chatbot always gets a very high customer engagement rate which means it is able to cater to all customer queries effectively. 

6. FAQs

Customers always have a set of common queries for which they poke your support team. These frequently asked questions can be related to your product or service, its benefits, usage, pricing, or even about your company. You must have created a common list of these FAQs. 

Have you ever thought about how your customer support agent feels, when he is forced to give answers to the same questions every day, more possibly every hour? Must be boring, right?

Why don’t you ask your ML chatbots to reply to these FAQs? Chatbots can take this job making the support team free for some more complex work. The ML chatbot has some other benefits too like it improves team productivity, saves manpower, and lastly boosts sales conversions. 

7. Increased Customer Retention

Research shows that “nearly 40% of customers do not bother if they get helped by an AI chatbot or a real customer support agent as long as their issues get resolved. 

Customers think like this because they need instant assistance and adequate answers to their queries. Many times, they are more comfortable with chatbots knowing that the replies will be faster and no one will judge them even if they have asked some silly questions. 

Thus, chatbots make customers happy and satisfied. Your happy customers will definitely stick with you for a long time.

8. Multiple Usage

Machine learning chatbots are much more useful than you actually think them to be. Apart from providing automated customer service, You can connect them with different APIs which allows them to do multiple tasks efficiently. 

Chatbots can automate many tedious jobs like emailing the target audience, and customers, responding to FAQs, and so on. If you configure chatbots to your eCommerce online store, they can also handle all the payments and transactions. 

Apart from handling your business, these chatbots may be useful for your HR team too. Many repetitive jobs like handling employee attendance, granting leaves, etc can be handled by machine learning chatbots efficiently. 

REVE Chat: An Excellent Chatbot Platform for Your Business

REVE Chat is basically a customer support software that enables you to offer instant assistance on your website as well as mobile applications. Apart from providing live chat, voice, and video call services, it also offers chatbot services to many businesses. 

REVE Chat’s AI-based live chat solution, helps you to add a chatbot to your website and automate your whole customer support process. 

Important Chatbot Features:

• FAQs

You can configure your chatbots with many support-related FAQs your customers ask. So, whenever they ask any questions from the predefined FAQs, the chatbot replies instantly thus making the whole conversation much more effective.

• Fallback Options

It is a great feature offered by REVE Chat. Suppose the chatbot could not understand what the customer is asking. Without even letting the customer know that chatbot is unable to provide that particular answer, the whole chat session gets transferred to a human agent and he can start assisting the customer from there. 

• Sentiment Analysis

With the help of natural language processing and machine learning, chatbots can understand the emotions and thoughts of different voices or textual data. Sentiment analysis includes a narrative mapping in real-time that helps the chatbots to understand some specific words or sentences.

For example, you have configured your chatbot with some good and abusive words. Suppose a customer has used one such bad word in the chat session, then the chatbot can detect the word and automatically transfer the chat session to any human agent. 

• Reporting & Analytics

REVE Chat’s AI-based chatbot offers detailed reports to get an idea about how the bot is performing. You will get analytics for all the handled customer interactions like the total number of sessions, handovers, etc just to measure the quality of service your chatbot is offering for further improvements. You can discover the features and get an overall idea of chatbot reporting and analytics. 

The Dos and Don’ts of Using ML Chatbots

Yes, the chatbot is very useful and should be used in your business but don’t make it the one and only option, I mean don’t rely on it completely. Also, you should know its correct usage to make the best out of it. 

 For your better understanding, let me give you here some basic dos and don’ts that need to be followed.

• Let Your Agents Look into the Complicated Customer Requests

Please don’t let your chatbot handle everything. Sometimes, customers also want to talk to a real agent, not a robot. Complex inquiries need to be handled with real emotions and chatbots can not do that. So, program your chatbot to transfer such complicated customer requests to a real human agent.

• Stop Spamming

Now you have to avoid this. It’s a request, please don’t use the chatbots to show a lot of marketing junk and forcefully make them feel how big your company is. It’s the best way to make them pissed off and leave your website. 

So, don’t use your machine-learning chatbots for such spam. 

• Give Your Chatbot an Identity

Anyways, a chatbot is actually software programmed to talk and understand like a human. So, give him some sort of identity to engage with customers in a better way. When you are developing your chatbot, give it an interesting name, a specific voice, and a great avatar. Make it relatable to a real human being. 

• Let Your Customers Understand What the Chatbot Can Do

Let your chatbot give a beautiful introduction to the customers and describe what he is capable of doing. It will enable the customers to get the best out of it.

Let me give you an example here. The bot can introduce itself like this,

 “Hi, I’m Jinni at your service today and I can guide you with order placements, returns, payments, and many FAQs. What would you like to know today?”

• Don’t Try to Show the Bot as a Human

Your customers know you, and believe you but don’t try to show them that they are talking to a human agent when actually it’s a chatbot. No matter how tactfully you have designed your bot, customers do understand the difference between talking to a robot and a real human. 

So, always be truthful to the customers.

• Don’t Show Long Texts

Yes, I know that you have a lot of information to give to the customers but please send them in intervals, don’t send them all at a time. Customers hate to read such big paragraphs. Configure your machine learning chatbot to send relevant information in shorter paragraphs so that the customers don’t get overwhelmed. 

Wrapping Up!

Machine learning in chatbots is a great technology to bring scalability and efficiency to different kinds of businesses. Be it an eCommerce website, educational institution, healthcare, travel company, or restaurant, chatbots are getting used everywhere. It has become a great option for companies to automate their workflows. 

I hope by the end of this article, you have got an idea about machine learning chatbots, their usage, and their benefits. Was it helpful for you? Let me know your feedback in the comment section below. Thanks for reading.

Now you can also add a chatbot to your business and make the best out of it. SIGN UP with REVE Chat to know more about it.