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We know selecting a chatbot is not easy as there are so many options around.
With many features to explore, you might feel clueless at times when choosing the right bot for your business.
And if you don’t research a bit, or if you don’t check all the features, you’re less likely to get the kind of bot perfect for all your needs.
The first thing to check is whether an online chatbot would fit into your company’s requirements. You also have to know whether the bot would support different processes or drive customer communication.
On top of that, the bot has to sound natural, converse as humans do, and work as a front for the business. If all that was not enough, you also hope the bot can tie well with various tasks across marketing, sales, and support.
Seeing such a varying degree of requirements, it’s safe to say how getting a perfect chatbot feels easier said than done.
In this post, we will discuss various things to consider before selecting an AI chatbot online for your organization.
What is an Online Chatbot?
An online chatbot is a computer program with the capability to simulate and process human conversation of any form, either written or spoken. It uses advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to understand human questions and automate responses.
Similarly, online chatbots can be as simple as basic software that can deliver a single-line response to a query, or as sophisticated as virtual assistants that can learn and evolve to handle complex conversations. In fact, some AI-powered bots may also engage in natural-sounding human conversations and deliver personalized responses.
Why Do You Need an Online Chatbot?
Chatbots are no longer a sci-fi fad. Their usage as a brand communication channel has gone up by a whopping 92% in the last three years. In fact, having the best chatbot online can help any organization engage with their customers better and provide great experiences to users.
Whether or not you need an online chatbot depends on many factors, including –
- Boost Customer Engagement – Your business definitely needs a chatbot if it wants to boost customer engagement across digital channels.
- Provide Real-time Support – Bots should always be a part of your support tool if you want to stay available 24×7 and help customers with quick responses anytime.
- Increase the Conversion Rate – If you think you’re not able to convert website visitors, a bot can help by ensuring better engagement and faster support.
- Reduce the Customer Service Cost – There are many chatbot business benefits to gain as you can trust them to reduce your support cost and minimize the need to hire people to man the support roles.
- Balance Automation with Human Touch – You can combine AI technology with a human touch to deliver seamless customer support.
Key Things to Look Before Choosing an AI Chatbot Online
Chatbots are really an incredible piece of technology when it comes to boosting communication between customers and businesses. You can find many great chatbot examples of how brands integrate it and transform many aspects be it customer support or marketing or sales. To get the most out of your online chatbot investment, you however first need to check whether the bot comes with all the right features.
There are so many things to consider before selecting an AI chatbot online for your business.
- In-house or Outsource Development
- Rule-based or AI Chatbot Online
- Conversational vs Scripted AI
- Integration Capabilities
- Omnichannel Compatibility
- Intended Use Cases Of Online Chatbot
- Human Handover
- Sentiment Analysis
- Personalization
We know chatbots are a great tool for customer communication. Even chatbot trends and stats suggest the same.
Let’s look at each of the things in detail.
1. In-house or Outsource Development
When you’re planning to develop a bot, one of the first things to consider is, how to build it? Go for in-house development or outsource the entire project?
It shows how you need a solid chatbot strategy in place to get the most out of your investment.
Well, there are so many benefits attached to developing software in-house that most companies often try to stick with this tried-and-tested formula.
In this type of development, you have full control over the project, progress of the work, and can supervise the implementation of the project.
There will be no risk with data and your team can itself do bug fixes. Your team and developers can work together to develop the product in adherence to the organization’s policy.
All such flexibility will, of course, not be available when the project is outsourced.
However, when we talk about advanced technology like chatbots, in-house may not always be the best route.
With AI chatbot development, you need an ML training team and data to make the bot algorithm robust and extendable to all use cases.
You need professionals trained on the use of artificial intelligence technology in combination with machine learning so that the online chatbot can learn regularly and improve its performance over time.
2. Rule-based or AI Chatbot Online
Irrespective of the purpose and role, chatbots are of two types –
- Rule-based
- AI-powered
Rule-based bots are command-driven and do interactions as per the instruction provided by the keywords. They are basic type in nature and can work best for the defined search terms and phrases. Such bots can neither learn over time nor respond to queries beyond the script.
Naturally, a chatbot design following rules will have some limitations but they will still be a good option for user engagement through click-type questions and answers. You can use them to connect users to a live agent and ensure good experiences.
On the other hand, AI chatbots are quite advanced in nature, can respond to queries in natural language, and understand user questions better.
Such bots combine the technologies like ML and Predictive Analysis, so can easily understand the user intent and context, can analyze past data, and ensure personalized responses.
Depending on the business requirement, you can decide whether to go with a rule-based or artificial intelligence online chatbot and meet your goals.
3. Conversational vs Scripted AI
Did you know, the average satisfaction rate of bot-powered chats stands at 87.58% which is great?
You ideally need a chatbot capable of conversing with users in a flawless manner.
You’d want the bot to answer questions as if a human agent is responding. You wish it could go beyond the script and dish out responses that sound acutely natural to customers.
And if you desire that kind of an AI chatbot online, which means, conversational AI will be best suited to your needs. Bots made with the concept of artificial intelligence can mimic natural language patterns and gestures.
You can expect conversational AI bots to go beyond the conversational flows and engage with users quite as support people do.
You want the bot to –
- Understand complex questions
- Offer provide accurate responses
- Ask follow-up questions
- Provide additional details
All this can easily be achieved with conversational AI chatbot as it is built by using the concepts of machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence together.
Needless to say, scripted AI bots can work along with a set of rules and have limited responses. They are good with a fixed script, so users often find it hard to get non-standard answers.
4. Integration Capabilities
We know there are so many touchpoints and channels that customers may use any of them to reach you or contact your business.
There are channels like website, mobile app, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Viber which customers may use and reach you.
In addition, many businesses may be having customer data in a variety of tools such as CRM, sales tools, and payment platforms.
You’d ideally want a tool to sync all the touchpoints and tools so that customer data is easily available for everyone in the team.
And when that happens, you will find it easy to engage, track and service your customers, or make their journey as smooth as you could.
This is where you plan on having an online chatbot with great integrations capabilities even if it costs money and resources.
You want a chatbot that can –
- Integrate with most of your customer-centric tools
- Enable fetching of data from any channels and tools
- Ensures a smooth flow of customer data from one avenue to another
- Tracking of customer analytics in a swift manner
It explains why you must look for an AI chatbot online that provides ample integration options. This is how you can control the flow of data between channels and touchpoints.
5. Omnichannel Compatibility
Do you know why more brands like to adopt an omnichannel customer experience (CX)?
For two reasons –
- First, doing this can help them streamline all the customer interactions (from, cross multiple touchpoints) in a unified way and deliver a consistent brand experience.
- Second, some 90% of customers want an omnichannel experience as it ensures them a seamless service between communication methods.
With multiple channels for sales, support, marketing becoming a reality, brands can’t help but take to digital omnichannel strategy to deliver a cohesive customer experience.
This approach takes away all complexity that channels may pose to customers in their attempt to reach out to your business.
But the question is – how would you make every customer interaction with your business part of a singular experience?
This is where an online chatbot can help by enabling integration with the channel of choice for you. When that happens, you can easily provide an omnichannel customer experience to users.
It’s therefore equally important to ask whether your AI online chatbot could integrate with popular channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, Viber, Shopify, etc.
Such an online chatbot AI will let you unify the customer data in one place which can help –
- Engage with customers in real-time
- Improve customer support
- Increase sales conversions
- Measure team metrics
6. Intended Use Cases Of Online Chatbot
Building a feature-rich chatbot is quite easy these days, thanks to the availability of DIY builder platforms.
But the real challenge lies in making the bot work in tune with your intended chatbot use cases. You’d want the bot to be smart and help get some tasks done in an efficient manner.
More importantly, you should know whether the AI chatbot online will actually help your target users in an intended way.
Since a chatbot can do virtually everything does not mean yours will too fit into the role for each and every task.
Look, rule-based chatbots can easily do your routine QnA task where users can ask queries and get instant answers. Beyond that, such bots won’t help me.
What if –
- You need the bot to pull data from the CRM or ERP?
- You want to give personalized responses to users?
- You want the bot to understand user sentiment?
It shows how a scripted AI chatbot is not for you if you want your chatbot to go beyond the routine and sound more like a human in terms of engaging with customers.
For such a type of online chatbot, you need to rely on custom chatbot development or need to execute your own scrips and API requests.
7. Human Handover
Only an advanced and smart chatbot can face queries of any type and respond flawlessly. If your bot is rule-based or has basic scripted AI, it will fail to handle queries successfully.
You perhaps need the best online chatbot that gives users the option to exit the conversions or connect to a live agent for a complex matter.
All this however will depend on the kind of chatbot scripts you use for your bot.
For such cases, you might need a live chat or human handover.
That’s why you should check whether –
- Your bot allows the feature of human handover.
- Your bot has a well-defined fallback human agent transfer.
- The bot is able to transfer chat when it finds query complex.
- The bot transfers chat when users show a preference to talk with a human.
In a way, you need an online chabot with the ability to quickly route the user to the right agent. For that to happen, you need to make the bot gather the user’s input and then send the data to the agent.
8. Sentiment Analysis
Not all chatbots are alike. While some are powered by rules and bound by limitations, there will be some with the ability to analyze sentiment.
Yes, intelligent bots can mine thoughts, opinions, and sentiments from messages of any type, be it text or audio, and then help you deliver value to them.
You can expect chatbot sentiment analysis feature to help parse user data from social channels, surveys, feedback, and reviews. It will help them understand how well customers perceive products or services.
An online chatbot with the ability of sentiment analysis can –
- Understand the customer mood by sentence structures.
- Decode the verbal cues.
- Help modify responses in alignment with customers’ emotions.
- Segment the audience based on satisfaction scores.
Before selecting a chatbot, make sure the one you build is able to identify sentiment types and analyze emotions. More importantly, it can decipher whether the conversations are positive, negative, neutral, or objective.
9. Personalization
Can your online AI chatbot help you in knowing your customers in detail so that you can lead with data?
For that to happen, you need to develop a bot that comes with analytics features, gives you the freedom to get a better understanding of the customers and make better decisions.
In a way, you need an AI chatbot online that enables tracking of relevant chatbot KPIs so that you can make data-driven decisions and deliver a personalized customer experience.
You need to ask these questions –
- Can you get key customer insights and analyze all the chatbot conversations?
- Can you measure the accuracy of bot responses?
A good online artificial intelligence chatbot will give you key metrics to analyze its performance like the total number of users it engaged with, bounce rate, interaction rate, and fallback rate.
Top Features of REVE Chat’s Online Chatbot
With REVE Chat, you can easily create your own online chatbot with no coding.
You can deliver seamless support and amazing experiences to customers by designing and building AI-chatbot in a few easy steps.
In fact, you can use our platform for chatbot online free for a few days and see how it works before subscribing to the plan.
More, the bot you’d design using our platform will help you put your customer conversations on autopilot. It will manage your customer conversations 24×7 whether your agents are available or not.
Some of the top features of the bot include –
- Build Your Bot Flow – You will find it easy to build and customize your bot design as per your business needs.
- Easy Scalability – The smart chatbot from us will help you handle a higher volume of conversation without impacting support performance.
- Human Handover – Design a bot that can handle the basic queries all by itself and route the complex conversations to the right agent/department.
- Bulk ML Training – Our chatbot platform will let you import all the general FAQs and answers and train the bot for improving its overall accuracy.
- Appointment Scheduling – Deploy a chatbot to ease appointment booking for your customers without human intervention.
- Advanced Reporting – Thanks to the advanced reporting, you can know various bot performances with metrics like first response time, etc.
Final Thoughts
Options are in plenty when it comes to developing an online chatbot for your business. You however need to choose the one that fits your needs perfectly.
You need to consider the goals you want to achieve and based on that need to look for the features in your bot.
Sign up here to take the right step with REVE Chat towards building the best AI chatbot online for your business.
Use our bot builder platform, the flow design, and get your AI on your in quick time.
