Supercharge Your Brand With AI Chatbot Technology

Frequently asked questions about Conversational AI Chatbots

• What is an AI chatbot?

  Chatbots are machines that converse with humans via audio or text. AI chatbots are smarter versions of these chatbots. An AI chatbot is an application that connects to your website or app to simulate human conversation using machine learning and natural language processing in order to better understand human intent.

  AI chatbots provide more natural communication with humans than regular chatbots.
  AI chatbots are trainable and will gradually learn in order to improve communication with your customers. AI chatbots are available 24/7 and can handle conversations with multiple customers at once. They can answer frequently asked questions and help customers navigate the website or app whenever needed, to improve the overall user experience.

• How do AI chatbots work?

  The most typical chatbot interaction occurs on business sites. These feature customer service bots that usually appear after a human user has spent some time on a site or exhibits behaviours that show that they are lost or are having difficulty finding the information they need. Once the chatbot window presents itself, the user can type their question in plain, syntactical language. AI chatbots also understand free language, and have a predefined set-up to make sure they solve a user’s problem. What’s more, they remember the context of the conversation and the user’s preferences.

  The chatbot’s language recognition functions analyse the question, compares training data and searches through a list of intents.

  When that search is complete, the chatbot shares the best and most relevant answer with the user. For every interaction they have with the audience, they become smarter. The bots thus become better and more efficient at task completion.

• How are chatbots created?

  Chatbot development comes with a unique set of requirements and considerations with a process that is similar to developing of a web page or app.

  The chatbot design is the process that defines the interaction between the user and the chatbot. The chatbot designer defines the chatbot’s personality, the questions that will be asked to the users, and the other elements of interaction. An important part of the chatbot design is also built around real world user testing in order to provide useful feedback for continuous bot timprovement.

  The process of building a chatbot can be divided into two main tasks: understanding the user’s intent, and producing the correct solution in the shape of an answer. The first task involves understanding the user input. The second task may involve different ways of approaching the build, depending on the type of response that the chatbot will generate.

  The usage of the chatbot should be monitored in order to spot potential irregularities or problems. Doing this can also provide valuable insights that can improve the final user experience.

  To keep chatbots up to speed with shifting company services and products, traditional chatbot development platforms require constant maintenance with ongoing manual input. This can either be in the form of an ongoing service provider, or for larger businesses: an in-house chatbot training team. To reduce these costs, some companies are experimenting with AI to develop self-learning chatbots.

  The process of building, testing and setting up chatbots can be done on cloud-based chatbot development platforms. These platforms are offered by cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers such as Google Dialogflow and Microsoft LUIS. These cloud platforms provide Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence and Mobile Backend as a Service for chatbot development (Mobile backend is a model for providing web and mobile app developers with a way to connect their applications to cloud storage and APIs).

• What are the benefits of AI chatbots?

  There are many benefits to AI chatbots, for both customers and for businesses. For customers, benefits include:

  24-hour availability
  Having to wait for the next available operator for minutes is not history yet, but chatbots are well on the way to ending this problem. Maintaining a 24/7 response system provides a continuous line of communication between the seller and the customer during a live chat. Of course, this benefit depends on how well the bots have been built. Bots that are unable to serve simple customer queries fail to add value even if they are 24/7 available. The main issue after this is to what degree chatbots can understand and solve customer problems.

  Swift answers
  A human operator can only concentrate on one customer at a time and only answer one question at a time. A chatbot, on the other hand, can answer hundreds, even thousands of questions at once. Depending on the speed of the cloud, internet, and software mechanisms, responses can be provided within milliseconds.

  Consistent answers
  When a customer talks to a customer service representative, they have no guarantee that other representatives are providing similar, consistent responses. If a customer service representative is not helpful, a customer could be tempted to try calling again to see if the next one is better. This unnecessarily prolongs the process.

  Patience
  While customer reps and customers sometimes lose their patience, this is something that bots are incapable of. The impatience of the representative and the consumer during the solution of a problem is one of the human-related failures. The representative is expected to be more patient as much as possible so that the company can keep consumer satisfaction high. Chatbots can show the patience that no human can provide. In this way, a human-sourced consumer service problem can be resolved directly.

  Programmability
  Since bots exist on digital platforms where people spend the majority of their days working, bots can be used to automate common tasks such as providing advanced search functionality and arranging meetings. Chatbots do not just have to be used for shopping. It is extremely convenient and time saving to hand over repetitive tasks such as arranging meetings or researching a topic to a chatbot.

  Personalization
  A chatbot or a customer service specialist is not a psychotherapist, they don’t listen to your personal life and give you tailored advice. Chatbots are, however, able to deliver more personalized experiences than customer service specialists are, who have no time to prepare for your enquiry and need to understand the context in real time. A chatbot has access to the history of your interactions with the company and can therefore deliver a personalized experience. Given that chatbots are a relatively new technology, this is not something most companies are focusing on now but it is being worked on for future chatbots.

  For companies, benefits include:

  Cost savings
  The ever-growing customer service department can be managed by deploying increasingly capable bots that can deal with more and more complex queries. Making workable chatbots comes with a certain amount of investment costs, but this cost is most likely going to be lower than consumer service salary, organisation, and education. Besides the implementation of investment costs, the added costs of chatbots are relatively low.

  Increased sales
  Bots can be a great way to present users with recommendations, to introduce them to new products and services from your company. Bots are able to also boost sales because of their 24/7 availability and fast response time. They recover sales from those customers who are unwilling to wait for a long time for answers.

  Increased customer interaction
  Bots provide another opportunity to reach out to your customers. They can increase customer engagement with tips and offers. Real-time customer communication of chatbots helps the customer find what he is looking for whilst also evaluating different suggestions.

  Reaching new customers
  Chatbot platforms such as Facebook Messenger are extremely popular. Being continuously active on a platform such as this one, with an extremely large customer base, helps companies reach new customers who may otherwise not want to reach out to the company because they feel email or phone is too big a step.

  Gaining a deeper understanding of customers
  Chatbots provide your business with detailed records of your customers’ greatest difficulties in navigating your site or app, helping your company improve its products and services. Chatbots are optimal tools for organizations to educate themselves about customer expectations. With the data provided by the chatbot-customer interaction, customer-specific targets can be planned. Thanks to chatbots, the organization can be given feedback, and improvements can be incorporated by analysing said data.

• How can you use an AI chatbot in your company?

  There are many tasks an AI chatbot can fulfil within your company. Firstly, they can provide customer service, by answering frequently asked questions and resolving customer queries. Optionally you can also, if customer queries are too complicated to solve, let the chatbot ask for a human employee to come in. Secondly, a bot can come in handy in marketing. It can recommend new offers based on customer feedback and searches. A chatbot can also do a lot in the sales field. You can make a straightforward sales bot, through which customers can purchase your product. Bots can also be helpful for all departments that use a service desk, such as HR, IT and Facilities. They can chat with employees and monitor their productivity and satisfaction. Moreover, they can answer common HR-related questions regarding topics such as holiday pay or leave.

  There are many more ways and topics an AI chatbot can come in handy. Think of E-commerce, booking a holiday, money transferring, healthcare (handling insurance coverage inquiries for instance). If you research enough, you will find an abundance of tasks your AI chatbot will be able to help with in your business.