What Chatbots are Right for your Business?
By [Cathal McGloin](/content/author/cmcgloin/ "Posts by Cathal McGloin"/index.html) 7 Minute Read
What chatbots could help your business engage better with customers or employees and generate better business results? This blog post explores some of the basics of chatbots, why they are so useful for business, and how businesses are using them. Let’s explore.
What is a chatbot?
Most of us know what chatbots are but we still come across people that aren’t quite sure what the difference is between a chatbot and live chat. So when you go to a website and a little avatar or window pops up asking you if you want to chat that is invariably powered by a human agent sitting in a contact center. It’s the modern-day equivalent of someone chatting to you by phone, except they are doing it via live texting in the pop-up window on their website or mobile apps.
But what if it’s not a human agent responding but rather a bot? Then this is a chatbot. In this scenario, it’s not always possible from the consumer’s perspective to differentiate whether they are “talking” (i.e. texting) with a human or with a piece of artificial intelligence software. And the better Conversational AI bots become the harder it is to make this distinction. One is human, the other is artificial, but they can be deceptively similar!
Simply put, a chatbot is artificial intelligence (AI) software that simulates a conversation with you using natural language. This can be using your voice or typing/texting. So whether you’re asking Alexa to reorder coffee from Amazon Prime or using text messaging in your banking mobile app to track your spending and complete transactions (e.g. Bank of America’s Erica) chatbots or virtual assistants are involved.
Why Businesses need Smart Chatbots?
Since we now have a whole new wave of conversational interfaces, from voice assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google Home to messaging and collaboration apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, and Slack as well as the more traditional SMS and Email channels, businesses are eager to take advantage of these engagement channels.
However, the reality is that managing multiple channels and manually responding to a growing volume of customer and/or employee interactions across them is cost-prohibitive. But what if a bot can take on some of the more routine interactions and be available around the clock to answer customer queries or fulfill their needs?
- How can you enhance customer experience if your service teams are slammed handling requests and can’t manage incoming chats?
- How can you convert incoming leads into sales if prospects can’t access the right information to complete the sale?
- How can you drive greater employee productivity if knowledge is difficult to find and access?
These problems are not new for any business as they have grappled with multiple technologies and portals to help improve both the user experience and corresponding business results. However, to date, many engagements that customers or employees have with a business are fraught with friction and/or non-value-adding steps in unwieldy processes.
Graphical interfaces force users into structured and tedious workflows that don’t always make sense. Traditional out-dated processes in industries like insurance, banking, and healthcare often require multiple departments and manual document processing, adding delays, costs, and frustration to interactions. Enhancing the user experience remains elusive for many organizations, largely due to high degrees of friction, low levels of transparency, clunky and outdated processes, and lack of personalization in how they engage.
For companies that are willing to embrace change and really strive for a better experience, chatbot technology offers a great solution. However, some negative early press gave chatbots a bad rap, making some businesses apprehensive. This is understandable. Early implementations often failed because the chatbot was only trained to answer basic questions before quickly handing off to a human agent, so they were pretty useless.
Thankfully, advancements in natural language understanding (NLU), the emergence of enterprise ai bot platforms, and maturing approaches to chatbot implementations have led to a better understanding of the true value that chatbots can bring across complete user lifecycles and a more sophisticated approach to their implementation. Any business that relies intensively on interactions, whether with customers and/or employees, can now enjoy the age of smart chatbots.
Six Ways that Business Chatbots are Useful?
Here are six core characteristics that make chatbots so powerful.
Increase Self-service. A chatbot has the capability to replace human interactions on routine tasks, automate workflows, and fulfill the user’s need to the best of their ability. This helps drive up self-service levels for a business that not only is attractive for users but also offers more cost-effective employee and customer support across different interaction points.
More Convenience. Chatbots don’t need to eat, sleep or take a vacation. They can work 24×7 without violating employment laws. This means they are available as much as the business wants and needs them to respond to out-of-hours requests.
Consistent Experiences. Artificial intelligence offers the capability for a virtual assistant to respond more consistently and accurately to customers but without bringing them through an unnecessarily rigid workflow.
Reduced Friction. Conversational interfaces and chatbots remove a lot of friction in how we can interact with a business.
Frequent and Proactive Outreach. Chatbots aren’t just for answering inbound requests. They can be proactive too.
Personalization. Artificial intelligence and machine learning enable greater personalization of user experiences, which is an increasingly key expectation and differentiator.
A Plethora of Chatbots for Business
Many different industries are turning to chatbots in an effort to achieve business improvements and transform how they interact with their users. Companies from industries that are interaction-intensive have a lot to gain by putting chatbots to work.
Some chatbot use cases by industry
Thinking of chatbots in terms of the user lifecycle sheds light on some interaction points that may not be as obvious as typical service or support interactions.
A Lifecycle Approach to Chatbots
What is the best way to get started with chatbots?
From our experience at ServisBOT each client has different business reasons for their initial chatbots. Some start with a simple internal FAQ bot while some of the more adventurous ones begin their journey with a sales chatbot or a chatbot for banking that may be focused on converting incoming leads by guiding someone through a quotation or application workflow through their web or mobile apps. Others have honed in on the onboarding process as a means to get users up and running as quickly as possible.