Everybody has social anxiety sometimes. Whether you live with a large number of roommates, must attend a conference with 20 other people, or arrange an appointment with your dentist, there are moments when you cannot deal with other people. In any case, I was encouraged to see from a recent survey that 71% of customers currently anticipate brands to provide customer assistance messaging. Many clients, including myself, prefer self-service to phone support, and chatbots can facilitate this.
What Is a Chatbot?
A chatbot is an artificial intelligence programme that simulates human communication via a live chat interface. It is programmed to display pre-written responses based on the customer’s prior communication. Chatbots examine the user’s text for specific customer roadblock-related keywords and phrases. The bot then gives self-service options depending on the data it has received.
And that’s only the beginning of what this technology can accomplish. Some chatbots are extraordinarily complex and practically indistinguishable from humans. While I find this frightening, business owners adore the benefits these bots give to the customer care department.
Advantages of Chatbots
Customer care agents appreciate chatbots because they save up time formerly spent on the phone with clients addressing basic questions. Customers would be pleased to avoid phone contact, and customer care representatives would have more time to provide proactive assistance if chatbots handled these easy tasks.
Customers would also receive quicker responses if a chatbot were implemented. It is difficult for humans to compete with computers’ lightning-fast processors that can sort through hundreds of keywords per second when it comes to simple tasks. Therefore, bots are an excellent addition to your knowledge base, frequently asked questions, and community forums, as they may distribute information based on client feedback.
In addition, when chatbots function properly, businesses save money. As chatbots are currently unpaid, managers can use them to broaden the reach of their team without hiring more representatives. This makes chatbots an attractive, cost-effective choice for service teams with insufficient personnel.
Now that we’ve made a case for chatbots let’s examine how they should be implemented for customer support. Here are some examples of firms making excellent use of chatbots: (and what you can learn from each one).
Best Chatbots of the Year
1. HubSpot Chatbot Builder
Permit me to present HubBot. HubBot is a free chatbot tool offered by HubSpot and its live chat platform. This chatbot can schedule meetings for your sales representatives, provide links to self-service help articles, and is fully lined with a ticketing system. In addition, HubBot is integrated with the HubSpot Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs’ features. You may save conversations from contacting records in your HubSpot CRM and activating workflows based on the conclusion of a conversation.
2. Core dna
Core dna offers website visitors customer service using a chatbot widget. When a user accesses the website, the bot is already available, making it simple for them to quickly locate the support they require.
Consider including a chat widget button on your website that is prominently displayed on every page so customers can simply locate it, click on it, and initiate an inquiry to address their issues. The more readily available, the better.
3. Zowie
Zowie is a chatbot that can provide rapid responses to consumer enquiries in more than 40 languages. Its no-code function Object() { [native code] } makes it simple to set up and interface with a wide variety of applications, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Shopify.
The nice thing about Zowie is that it learns from every interaction with the customer. It provides customized suggestions for enhancing existing automation and even suggests new questions to add. This helps to tailor the chat experience by providing clients with unique solutions to your website.
4. Impulse Creative
Impulse Creative employs a chatbot to assist users in navigating its website and locating the information they seek through a “choose your own adventure”-style system in which visitors can select a query that corresponds to their interests.
By having a chatbot guide consumer through your website, you can provide them with a personalized experience. When the chatbot surfaces typical concerns, a user may quickly select what they need and land on the appropriate information rather than looking through your website’s content to locate a solution.
5. Chatfuel
Chatfuel is a popular Facebook Messenger bot that your organization may instal for free on its Facebook page. The amazing thing about Chatfuel is that you can design bots without any prior experience. Chatfuel’s bot-building interface provides clear and concise instructions for each step of the logic-development procedure. After completion, the bot is quickly enabled and begins working on your account instantly.
6. Apple
Apple’s website features a customer service chatbot where consumers can submit help requests. A site visitor will provide all pertinent contextual information in the chat, and the bot will analyze the message for keywords before displaying the most pertinent content to fulfil their needs. A user is escalated to a live agent if they are not happy with automated support.
7. Xenioo
Xenioo is a chatbot-building platform that enables the creation of bots for nearly all types of live chat interfaces. It includes development tools for Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and more. Even options for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are included. Thus, you can maintain an omnichannel experience across every bot you develop.
8. Pipeline Ops
On its website, Pipeline Ops includes a chatbot that collects consumer information on the front end. In this manner, an anonymous site visitor becomes a lead whose contact information has been exchanged without ever being approached by a live representative.
Chatbots on your website can perform a portion of the administrative labour associated with prospecting. In terms of delivering content and qualifying leads, segmentation may help you create unique experiences at scale by enabling you to serve relevant material to the right prospects. In fact, Drift’s poll of B2B professionals from a variety of industries revealed that 54.8% of respondents obtain a larger quantity of high-quality leads utilizing chatbot technologies.
9. Bold 360
The chatbot provided by Bold 360 is not confined to pre-written texts. Instead, the company’s bot employs natural language processing to personalize client interactions. Install workflow logic on your website as opposed to spending time writing and designing it. After then, the bot will gradually learn and adapt to customer chats, producing increasingly authentic interactions over time.
10. UrbanStems
UrbanStems is an online flower and plant marketplace. Its website contains a chatbot that surfaces frequently asked questions and answers so visitors can find common solutions to their problems. Additionally, it has a Live Chat icon that visitors can click to be connected to a live agent for more urgent situations.
Many chatbots do not escalate discussions to a live person unless a customer issue has not been resolved, however, UrbanStems gives customers greater control over their service experience by allowing them to make this option themselves.
AI Chatbot for Customer Service Comparison Criteria
When selecting the most effective AI chatbot for customer service, what should I consider?
Summarized below are my evaluation criteria:
User Interface (UI): When it comes to chatbots, both agent-facing and customer-facing UIs must be modern and intuitive. I desire chatbot functionality to be readily apparent based on design context cues.
How simple is it to learn and master? Does the business provide excellent technical assistance, user support, tutorials, and training for the service team? Is the response time quick following the generation of queries? How effective is the chatbot in intelligence, error management, question responding, navigation, and onboarding?
Integrations: Is it straightforward to integrate with other technologies that provide relevant metrics? Exist preexisting integrations? In this instance, I’m searching for a compatible chatbot with Slack and Facebook Messenger.
Value for Money: How well does the pricing correspond with the features, capabilities, and use case? Are prices transparent, clear, and flexible? Prior to committing to a subscription plan, I always look for a chatbot for customer care software that offers a free trial so that I can evaluate the technology.
Final Thoughts
Chatbots are clearly helpful in enhancing the user experience, assisting with sales prospecting and qualifying, and providing a self-service environment for your clients. Existing infrastructure must exist to support this excellent tool.