Are you a business owner looking to implement chatbots to help your business or businesses? You are in for a treat! Whether you are just here for some information or about to have a chatbot implemented for your business website, we'll give you everything you need plus the platforms where you can build these chatbots!
Table of Contents
- All About Chatbots
- How Are Companies Using Chatbots?
- Benefits of Using a Chatbot in Businesses
- 5 Best Chatbot Platforms
- Your Next Move...
All About Chatbots
A chatbot is a powerful software program that engages humans via live chat windows, messaging apps, or voice. In the customer service context, chatbots use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to answer the most common customer questions. Basically, chatbots simulate a conversation with the user in a fun, back-and-forth method.
Simple chatbots are deployed to deliver predefined answers to FAQs. On the other hand, sophisticated chatbots combine the power of AI and machine learning to create conversations and responses based on customer questions.
Generally, customer service chatbots blend three parts, namely: User Interface (UI), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Integration. The UI creates the link between the bot and the user. On the other hand, the chatbot leverages AI to understand and respond to customer queries. Interestingly, thanks to AI, chatbots learn from each customer interaction.
Lastly, the integration is what makes it easy to add chatbots across chat platforms. In recent years, companies have implemented chatbots on Facebook Messenger, Slack, WhatsApp, Skype, and even Amazon Alexa. The growing interest in chatbots is largely attributed to two monumental developments. One is the advances in AI technology and two, is the growth of messaging services.
What you should know is that there are two main chatbot types. The first is vendor-built chatbots. What happens here is that you craft and submit a chatbot idea to a company. Then, the company or chatbot builder develops a chatbot for you.
Second, there are user-built chatbots. As the name suggests, these are chatbots built by a user. In this case, a company provides you with a platform or kit to build your own bot.
How Are Companies Using Chatbots?
Today’s successful companies place a premium on quality customer service. They recognize that digital support for online shoppers is the best opportunity to build a sustainable relationship with would-be buyers and motivate them to make that purchase.
The data backs up the value of having a customer-first strategy. Even though the majority of shoppers still prefer support from a real human, chatbots have increased sales by over 60% for e-commerce brands.
A company's goal in using chatbots relies upon its needs. Some for marketing,
It’s interesting to note that those insights were collected near the end of 2019, which predates COVID-19. The pandemic caused a massive spike in demand for online shopping as people were confined to their homes and shops had to close amid lockdowns.
That means companies had to manage even higher volumes of traffic, increasing their reliance on chatbots to manage large numbers of inquiries. As a result, those chatbot-driven boosts in revenue have spiked even further since the pandemic and will continue to do so long after the pandemic is over.
Chatbot Customer Service
The most unfortunate thing is that today’s customers don’t have time to read your FAQ pages. As such, customers are likely to ask questions at some point throughout their journey. Besides, customers nowadays like to shop anywhere, anytime. As a result, some questions will most probably arise outside of business hours. This makes it harder to provide instant answers to vital customer queries. And, this is where chatbots come in handy.
A chatbot customer service enables you to respond to customer questions—especially the FAQs—when your customer service staff are unavailable. They automate FAQ responses, allowing you to quickly respond to questions that customers ask over and over again. This way, customers always get instant answers to their questions regardless of the time they need help.
Social Media Chatbots
Hundreds of organizations have already deployed chatbots over their social channels, providing their customers with instant answers to their most common questions.
At the same time, these organizations’ customer service teams are enjoying less workload, fewer complaints, and happier customers.
As Instagram launches updated bots, this is a good opportunity in growing and marketing social media connections.
Turnaround times improve too: there are fewer live chat interactions and shorter queue wait times, all thanks to the deflection capabilities that social chatbots provide.
Social media chatbots like Facebook messenger bot are fun, and they can streamline your customer service and marketing, all while potentially cutting down costs.
That’s great news, but it doesn’t counteract the fact that customers are craving human connection, and they’ll notice if your brand can’t give it to them.
Utilizing options like inbox management and saved replies are much better ways to streamline the process, automating what you can but then having an actual empathetic person there to step in and deliver customer service excellence every time.
Real Estate Chatbot
When a potential buyer is looking for a new place to live or a seller is considering offloading their home, they want immediate answers — for these consumers, the concept of “responding too fast” simply doesn’t exist.
But in an era when real estate agents are expected to juggle not only sales transactions and marketing listings but also evaluate products to help run their business, market themselves, AND keep up with past clients…
Like any good funnel, it’s broader at the top than the spout for a reason — you need to capture a higher number of people early on in their real estate journey, in order to guarantee yourself a specific number of clients in weeks or months down the road. And it’s no secret that more and more buyers (and sellers!) are starting their real estate journey online.
So even if you’re securing stellar success through paid leads, it can be dangerous to ignore online leads entirely. But if you’re like most agents, you’re probably far too busy to respond to every single person who pings you online. It seems like a conundrum without a solution…until chatbots enter the mix.
“Agents can’t really afford to go out and hire their own ISA (inside sales agent), but they still have a really dire need to follow up with leads,” explained Nate Joens, CEO at Structurely, a conversational AI (a.k.a. chatbot) company, “and most of the time busy agents are running around with their heads cut off and they really don’t have time to sit at their computer and follow up with leads.”
That’s where real estate chatbots come in. But before you go all in, there are some important things to know.
Benefits of Using a Chatbot in Businesses
Customer communication has to be prompt whether for sales, marketing, or support.
And if your business is not delivering smooth engagement, customers would definitely never stick with it.
This is where AI-powered chatbots can make their presence felt as they can automate customer communication and augment the support in a big way.
In fact, 35% of consumers want more companies to use chatbots to improve their communication strategy and deliver a better experience.
With so many chatbot business benefits to achieve, you should immediately plan to automate customer communication and ensure a hassle-free customer journey at every step of the way.
Chatbots can be an incredibly useful tool when it comes to forging good customer relationships. Your business can leverage it to build strong connections by engaging, and interacting with, users coming to the website. By integrating chatbots, you not only achieve marketing goals but also drive sales and improve customer service.
There are many different ways a chatbot can positively impact customer communication and drive business growth.
- Increase Customer Engagement
- Improve Lead Generation
- Reduce Customer Service Costs
- Monitor Consumer Data to Gain Insights
- Devise a Conversational Marketing Strategy
- Balance Automation with Human Touch
- Meet Customer Expectations
- Achieve Scalability of Support
- Streamline Your Customer Onboarding Process
- Make the Customer Journey Smoother
Chatbot Benefits for Customers
The need to stay available all the time is at the center of the ever-growing popularity of chatbots across industries. And if your business wants to engage customers round the clock and improve their experience, it must use a bot at some point in time. This will help manage customer requests with instant responses and boost satisfaction levels.
Chatbots are quite advanced and they ensure many advantages for customers.
- 24/7 Availability – Customers needn’t wait for the next available operator when chatbots are part of the communication strategy on a round-the-clock basis.
- Instant Response – Chatbots can handle the queries of thousands of customers instantly as well as simultaneously and improve the average response time.
- Consistency in Answers – The use of chatbots can help businesses maintain a great level of consistency in answers and improve customer experience with the brand.
- Omni-channel – AI-powered bots come with omnichannel messaging support features which help customers communicate with businesses through various channels such as websites, Facebook, etc.
- Personalization – Bots can ensure a touch of personalization by engaging customers with one-on-one conversations, maintaining a natural-sounding tone, and being good at interactive communication.
- Multilingual – Your business can program the sales bot to answer queries in the language of customers and expand the reach to new markets or territories.
- Order without human help – Thanks to bots-driven automation, customers can book orders or do transactions without any human help.
Chatbots with a virtual agent system and machine learning capabilities can help you enhance the customer experience in a big way.
5 Best Chatbot Platforms
A great chatbot platform simplifies working with chatbots by already containing the complete infrastructure and standard communication features. Businesses can build bots by following chatbot best practices in less time frame and focusing on solving important business problems, rather than researching communication protocols and solving infrastructure issues.
With a myriad of chatbot platforms out there, choosing the right conversational AI chatbot platform to build the best chatbot can leave you reeling.
In order to simplify your problem, we have narrowed down the best chatbot platforms out there.
1) TruVISIBILITY
Their suite of AI-driven, easy-to-use tools are designed for small and mid-sized businesses who want to create and deliver their marketing message just like a Fortune 500 company.
- No coding skills needed
- No technology background required
- And it's free to start using the tools
TruVISIBILITY's AI-driven Chatbot app to create and launch conversational chatbots easily. No coding skills are needed.
And if you've never done this before, choose one of their Ready-To-Go Chatbot Templates to modify for your specific needs.
2) REVE Chat
REVE Chat offers an AI-enabled omnichannel live chat platform to seamlessly engage with customers across their preferred channels to deliver a consistent experience. It also offers a complete suite of live customer engagement tools such as co-browsing and video chat to personalize conversations and deliver a virtual in-person experience.
REVE Chat offers a ready-to-use chatbot platform that allows brands to create customized bots with zero codings based on business needs. You can start using your chatbots in a short time frame, train the bots and measure their performance much quicker compared to a custom solution. It is ideal for enterprises or small businesses who want to manage conversations in a hassle-free manner.
3) ManyChat
ManyChat is a widely accepted chatbot platform that automates & combines Facebook Messenger and SMS to grow your business. It is an excellent platform to build your chatbot in just a few minutes and deployed on Messenger for use cases on sales, marketing, and customer service.
- Better marketing and sales by selling products, booking appointments, nurturing leads, capturing contact info, and building relationships via Messenger.
- Engage your audience with Facebook marketing tools.
- The visual drag & drop interface allows users to connect messages and actions with each other.
4) HubSpot
HubSpot is a marketing, customer service, and CRM platform that also offers a live chat chatbot for your website, which is called HubSpot Conversations. The chatbot platform is integrated with HubSpot’s free CRM tool, which means your bots can deliver more personalized messages based on the information you already have about your customers.
- Automatically sync all the data collected by the chatbots on a contact’s timeline, to give a complete context to the support team.
- Configure your bot to hand the conversation off to a human agent if needed, create support tickets, and add users to lists and workflows.
- Offer a visual editor to customize the conversation and match your brand’s voice, service and tone.
5) Botkit
Botkit is a part of the Microsoft Bot Framework, so it easily integrates with other tools and platforms by Microsoft. It is an open-source platform that you can use to develop AI chatbots, mobile apps, and custom integrations.
They have an open community on Slack and GitHub so that developers can interact and submit bugs and get help easily. It has a visual conversation builder and multiple plugins to make the process of chatbot development easier.
- Integrated NLP capabilities from LUIS.ai
- Multiple chatbot plugins
- Open-source library
- Access to battle-tested code
Chatbots generally help you to engage effectively and in a more personalized way with your esteemed customers. You can leverage automation and broadcast deals and messages pretty easily. The AI Chatbot platforms (Non-Coding and Coding) we discussed above can help you build chatbots for your next multi-million dollar business. You can choose the platform you like the best.
Your Next Move...
Building the best AI chatbot for your business is easier than ever with the help of a chatbot builder. While there are many platforms available out there, you should ensure that you are clear on your preferences and needs.
Next, compare different platforms based on their user-friendliness, integration, reporting capabilities, and other factors mentioned above.
If you are looking for rich capabilities at a nominal rate, consider opting for the best that suits your business' needs. It has a user-friendly interface and comes with tons of features that make the process of building an AI chatbot hassle-free.
Related articles
Want to receive more articles?
Sign-up for our weekly newsletter to receive info that will help your business grow