While AI-powered chatbots have been around for a while, they are not all the same. “Chatbot” refers to a broad range of technologies that allow consumers to use a conversational AI interface to interact with companies and accomplish tasks.
Chatbots allow customers to self-serve and get answers to a range of questions quickly and easily at any time of day.
Using chatbots to handle a range of customer questions deflects customers away from more costly customer service channels, lowering costs without impacting customer satisfaction.
Chatbots are able to converse with and assist multiple customers at once. They never tire, and can be trusted to provide a consistent level of service around the clock, including on holidays and weekends.
AI chatbots excel at handling repetitive work that can become tedious to human agents. Additionally, if a customer is escalated from an AI chatbot to a human agent, the chatbot will transfer the entire conversation history, preventing the customer from having to start over, and allowing the agent to quickly and easily identify and solve the customer’s issue.
Today’s customers want to self-serve and find answers on their own in the moment, without having to pick up the phone or email and wait for a response. AI chatbots provide the experiences they expect.
Simple chatbots are the most pervasive chatbots on the market today. Similar to an FAQ page, they’re created for casual use and are designed to deliver an entertaining experience for customers. If a simple chatbot doesn’t know an answer or can’t understand a customer question, the stakes are relatively low for the brand. For instance, we don’t really expect Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa to know all the answers. These are examples of “unbound” chatbots that have no specific context to operate within.
For the vast majority of businesses, chatbots need to be smart to be effective. Chatbots are able to interact with customers in real-time to resolve issues, conduct transactions, and answer questions. Intelligent chatbots can also predict customer intentions and offer specific help when they detect that a customer may need assistance. For example, if a client has visited several mortgage pages and pauses on a specific page, the chatbot can proactively engage the client and offer assistance.
Informational
Understands natural language to provide answers to questions posed
Personalized
Presents user-specific responses by connecting to enterprise systems and clarifies user intent using menus or simple questions
Intelligent chatbots are able to integrate with enterprise systems, leverage big data, and use artificial intelligence (AI) to help customers resolve issues and conduct transactions. Here’s what intelligent chatbots can do for your organization.
Combine Data to Predict Customer Intentions
Chatbots develop an understanding of what the customer wants/needs by combining all the data signals. This helps make the conversation contextual and more natural when the customer engages the AI chatbot.
Learn more about the inner workings of chatbots and see what features and capabilities set them apart from simple bots.
Not All Chatbots are Created Equal: The Intelligence Question.
Learn more about the many ways chatbots can automate and improve your customer experience.
Chatbots aren’t just here to make life easier for your customers – they offer dramatic improvements in a number of areas.
Chatbots can generate more leads, attract more customers, and increase revenue from existing customers.
Chatbots can handle routine questions and tasks, freeing up more time for staff to deal with more complex, value-added services.
Chatbots can help partners get the information they need to support their customers quickly and effectively.
Chatbots can:
AI chatbot conversations create the opportunity for cross-organizational analytics and insights. Marketing, product, sales, and customer service benefit from a shared view of customer trends and voice of the customer insights.
Learn how to assemble an RFP that will ensure you get the best chatbot for your business.
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Defining your business case starts with understanding your desired outcomes for deploying an enterprise chatbot. Maybe you want to reduce call volumes in your contact center by as much as 50 percent. Maybe you want to reduce shopping cart abandonment by 10 percent. For enterprises, these outcomes could mean tens of millions of dollars in cost reduction and millions in increased revenue. Here are some ways to predict and measure a chatbot’s return on investment as part of your business case.
No! Chatbots actually help human agents work smarter in a number of ways.
Find out more about the future of customer service and how your organization can strike the right blend of bots and human agents.
There’s a lot that goes into deploying effective AI chatbots. To help you find success faster, we’ll ensure your bot follows these essential chatbot best practices.
Especially with mobile technology, there is limited “real estate” to create your chatbot experience. We’ll provide a clean design that honors the customer’s expectations about how and where the conversation will unfold.
Effective agents (both live and virtual) need access to enterprise systems and data to resolve customer questions and issues.
Customers know how chat works; we adhere to general chat best practices to make the experience intuitive and easy for customers to use.
Chatbots communicate the same way people communicate. Phrases like “How can I help you?” and “Is there anything else I can help you with today?” are first-person phrases that go a long way to make the interaction feel human and engaging.
In situations where your chatbot needs to provide legal or policy information, we preface it with conversational human sounding language, like, “Here’s what I found for you. Click this link for the details of your policy.”
We’ll help ensure you use language that is consistent with your brand. You don’t want the AI chatbot experience to stand out as something that doesn’t quite match the feel of the rest of your digital experience.
Chat agents know to offer answers and information one piece at a time, rather than dump a long block of text into a conversation all at once. Your AI chatbot will do the same.
When chatbots hand the customer over to a live agent, they’ll preserve the context of the conversation so agents have full insight into what was already discussed. This prevents customers from having to start over or repeat themselves.
Customers need help and may be impatient, confused, or overwhelmed at the moment of interaction with your AI chatbot. Your AI chatbot will tell them what it knows about them and draw from available data points to make the experience as efficient as possible.
When designing your AI chatbot, we make sure that it looks like a natural part of your brand’s experience. By following your company’s standardized color palette, fonts, imagery, and other aspects of your brand identity, your chatbot won’t stand out for the wrong reasons.
While AI technology has advanced, we’re still at the beginning of its evolution. Even chatbots aren’t totally self-learning. You still need humans to supervise their learning, analyze and prepare training data, and integrate chatbots with enterprise information systems. Our experts can take care of that!
Our chatbots come equipped with out-of-the-box intelligence about industry practices, terminology, and customer journeys. This will help you automate 20 percent of customer journeys right away; then apply AI and machine learning to achieve a further 50 percent or more automation.
We mine the hundreds of thousands of conversations your AI chatbot is having in real time to judge customer sentiment, drive increased customer understanding, create new products, and adapt to changing customer needs. From there, we help you unlock the intent and understanding that comes from analyzing conversations.
Pay for results, not technology. Contact us today to get started with your chatbot deployment.
