Chatbots are computer programs that replace the need for human agents to communicate with other humans by relying on natural language processing technology to generate communication scripts. The technology behind chatbots learns to identify pre-programmed keywords and phrases expected from chat users, and it has become so sophisticated that it can act almost like humans while responding to queries and requests.
Their use is mostly found in providing customer service in various businesses. There are some questions that users encounter in the beginning of the chat that allow them to be routed to the relevant solutions or departments that can solve their problems. Apart from this simplification, there are other advantages of chatbots as explained below.
24/7 Availability
Research shows that 50 per cent of customers expect to be able to reach a business 24/7. Make a customer wait too long to reach a customer service representative and you have a classic bad customer experience situation. Businesses, big and small, need a chatbot on their websites as they serve as a perennially available point of contact.
Personalization
Bots can shape responses to user queries based on records of interaction conducted with users in the past. Chatbots can be integrated in CRM, ticketing, payments, and other software to access relevant data for personalized interaction.
Higher Sales
Research has shown that chatbot integration can lead to an expansion in sales by 67 per cent, as chatbots can advertise new products and services as well as solve customer grievances quickly. Conversely, lack of responsiveness to customer queries can result in lost business. Moreover, chatbots can help businesses find leads for expanding their customer base. An especially useful feature with ecommerce stores, sales chatbots can ask customers about their interests. For instance, if a customer indicates that they are interested in winter clothing, the chatbot will show them winter clothing suggestions.
Data Collection
Data collected through customer interactions on chatbots can deliver actionable insights and provide research on new products and services. Analytics combined with chatbots, as well as automation of data collection, allow businesses data for FAQs, personalized responses, transactional interactions, and even predictive analysis.
Savings in Cost
Customer service incurs training costs, employee remuneration, and installation costs. With chatbots, these costs are eradicated. A study shows that chatbots can help businesses save a maximum of 30 per cent of the 1.3 trillion dollars in costs of supporting almost billions of customers.
How to Integrate Chatbot Functionality?
With WordPress, plugins allow you to integrate the chatbot function to a website. If the website is developed on Shopify, this list offers a glimpse into free chatbot software integrable with Shopify. On a custom-built website, embedded code can enable a chatbot to be featured on a website in a matter of seconds. For building a chatbot from scratch, Nodejs, Python, Clojure, and AIML are some of the languages that can be used.
Arslan Ahmed | Contributing Writer
