Chatbots are helping businesses scale without as many growing pains as without them—especially in customer experience. With automated chatbots, your customers can access support whenever they need it, regardless of your business hours. Bot automation allows the tool to answer common questions and promotes customer self-service. Plus, automated chats are cost-effective. You won’t need to hire additional service reps to work nights or weekends, and your existing reps can devote their time to more revenue-generating tasks.
AI-powered automation bots aren’t just a trend. With over 300,000 active bots on Facebook Messenger alone, chatbots are becoming more indispensable for businesses across every industry each year. That’s why it’s necessary to learn more about the critical role automated chatbots play in your company, the benefits they offer, how to best use chatbots, and the top automated bot software to consider.
The Role of Chatbot Automation
Automated chatbots play more than one critical role within your company’s website and social media platform. AI chatbots reshape and enhance how your existing customer service operates, boosting customer engagement through personalization and increasing productivity by automating tasks—all crucial to your growth and continued success.
What is chatbot automation?
Chatbot automation is AI-powered software that simulates natural conversations by using conversational AI and automated responses. This tool uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand and communicate with people in real-time.
Your company can use chatbots to recognize your customers’ needs and preferences and help them answer questions, fulfill requests, or resolve problems. Over time they can even personalize their responses based on each customer’s unique history with your business.
Role in Enhancing Customer Service
Automated chatbots allow customers to access support when they need it, 24 hours a day. They’re also transforming customer service by offering more self-service options. People can use a chatbot on your website to quickly schedule appointments, check the inventory of their must-have items, track their orders, or get answers to questions when it’s convenient for them. They’re not relegated to waiting in a phone queue to speak to a human representative or limited to support only within your operating hours.
Role in Improving Operational Efficiency
Chatbot automation also streamlines many customer service operations, allowing human agents to eliminate repetitive work and focus on the most critical issues. They can also handle multiple customer queries at once, allowing more customers to receive assistance faster. Using chatbots can also shorten your sales cycle, helping prospects learn about your products and move faster through each stage.
Role in Driving Customer Engagement
AI chatbots go beyond handling simple customer queries. An automated chatbot can gather valuable information about your customers, helping you further personalize future interactions. Your business can also use this data to inform its outreach strategy and further develop customer relationships.
3 Benefits of AI-driven Chatbots
AI chatbots are often your website visitors’ first interaction with your business. They can respond quickly and provide excellent support using conversational AI and automation. Other benefits of these chatbots include:
24/7 Availability
Customers want fast service on their schedule, even during peak hours or big promotions. Since chatbots are software applications, they can provide around-the-clock support to worldwide customers—even at high volumes. Customers can use bots outside of business operating hours to quickly solve their problems or get answers to FAQs in minutes.
Personalized Interactions
Automated chatbots use customer history to improve support responses and personalize conversations. For example, they can adapt the chat messaging to the customer journey stage, suggest other relevant products, or switch from chatting on the web to text messaging or another preferred channel.
Data Collection and Analysis
Your business can collect customer data from AI chatbot interactions to further improve customer experience. The chatbot will learn more about their preferences and needs to better personalize any future conversations. You can also integrate your chatbot data with other analytics or automation tools, like your CRM, to give your marketing and sales teams more information to work with.
Implementing Chatbot Automation
More and more companies are choosing to adopt this AI technology because of all the advantages chatbots offer. To get the most out of your chatbot, it’s essential to implement the automation tool in the right way. We’ve outlined these steps below to ensure your chatbot implementation goes smoothly.
Define Chatbot Goals
You won’t improve customer satisfaction or business operations without defining the primary outcomes you want to achieve with your chatbot. Maybe you’re interested in generating more leads, reducing customer service costs, or improving operational efficiency. Or, you may want a chatbot that uses your company’s knowledge base to answer customer queries. Considering your customers’ expectations in this process is also essential. You want to build a bot that can achieve all of your goals.
Choosing the Right Chatbot Platform
The next step is selecting the right type of chatbot for your business. There are several different chatbot technologies to choose from, including rules-based bots and AI-powered bots using conversational AI and generative AI, to name a few. You’ll want to consider the type of chatbot and chatbot features that bring the most value to your business and customers, then select a platform that can build your preferred bot model.
Designing Conversational Flows
Conversational flows are the make-or-break element of your chatbot automation. When designing conversational flows, think about how your customers and your teams will use the chatbot. What questions are customers frequently asking, and what do they often need help with? Use your customer service reps’ experience during this step to gain deeper insight into how customer conversations typically go and what results in higher levels of satisfaction.
Integration With Existing Systems
When building your chatbot, consider integrating it with your existing digital channels and tools, like social media and messaging platforms and your CRM. Doing so provides your customers with even more access to personalized support without visiting your website or calling your business.
7 Best AI-Driven Chatbots of 2024
AI chatbots can lighten your customer service workload while improving customer satisfaction. But, with numerous chatbots in the market, knowing which bot is the right choice for your company can be challenging. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the best chatbots currently available, exploring both their features and pricing.
Podium
Podium’s offers several AI-powered chat tools, including Webchat. This AI Assistant captures leads and suggests responses at the push of a button. But if you’re looking for a chatbot that can autonomously converse with your customers, consider Podium’s AI Employee.
AI Employee instantly responds to customers, driving them towards specific actions like scheduling an appointment or making a purchase. It works around the clock to improve customer engagement and boost sales.
Pricing starting at $399/month. Contact sales or watch a demo to learn more.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is OpenAI’s conversational chatbot powered by generative AI. Its main capabilities include producing text-based content and chatting about topics, making it useful in customer service applications.
Its prompt-based functions are easy to use, but its popularity also means it can reach capacity sooner than other chatbots. It’s also important to consider that ChatGPT sometimes generates inaccurate content, so you may need to fact-check answers and conversation flows before deploying it.
While a free option is available, many businesses will need to upgrade to a premium or enterprise account to access the full features.
Claude 2
First launched in 2023, Anthropic’s Claude has quickly become a top chatbot choice. It supports document uploading, reading, and summarization to learn context and help others understand the file—a useful tool when customers have policy questions.
Claude has a longer conversational memory than other chatbots, allowing for greater personalization and customer satisfaction.
Claude’s free option is limited to 25 messages/day, so you may need to upgrade to their pro or team plans, which start at $20/user/month.
Chatsonic
Mainly known for its writing assistant abilities, Chatsonic is powered by ChatGTP-4’s LLM technology and can produce content and conversations at scale.
Its feature-rich chat experience offers voice-to-text and text-to-voice. Customers can prompt conversations by talking out loud. They receive verbal answers, which makes it accessible to a greater number of customers. Its capabilities also include PDF assistance and web search.
Chatsonic offers free and paid options, both with monthly word generation limits.
ZenoChat
TextCortex’s fully customizable AI chatbot, ZenoChat, uses NLP and machine learning (ML) to help businesses enhance customer engagement. The platform utilizes prompt templates and ML to quickly understand customer inquiries and provide relevant responses.
Zenochat also integrates into messaging platforms and websites to offer omnichannel customer support. The free plan limits users and access to its advanced models, and a premium plan is priced based on usage.
Perplexity.ai
Perplexity’s AI-powered chatbot is connected to the internet to provide users with sources alongside their responses. This chatbot is straightforward to use and offers suggested prompts and other relevant questions related to your conversation to move it forward.
It also lets you share chats with others, making it easy to hand off a chat to a live customer service rep if needed. Perplexity.ai is another free tool with the option to upgrade to a professional account.
Tidio’s Lyro
Tidio’s AI chatbot, Lyro, boasts an easy setup and can tackle a variety of customer concerns. Lyro answers questions using your knowledge base to minimize hallucinations and redirects support to live agents if it lacks the information to assist a customer. You can also pair it with Tidio’s Flows to automate more customer service tasks. Pricing starts at $499/month for access to Tidio’s full range of customizable features.
Podium’s AI Employee
Build an efficient customer experience with Podium. Our all-in-one AI Employee is an automated chatbot and more, using conversational AI to assist customers and help you make more sales—even after business hours. See all the ways our AI Employee can help your business today.
