Introduction
“24/7 or round-the-clock customer support” is one of the best sales hooks and pitch points businesses use to persuade their users to make the desired decision to buy their product/services. And AI chatbot has helped the business to provide intelligent round-the-clock digital support to their customers.
AI chatbots act as a tool that makes it easy for the users/customers to find information whenever they have queries and requests through text input, audio input or both on websites or apps.
From simple FAQs, locating web pages and product/service comparisons to collecting leads and mapping the entire customer journey, chatbots have become effective business and marketing tools.
But what is a chatbot, actually? What’s behind its popularity, and how effectively can it enhance customer experience? Along with finding the answers to these questions, this article will explore everything businesses need to know about chatbots and what they need to do to find a perfect AI chatbot solution.
How does a chatbot work?
An AI chatbot is software that simulates human conversations. It is trained using machine learning algorithms and Natural Language Processing (NLP), which can understand the open-ended queries of users and automate the solution for them.
Along with understanding the orders, it also understands the sentiments, intent, context and language of the inputs from the users. AI bots also learn from every interaction they have with users, so it continues to improve daily.
So this is how a chatbot works in the front-end. Let’s now look into how the AI chatbot works in the back-end.
How important is natural language processing in an AI chatbot?
Natural language processing is an essential component of an AI chatbot. It converts the users’ text or speech into unstructured data to select the appropriate answer. Natural language understanding in NLP helps the chatbots to understand the query by breaking it down into concepts.
There are three specific concepts:
- Entities: Entities represent the keywords from the user input recognised by the chatbot to understand what the user wants.
- Intents: Intents represents the process of identifying the action the chatbot needs to perform on the users’ input.
- Context: Contexts help in easily relating the intents and provide the necessary relatable solution to the queries of the users.
The chatbot is connected to the database, and it uses the database of information to give a suitable response to the user. Once they understand the concepts, the AI goes through the patterns in the database and provides a relatable solution to the users’ queries.
How does a chatbot benefit businesses in enhancing customer service functions?
When it comes to customer experience and expectations, we can sense that digital disruption is rapidly rising. Customers are more informed, selective, and explorative in this digitalised lifestyle era. So to attain customer loyalty and trust and increase the customer retention base, businesses need to provide differentiated and unique experiences.
AI chatbots help businesses by automating various customer-related communication functions to a large extent. Through chatbots, guiding customers through the buying journey, acquiring leads or communicating with the existing clients and providing 24/7 digital customer service has become relatively easy and manageable.
A chatbot can also help businesses place an order, simplify order management, send notifications, and provide instant customer support. AI chatbots are highly interactive, facilitating a humanised and personalised experience for the customer.
The troubleshooting services and customer service AI chatbot are highly cost-efficient. It is more efficient, convenient, multilingual and takes less effort and time for the customers to converse with an AI chatbot.
As mentioned earlier here, though chatbots can’t replace humans, they can complement the customer support chat experience, providing the instant support they need round the clock.
Here are the top 5 ways how customer experience can be enhanced with AI chatbots
1. Reduced customer wait time
AI chatbots help users instantly get immediate answers to common queries, thereby reducing the waiting time of customers in line.
2. Always-on customer service
Being there to provide basic customer support round the clock is only possible with AI chatbots.
3. Maintaining communications with customers
Along with quickly resolving users’ queries, AI chatbots can be leveraged to maintain efficient communication with existing customers.
4. Extracting leads
By handling the initial support communication with the users, AI chatbots help businesses identify the users as potential buyers or not. A chatbot can ask a series of questions and collect the required contact details from prospective customers.
5. Branding and brand loyalty
Bots can converse and instantly welcome the users with the branded greeting. They can use the tone and voice of the business branding. Along with business branding, a personalised tone can be added to provide humanised and personalised support.
To know more about the characteristics and advantages of chatbots and the challenges in building the chatbot system, check our recent article.
How to choose a chatbot platform?
Implementing an AI chatbot system comes with some significant challenges. Building an AI chatbot at the enterprise level requires deep technology developing and deploying knowledge. Building a chatbot without compromising on security, governance, and data protection needs to be given priority.
As AI trains and enhances itself with every interaction with humans, there is a chance of developing biases, so AI chatbot requires continuous checks. Also, training and deploying them into front-end systems and integrating internal business systems into chatbots requires experience.
So to make the process of building, training, deploying and analysing the AI chatbot simplified, businesses can build their chatbots on chatbot platforms. Chatbots platforms offer tools and support for developing, customising and deploying personalised chatbot systems at the enterprise level.
When selecting a chatbot platform, these are the following requirements that businesses should look for:
- Multiple tasks undertaking - Chatbot platform should offer pre-built or templates of chatbots that are ready to be deployed and that can perform multifunctions by communicating with multiple systems and completing every task within each of them.
- Multiple system support - Businesses should look for a chatbot development platform where chatbots can be integrated with multiple front-end systems like websites, applications, social media messengers, email, SMS, etc.
- NLP training - Chatbot development platform should support in training the NLP of the chatbots to get the desired results once deployed.
- Speech support - Along with text support, if speech support can be incorporated into the chatbots, they tend to understand the user context and intent and provide the best results.
- Chatbot building - The chatbot platform should provide user-friendly and intuitive tools for designing, building, customising, training, testing and deploying the chatbots. They should also allow customisations of features according to the use-cases. The chatbot platform should support businesses with analytics.
- Multiple language support - Go for chatbot platforms that support communication in multiple languages. When your users and audience are from diverse environments, chatbots need to understand various languages and dialects and provide support accordingly.
Picking the correct chatbot platform isn’t an easy task – it requires many considerations and experience. Businesses can partner with experienced chatbot solution developers like DMG and build seamless chatbot solutions. Joining experienced developers will provide the best solution in a cost and time-efficient way.
How can DMG help your business?
DMG has years of experience building AI-based chatbots and voice bots solutions. We have supported businesses across various industries by reforming their customer service with enhanced chatbot solutions. DMG holds expertise in analysing, conceptualisation and creating a chatbot.
With our team of experienced programmers and developers, we have defined the process of building enterprise-level chatbot solutions. From understanding the landscape of the business, use case of the chatbot and selecting the chatbot platform to develop personalised chatbot systems, training and deploying them into the systems – we provide extensive support.
We also extend our support in the post-deployment phase in tracking, monitoring and auditing the chatbot’s performance. We also provide consulting services to initially check on the need/requirement of chatbots with regards to business operations of the businesses.
Chatbot systems that DMG mostly use
Botpress
Botpress is an open-source, on-premises chatbot framework with a native NLP and NLU engine, which supports businesses in designing the conversation flows. It has graphical bot-building tools, which make it a user-friendly chatbot builder for various purposes. The best advantage of Botpress is that it is a non-cloud chatbot framework, so it comes with extensive security and data privacy.
Amazon Alexa Skills
It is a cloud-based voice service which allows businesses to integrate their chatbots and voice assistance with Alexa. It offers many APIs, tools and references to support businesses build highly interactive and intuitive chatbots. It allows maximum customisation so that bots can be created according to the business use cases.
Leon
Leon is an open-source personal assistant that can be integrated into multiple systems like websites, apps, social media, etc. It is one of the most easy to set up and developer-friendly chatbot systems built using web technologies.
Dialogflow
It is a natural language understanding platform with the best user-friendly back-end and front-end with an integrated code editor and serverless application structure. Main advantage of Dialogflow is that it offers over 20 different languages.
Amazon lex
It fully manages artificial intelligence service with advanced natural language models for building, designing, testing and deploying text and voice-based conversational interfaces.
Microsoft bot framework
It is an enterprise-level framework for building, deploying and managing bots. It comes with higher quality bots at the minimum cost of development.
LUIS
It is a cloud-based conversational AI service, which uses machine learning technology that rapidly improves based on the utterances given.
At DMG, we offer to help businesses with chatbot development using the above-mentioned chatbot system, though we don’t restrict our scope only to these systems. We work round the clock to make sure our clients get the best chatbot solution to provide an enriching experience to their customers.
We have supported clients all around the world by developing highly interactive chatbots, which allowed them to communicate with their customers effectively, provide excellent customer service and ultimately enhance their profits.
Ready to redefine your customer experience?
We live in the digital era, where everything needs to be quick and personalised. And in the same way, customers expect fast, reliable customer service around the clock.
Chatbots help businesses with upgraded customer service capabilities, allowing them to be there for their customers 24*7, maintain seamless and continuous communication, define a smooth customer/buyer journey and provide assistance.
If you need more information, assistance or consulting in building your chatbot systems, fill out the form below, and let’s discuss!
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Till Neitzke
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