You must have noticed a chatbot widget popping up (usually in the bottom right corner) when visiting a company’s website. It might ask you if you need any kind of help. This is exactly what you call a customer support chatbot!
This tool is helping many companies around the world provide instant and personalized assistance to their impatient customers. Not just that, it is magnificently reducing human intervention, ultimately saving businesses their expenditures and valuable time.
So, let me give you a flying overview of this game-changing thing!
- AI Customer Service Chatbot – A Quick Look
An AI chatbot for customer service is a software program that can grasp customer queries, give tailored responses, and simulate human-like conversations with customers by using advanced capabilities of artificial intelligence, machine learning, or natural language processing.
Businesses integrate these bots on websites, mobile apps, or social media platforms to provide 24/7 assistance to their customers. These bots interact with customers in real time, automate tedious tasks, and elevate the customer experience.
Furthermore, note that there’s a mighty difference between today’s AI bots and the old bots with pre-written scripts. That is, today’s AI chatbots also use generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) to comprehend and answer queries in a way that is incredibly efficient and resembles human nature.
- The Need to Build a Chatbot for Your Business
AI chatbots offer ample advantages for not just businesses but customers as well. Below, I’ve shared the key ones:
- Fast query replies and resolution
No matter what time it is, businesses can respond to consumer concerns right away with a 24/7 customer service AI bot. Thus, users can receive assistance without having to wait for long hours. AI chatbots offer speedy support for all sorts of troubles, despite how complicated they are, saving time and reducing anxiety.
- Data collection and personalization
AI chatbots can gather large volumes of data from past interactions with a customer to deliver personalized experiences. They can make suggestions tailored to the customer preferences and pain points. Besides, businesses can use this data to improve their products, services, and customer loyalty.
- Increased scalability and flexibility
Most businesses experience traffic spikes from time to time. Whether it’s a busy time of year or just specific peak hours, AI chatbots give you the flexibility to scale your support and make sure your company responds to every query. It gives you the chance to grow, collaborate with more clients, and boost sales.
- Cost savings for businesses
Businesses can cut costs notably by getting an AI chatbot for customer service. It augments your support staff while reducing the need to hire human workers. In contrast to recruiting and instructing support personnel to work nonstop, an AI chatbot can tackle loads of queries in one go without raising overhead.
Read: Why You Should Consider Conversational AI Chatbots 2024
- Build a 24/7 Customer Support Team with AI Chatbots
If you want to create an AI chatbot for customer support quickly and successfully from scratch, I advise you to follow the steps mentioned below keenly:
- Set down the chatbot’s purpose and goals
The first thing you need to do is be clear about the primary purpose and goals of your AI chatbot. Identify the tasks you wish the chatbot to carry out and the problems it should be able to crack. You can make a list of goals you want to accomplish with the chatbot, like increasing customer engagement by 40% or routing to the right live agent.
Now, this list will help you decide what features, functionality, and advanced capabilities the bot must possess. Write them down, too, and create a specific strategy that will help make sure you attain your desired objectives. Let’s say you own an online business. You might want your AI bot to help customers with product search and payments. Or, if you offer any retail services, you can train your bot to assist buyers in property suggestions and scheduling virtual property visits.
- Pick the most suitable AI chatbot builder
Once you’ve set goals for your AI chatbot, choose a platform for it. Here, it’s really essential that you opt for a platform that is both suitable and trustworthy. What does that mean? Look for chatbot builders that have previously built reliable AI chatbots for customer service and can provide smooth integration with your existing systems, advanced NLP capabilities, and the ability to learn and modify over time.
There are sundry AI chatbot platforms you can find on the internet. They come with pre-built templates and functionalities you can customize according to your needs. Plus, some platforms may offer the latest capabilities, such as deep learning and generative AI. While comparing various platforms, consider functionality, AI tools, usability, and support options and make sure they align with what you need.
- Craft your chatbot conversation flow
Next, craft the conversation flow. Conversation architecture structures and plots the flow of communication. The architecture of AI-powered chatbots includes NLP, NLU, knowledge base, data storage, dialogue manager, natural language generation, and user interface.
Kick off by imagining every possible scenario your chatbot may come across and how to react for each. Make a list of diverse user inputs with their appropriate replies, which should be short and to the point. To match the queries with their corresponding responses, construct a dialogue tree. Also, add AI capabilities to enable the bot to give personalized answers efficiently. Additionally, establish a unified tone of voice to show your brand’s personality. Further, ensure that the bot can determine when to hand over more complex issues to a human agent.
- Thoroughly train and test your chatbot
After that, train your AI-infused bot with relevant data and test its performance so that it works flawlessly and accurately. For this, use real-life conversations with your customers and refine the chatbot’s responses. Doing this will help it figure out the intention of users better. As a result, it will be able to deliver responses that are both accurate and useful.
Then, give your chatbot a meticulous test to resolve bugs or make necessary corrections and refinements for efficient service. Scrutinize NLU, i.e., see if the bot can get human instruction. Moreover, check the chatbot’s capability to deal with diverse situations by engaging in mock chats and using varying speech patterns and user intent. Apart from that, you should also inspect its navigation, ease of use, reactions to unrelated inputs, and user voice style recognition.
- Decide where you want it to appear
Now, it’s time to decide which channel is the best fit to put your AI chatbot for customer service on. Chatbots can be found on websites, mobile apps, emails, messaging apps (such as WhatsApp and Messenger), social networking channels (like Twitter), and pretty much any other platform that supports text-based exchanges.
In order to quickly determine your ideal channel, first find out where you will find the majority of your clients. Mostly, businesses across the world choose their website and social media pages to serve as the ideal channel. In addition to that, remember that all platforms have distinct requirements and limitations. So, consider this and try a range of deployment options to gauge how well the chatbot will work on each.
- Monitor performance and make changes
Have you deployed your chatbot? Still, you can’t relax because one thing is left. It’s performance monitoring. You ought to continuously monitor the performance of your chatbot and use analytics tools. It will help you know what to tweak in the chatbot’s responses so they align with your customer’s evolving needs, and you can maintain the quality of customer service.
To find out what elements attract your audiences and give the best results, make use of A/B or split testing. It is a technique in which you see two versions of the same chat with different elements. Of them, the version that performs better is implemented. Also, written content, graphics, voice style, and other components can be tested. What’s more, you can even ask customers for feedback or ratings to discover how helpful the bot is. All these points will help you make suitable changes.
So, this is how you build an AI chatbot for customer service for your business on your own.
However, if you want a fully-customized chatbot and want someone to build it for you, seek AI chatbot development companies. Or depend on Intelvue.
As a reliable chatbot development company in the USA, we provide high-class chatbot development services to businesses worldwide. Our AI chatbots for customer service are powerful, offer personalized experiences to customers, and escalate business revenue. By automating mundane tasks, they help industries slash operational costs and save massive time for both businesses and customers.
- Closing Thoughts
To sum up, AI chatbots serve as an exceptional customer support team for your company. By adopting AI chatbots, businesses can provide a tailored and timely service to customers in a way that resembles humans. Thus, it’s crucial for businesses to build a chatbot for their website, mobile app, or social media channels. It doesn’t matter if you make a chatbot yourself or get help from an AI chatbot development company. What matters is that your company’s platform should have an AI chatbot that could enhance efficiency, scale your support operations, and keep the customers happy and engaged!