How to build AI Chatbot for your business
Understanding the latest technology and how it can help your business goals
The AI Chatbot is no longer a stranger in most sectors. The adoption of this technology accelerated massively since 2016. By 2020, 80 percent of businesses intend to build a chatbot to serve their customers, more so for brands with customer-facing products.
Let’s take a look at some popular benefits of AI Chatbot for businesses:
Always-On
Instead of relying on a large group of 24/7 customer support agents, AI Chatbot is a fantastic way to provide around the clock support if you are serving customers across the globe. This technology allows us to automate repetitive tasks so live agents can assist more complex cases rather than spending most of the time addressing time consuming simple tasks.
“Call centers, websites, and mobile apps are no longer the only means of interaction with brands. Chatbots are fast becoming a business imperative for businesses that want to engage with their customers. Online chat through chatbots has grown faster than any prior channel.”
— Eileen Brown, ZDNet
Higher Conversion
AI Chatbot serves as a great addition to a website, especially for e-commerce. Customers can get quick facts from you in the decision-making process, making the overall buying experience much easier than before. With automation, AI Chatbot helps us to make orders or transactions possible without any human assistance.
“Ironically, a lot of people think that they’ve never used a chatbot, they’ve never experienced it, when in fact they have. Because Siri and Google and Alexa and all those voice-activated speaking bots, if you will, those are actually audio chatbots.”
— Kelly Noble Mirabella, Spiderworking
High Handling Capacity
From 10 to 100 questions at a time, an AI chatbot can answer them in fast and accurate manner. On top of that, customers who prefer to take their time in the evaluation process can freely ask as many questions as they want without feeling unwelcome.
Data & Insights
A huge advantage of using AI Chatbot is its ability to capture customer behaviour insights accurately. Data gives insights into how consumers interact with brands and products throughout the consumer decision journey. On top of that, other possible information such as demographic data and personal interests help companies learn who their customers are. Successful businesses use these inputs and respond by providing unconventional digital experiences to their customers.
Trending Bot Articles:
2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?
4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?
So, how exactly should businesses leverage AI chatbot technology?
There is no shortcut in developing a successful AI Chatbot. Much evaluation and internal engagement are required to determine the success of its implementation.
With the experiences we have gathered as a team, we discovered that the following must be considered ahead:
Set your priorities right
Be goal-oriented in your approach by identifying your business pain points and opportunities. Here’s the most important question businesses should ask themselves before getting started:
“What are you trying to solve?”
Whether it is managing product enquiries or assisting customers to check account balance, a good AI Chatbot focuses on its key tasks. This helps businesses to improve productivity by responding to pain points or opportunities more effectively.
Form realistic expectations
Most businesses expect AI Chatbot to know as much as Wikipedia, and more. That is not what it should be. An AI Chatbot is only as good as what it is trained to do and its knowledge base should be designed around your business and your customer needs. This helps to increase response accuracy on what truly matters. Focus on your user journey flow and keep the conversation within what is relevant. When your AI Chatbot is able to solve 80% of your customers’ needs, it is a winner.
Build one-to-many AI Chatbot
Customers tend to reach out to businesses through various channels from websites to social media platforms. These channels hold different strengths and challenges, which makes building one AI chatbot to fit all an incredibly challenging some time ago. With Meta owning most of the popular platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram, you can now build one that works for most if not all of them. While it is not without limitations imposed by each platform, an attempt at such unified approach can make training and performance tracking much more effective and cohesive for business in the long term.
Expect iteration and training
AI Chatbot can only improve when it gets more unsupervised conversations to learn what is important in serving your customers hence businesses should anticipate the need to train and iterate in the initial stage of the launch. The sooner your AI Chatbot is made available to the public, the faster it can achieve its best performance. Adopting this agile method allows you to identify the market opportunities and respond to it faster than your competitors.
Understand the technology limitations
One of the biggest misconceptions about AI Chatbot is that it can self-learn and improve without human intervention. That is not the case. For most businesses, intelligent and hybrid chatbots need to be developed and trained by humans. Such supervised learning is still essential for accuracy because true machine learning currently requires large amounts data and very few businesses have enough of data to use machine learning meaningfully. Instead of fully relying on your AI Chatbot to run on its own, businesses should always run regular reviews of what it has learned.
“To the user, chatbots seem to be “intelligent” due to their informative skills. However, chatbots are only as intelligent as the underlying database.”
— Peter Gentsch
Moving beyond customer service
As a small business or large enterprise, AI Chatbot has a role to assist businesses in many ways beyond customer experience. The technology is seen to manage HR matters, business process automation as well as website concierge and assistance.
Throughout the years, we see promising technological advancements in Artificial Intelligence. Chatbot has moved beyond its conventional keyword-based approach to fully relying on Natural Language Processing (NLP) in building conversations.
With AI Chatbots becoming more intelligent, we will see new opportunities where the technology will bring seamless customer communication in small businesses as well as enterprises.
Well, what do you think?
If you are interested to read more about AI Chabot for businesses, here are some write-ups which we find useful:
- Top 5 Chatbot Misconceptions: What You Should Know
- 11 Myths You Must Know About Chatbot Implementation and Its Usage
- 80% of Businesses Want Chatbots By 2020
- Chatbot Use Cases
- How NLP plays a role in deciding if your AI Chatbot is good or great
XIMNET is a digital solutions provider with two decades of track records specialising in web application development, AI Chatbot and system integration.
XIMNET is introducing a brand new way of building AI Chatbot with XYAN. Get in touch with us to find out more.
Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !
How to build an AI Chatbot for your business was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.