Human assistants are great, but sometimes you just want the answers to your questions immediately. No waiting for an email response because it’s not business hours.
It’s no longer surprising to see businesses use chatbots to interact with consumers — or even create their own automated chatbots. As the audience becomes increasingly used to a 24-hour, readily available shopping experience and the role of messaging platforms in everyday communication expands, it’s only natural for businesses to look for efficient ways of connecting to their potential customers.
Below is the list of how to effectively use chatbots:
Section: 1. Identify Your Key Customer Service Needs
Do you want to answer common questions like those about shipping, billing, or returns? Or do you want to handle more complex queries from customers?
Are your customers asking the same questions over and over again? If so, a chatbot can help reduce your support costs by answering those frequently asked questions.
Are your customers having trouble completing certain transactions? If so, a chatbot can make it easier for them to complete these transactions by walking them through the steps or even performing parts of the transaction automatically.
Do you need to provide more information about your products or services? A chatbot can provide this information seamlessly in real-time.
Section: 2. Focus on a Single Channel for Your Chat Bot
You can build a chatbot that works across multiple channels — Facebook Messenger, SMS, and email — but it’s better to start with just one channel so that you can test it and see how customers react. This will also make it easier for them to find your bot and use it without having to jump between different apps or devices.
Section: 3. Decide on What Triggers Your Chatbot
Before you set up your chatbot, you need to decide what triggers it will respond to. You can either use a trigger word or have the bot start the conversation when it sees certain keywords in the user’s message.
For example, if you want to talk about sports, you could use a trigger word like “sports” or “football” and then start talking about your favorite teams or players.
Section: 4. Create Conversation Flows for Your Chatbot
This is very important, especially since it has been found that 63 percent of people would consider messaging an online chatbot. A conversation flow is the set of rules that govern how your chatbot talks to users and accepts input from them. These are like walkthroughs for humans, but for machines instead. They tell the machine what to do in every possible scenario it might encounter while interacting with a human being. These rules dictate how long it takes for someone to have a conversation with your bot, what questions they can ask and responses they can receive, and how long each conversation should last before moving on to the next one.
Section: 5. Develop and Train Your Artificial Intelligence Engine
This is the core of your chatbot, so it needs to be well-designed and well-coded. You also need to train it. You can use machine learning techniques like neural networks or deep learning to train your chatbot on how to respond to different situations. Once you have trained your AI engine, you can start using the chatbot in production.
Section: 6. Test and Optimize Your Chatbot
Once you have developed and trained your AI engine, it’s time to test and optimize your chatbot. You’ll want to test it on various platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram, and more. You’ll also want to test different scenarios with different users so that you know how your chatbot performs under different contexts and conditions. Once you’ve tested it enough times, you’ll be able to optimize the performance of your chatbot by fine-tuning algorithms or changing pre-programmed responses based on user feedback obtained from testing sessions with real customers who use the bot regularly for their business needs.
Having a great customer service experience gives customers a positive impression of your brand. Offering a great service is not only for companies with thousands of customers but also for startups and small businesses that are just starting out. Having a chatbot to answer your customers’ questions can give you an edge over your competition and keep your customers coming back to you.
Implementing chatbots can have a significant impact on customer service experiences, but you need to be aware of their pros and cons before diving in headfirst.
