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Types of chatbot and how to choose the best one for your business?

The relationship between businesses and customers has changed significantly over the past few years as we move closer to the fast-paced digital world. Customers' expectations are rising over time, so companies must come up with new ways to engage with them. In addition, businesses must improve the quality of their services and processes. As a result, many companies have jumped on the AI train to enhance their customer service. 

Chatbots are another example of how new technology is rapidly disrupting various industries. According to the Business 2 Community report, 82% of customers claim that instant responses to their questions are critical when contacting brands. 

Innovative chatbots can give businesses a fresh approach to interacting with customers and nurturing brand loyalty. Use chatbots on a variety of channels to meet your customer service needs. Over the past few years, we've seen different types of chatbot and their number arises. However, there are so many of them available right now that choosing one that can benefit your business and increase your audience might be challenging. Live platform provides the kind of chatbot that would be ideal for your business's needs. A bot that speaks your language, understands dialects and does street talk.

In this blog, we will highlight the benefits, types of chatbots, and tips on how to choose the best chatbot for your business.

What is a Chatbot?

Chatbots are software applications that simulate human-like conversations with users through text or voice interactions. They perform the role of digital assistants who are knowledgeable about human abilities, comprehend user intent, respond quickly to concerns, and offer solutions.

You can quickly engage customers with personalized content using a chatbot. Additionally, you can create special chatbots based on the demographics, location, information-consumption patterns, and customer lifecycle stages of each web page or audience segment. Live chatbot also recognizes context and follows up questions while handling multi-line messages, and offensive language handling. Furthermore, if you need it for your business, seamless transfer to a human agent is also available.

With a chatbot, you can provide your customers with a better, more convenient experience while relieving your team members' workloads of repetitive, time-consuming tasks. According to the MIT Technology Review study, 90% of businesses report large improvements in the speed of complaint resolution. 

Benefits of chatbots

Chatbots are filling the gap during off-hours and offer prompt responses. Also, it can be scaled to handle numerous customer requests concurrently, all of which help to enhance your overall customer experience. In various ways, chatbots are helping your company to achieve business goals, increase sales, and expand customer service.

1. Get rid of that time-consuming, tedious tasks

Nobody likes doing repetitive tasks. Chatbots are now used to help automate repetitive tasks. Teams can save money and work more efficiently as a result. Chatbots also guarantee that customers get a quick response to their queries without having to wait in line.

2. Improve customer engagement

AI chatbots can provide consistent responses and are useful in avoiding giving customers irrelevant information, which improves customer engagement.

3. Provide 24/7 customer service

Customers consistently expect a prompt response to their concerns and questions. Unlike your support team, chatbots don't need to take breaks. Even after hours, your company can help a customer. Customers are more satisfied as a result because they can get assistance right away. 

4. Boost lead generation

Chatbots are a great tool for increasing lead generation because they enable you to engage and differentiate your prospects on any channel, including web ads, landing pages, websites, messaging apps, and social networking sites.

7 Types of Chatbot You Need to Know

You should be aware of a few different types of chatbot functions and how they are made, though.

However, have you considered how to choose the chatbot that is best for your business? Your answer will become clear once you have a full understanding of the different types that are available. So let's evaluate them carefully.

1. Support chatbots

Support chatbots are one of the most popular types of chatbot. These applications are made to help your customers when they have general queries or questions about what to do next and to offer more context to support the customer journey.

Support chatbots assist your business with important tasks like fostering customer relationships, replacing emails and incessant questions to your team members, and enhancing website browsing with more interactive elements.

2. Rule-based chatbots

Rule-based chatbots, also referred to as decision-tree-based chatbots, communicate by providing predetermined responses. Users are given a conditional if/then at each stage as they respond to queries using pre-defined criteria to direct dialogue flow.

Companies must specify the chatbots' language requirements when using rule-based chatbots (asses the order of the words, synonyms, and many more). The customer can quickly get the needed response if their query falls under the chatbot's criteria and matches the condition set forth by the chatbot.

There are two categories of rules-based chatbots: button-based and scripted bots.

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3. Button-based or Menu-based Chatbots

The term "button-based" chatbots also apply to menu-based bot. If a company wants to introduce basic, first-line automation into their operation, this is typically their first choice. The user is given a predetermined list of responses to choose from when using these chatbots, which operate on a straightforward button-based rule.

The design of the conversation is predetermined and follows a script. Usually, it is developed to address particular business use cases.

4. Scripted Chatbots

If your brand doesn't require the sophisticated AI capabilities option, there are also scripted chatbots, which are more popular for smaller brands. The simplest kind of chatbots are scripted chatbots, also referred to as quick reply bots. To respond to particular queries or directives, these bots use pre-written responses.

In order to encourage users to provide the inputs necessary to generate a response, the chatbot uses pre-programmed scripts and prompts. Alternatively, it will ask users to choose from a list of options rather than typing at will.

Although they have some limitations, these chatbots are affordable and easy to use. They are frequently employed for routine customer service tasks like answering FAQs, resolving straightforward problems before forwarding the case to a live agent, and automating data entry forms.

5. AI chatbots

AI chatbots, also referred to as contextual chatbots or conversational chatbots, are computer programs that can understand the context of a conversation and interpret the correct meaning of a customer query. Chatbots that use machine learning can process complex questions, actually, learn from their interactions, and become smarter over time.

These technologies enable them to comprehend user intent and temperament in order to provide responsive and flexible answers. They can keep track of earlier interactions and make use of that information to interact with returning customers in a relevant way.

Large brands that handle a variety of incoming requests from a large audience can benefit greatly from smart AI.

They can help your brand manage more complex customer relationships because they can support inquiries and requests that go beyond basic FAQs.

6. Hybrid chatbots

Businesses usually appreciate the sophistication of AI chatbots, but frequently lack the resources or vast amounts of data necessary to support them. They choose the hybrid model because it offers the best of both worlds. The hybrid paradigm combines the strengths of three different paradigms: the ease of use of rule-based bots, the sophisticated capabilities of AI chatbots, and human empathy. This provides a flexible approach where simple bots can handle FAQs, more complicated questions use AI, and others get human interaction.

Agent responsibilities and the way customers are answered are unaffected by hybrid chat assistants. The hybrid bot, which combines rule-based and AI components, will serve as a new virtual agent that handles queries it can address and forwards complex, multilayered chat agent queries.

If your company is big and has a large database of customers, hybrid chatbots are suitable. This technology will best meet the needs of large corporations because setting up a hybrid chatbot involves many different steps. It is not necessary to spend as much time and money developing the hybrid bot for new businesses that only get a few straightforward queries.

7. Keyword recognition-based chatbot

The ability to listen to what users are typing and respond appropriately is a strength of keyword recognition-based chatbots. To give the customer the right response, these chatbots use Natural Learning Processing (NLP) and keywords that can be customized. They are useful for websites because they let visitors type in their queries and quickly receive a response. Customers are more satisfied because of the conversation's natural flow. 

They are useful for websites because they let visitors type in their queries and quickly receive a response. Customers are more satisfied because of the conversation's natural flow. Additionally, it's not unusual to come across bots that combine button-based navigation with keyword recognition to enhance their capabilities.

How to choose the best chatbot for your business

A company's customer service is improving with chatbots, which also increase operational effectiveness and boost engagement. The use of chatbots is important for the success of your business because of the enormous popularity of chatbots in recent years. 

It can be difficult to limit your options and choose the best chatbot for your business when there are so many of them available. However, there are a few ways to choose chatbots that are most effective for your company's needs.

1. Establish your objectives

Set your chatbot's goals and functions after defining your business's objectives. As you established your objectives, consider the capabilities of your chat assistant and how to enhance the conversational experience.

Answering the following questions will help you understand the tasks that chatbots will handle:

  • What is the main goal of creating a chatbot? Is it for lead generation, marketing, or customer service?
  • What type of people are you trying to handle? Are they both first-time and recurring guests, or both?
  • During what times do you want to offer chatbot support? Will there be support at predefined hours or days, or will it be available 24/7?
  • Which duties will they need assistance with?

Since they will be interacting with the chatbot on a daily basis, the customer should always come first in your strategy.

2. Define your Target Audience

You must first define the behavior and expectations of the target audience in order to design a successful chatbot. It is important that the chatbot act as a link between you and the customers. The chatbot needs to be intelligent enough to comprehend your customers' needs and effectively meet them.

3. Identify your Value Proposition

Making sure that your company's most important component receives priority is part of the value proposition. It's useful to know whether your potential customers would choose you over your competitors. As a result, businesses must decide on a value proposition before selecting the best chatbot for their needs and their budget.

4. Analyze the features and functionalities

An in-depth analysis aids in identifying features necessary for the chatbot to keep your processes running smoothly. For those who are starting now, you can create standards for evaluating all solutions. 

Companies should determine which features—such as integration, NLP, contextual awareness, analytics, and many others—are essential.

5. Multilingual AI

It isn't sufficient to communicate in one language in this fast-paced world. You should keep in mind that you need a system that can understand English and other languages as your company grows, and you attract more international customers.

Customers can communicate in their native tongue to have a more meaningful and natural interaction with a chatbot. Additionally, by adding new languages too, the platform should keep improving its multilingual capabilities.

Related Read: Improve customer experience with multilingual customer support

Conclusion

Due to their ability to automate internal and external business processes, chatbots are essential to a company's daily operations. They assist in organizing, responding to, and directing customer inquiries without adding to the workload of your team members.

Therefore, your company can maximize the benefits of chatbot technology by evaluating the goals of your company and keeping in mind the expectations of your customers. Choosing the best chatbot for your business would allow you to take your company to the next level.

This is the place where you can set up a chatbot. Live is the best chatbot supplier for you. 


Learn more about how the Live product family can help you support and improve your customer experience strategy.

 

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