Chatbot: An Ultimate Guide

With rapid advancements and innovations in technology, businesses keep upgrading their ways of interacting with customers. For instance, in the past couple of years, more and more companies have deployed Chatbots. 

Forbes predicts that the chatbot market will reach $1.25 billion

With the increasing scope of its application, chatbots have constantly been evolving. They have grown powerful in terms of functionality. For example, Chatbots built on conversational AI technology can mimic human agents and converse with customers in natural, human language 

What Is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program or chat interface that simulates human conversation, whether text-based or Voice-based, allowing users to interact with computers. They are typically deployed on customer-facing channels - Websites, Mobile Apps, and Messaging apps, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and telegram.  

Depending upon the underlying technology, Chatbots can be primitive, answering simple queries or FAQs, or sophisticated enough to understand natural, human language. 

What Can a Chatbot Do?

In basic terminology, a chatbot can automate tasks. The task can be further divided into other segments like customer support, surveys, lead generation, appointment scheduling, and much more. 

Here are a few cases in which chatbots have successfully helped many businesses. 

• Answer FAQs & give information about the product or service. 
• Help users book appointments, make payments, address problems, and plan their trips. 
• Answer multiple queries at one go. Marketers consider this a powerful functionality. 

The above cases prove that chatbots definitely decrease the time taken by tasks and help improve the overall performance. 

Why Chatbots Are Important

Chatbots enable customers to interact with businesses more conveniently. They enable self-service that most customers prefer over talking to an agent.  

According to Harvard Business Review, 81% of customers prefer solving problems themselves rather than talking to customer service agents. 

Also, Chatbots enable businesses to be available on platforms where their audience spends most of their time, i.e., social media platforms. You can integrate chatbots on these platforms, making it easy for customers to reach you. 

These integrations also target a lot of sales. They act as your online sales representative to the online audiences - promoting offers and helping customers find information about products and services. 

Also, conversational AI chatbots can also understand the intents of queries and, therefore, give appropriate responses. Bots increase the accessibility of the products or services - providing all the information required on all customer-facing channels. 

Benefits of Chatbots

Chatbots offer many benefits, such as: 

• Omnichannel, 24 X 7 customer assistance. 
• Fall back on Live chat (handing over the conversation to an agent) for complex queries  
• Help customers navigate through your website and find appropriate information about your business 
• Help your marketing team broadcast information via chatbots 
• Increase customer engagement and CSAT scores  
• Derive powerful, actionable business insights through automated AI analysis of conversations 
• Generate leads and increase sales 
• Upsell and cross-sell through appropriate recommendation  
• Deliver hyper-personalized customer support and buying experience 
• Reduce support costs 

Types of Chatbot

Workflow-based or Simple chatbot

Workflow-based chatbots are generally menu-based or keyword-based  

Menu-Based Chatbots: 

Through menu-based Chatbots, you navigate users through information about your product or services. Or, you can help the user finish a step-by-step task, e.g., ordering a pizza.  

Keyword-Based Chatbots: 

In keyword-based Chatbots, you detect keywords or phrases from the user query and respond according to the rules set for that particular keyword.  

Conversational AI Chatbot

Conversational AI chatbots are advanced and can understand natural human language. They are built on top of Conversational AI technologies, such as machine learning and NLP (Natural Language Processing). They act like human agents and can answer up to 90% of queries if trained properly. 

How Conversational AI Chatbot Work

While interacting with a well-trained conversational AI Chatbot, it feels like you are texting with a human agent. When you type a query and send it to the Chatbot, the bot first understands what you want (your intent) through NLP (natural language processing). Then the bot finds an appropriate response from the knowledgebase and formulates the answer in the natural language using NLP again.  

How to Build Conversational AI Chatbot without Coding

Building an infrastructure for conversational AI Chatbot from scratch on your own can be a tedious task - it requires time and resources. However, you can turn to third-party vendors, such as Floatbot.  

Floatbot offers a complete no-code platform that you can use to build Conversational Chatbots without writing a single line of code. 

Reach out to us at connect@floatbot.ai if you need any assistance in Chatbot building