In the digital age, customer service has evolved far beyond the traditional call centre model. Enter chatbots - an innovative solution transforming how businesses interact with their customers. These AI-powered tools are revolutionising customer service by providing instant, round-the-clock support, resolving queries efficiently, and enhancing overall customer satisfaction.

Chatbots have developed extensively in the last few years and are now a scalable solution that allows brands and businesses to deliver support to their customers 24/7.

In this blog, we’re taking you through the ins and outs of using chatbots on your website, with advice on how to design, integrate, and use a chatbot in the most effective way possible.

Understanding Chatbots

Chatbots are those little messaging boxes that pop up when you stay on a webpage for more than a few minutes. They can be personalised to deliver a bespoke service to each user and are designed to point customers and users towards the information that they need.

There are two types of chatbot that are worth knowing about.

1. Rules-based chatbots, that follow a series of instructions to create a conversation.
The user will select an option which drives the next question or answer.

2. AI-powered chatbots, which are more fluid, and which draw upon learned conversational speech as well as context hints to give users the correct information.

Both types have their benefits and help to filter out the number of customers who call on support agents.

Benefits of Implementing Chatbots

With that in mind, let’s look at the other benefits of adding chatbots to your website or social media platform.

For one thing, chatbots offer a 24/7 service that supports the needs of midnight browsers, international customers, and more. With a chatbot service, customers can get the advice and help they need, when they need it.

Another benefit of chatbots, at least as an initial touchpoint, is that they fulfil the consumer desire to get answers instantly. Chatbots can handle large volumes of queries and issues at the same time and in an orderly, efficient manner.

All of these capabilities make chatbots a cornerstone in the delivery of an efficient service for customers - not to mention they support operational efficiency from a business perspective, by removing some of the demand on customer service agents.

Planning and Designing Your Chatbot

Sold on the idea of a chatbot for your website or business?

Now’s the time to consider the finer details - specifically how to create a chatbot that supports your business, and then how to integrate it into your wider customer service strategy.

Your chatbot needs to align with your values and deliver the kind of interaction that reflects your vision. It’s no use marketing your brand as engaging and personable, and then making customers speak to a lifeless bot with no personality.

By far the best way to plan and design a chatbot for your business is to create a script that reflects your brand’s tone and acknowledges your values.

Some of the best ways to do this, and to put your brand at the heart of every conversation and interaction, include:

• Record existing customer interactions to get an idea of how agents speak to customers and to understand some of the issues that customer face when using your site
• Collect feedback on the quality of the website experience and ask customers for feedback on issues they have
• Use real agents to help create the script for your chatbot
• Make the conversation as personal as possible

Integrating Chatbots into Your Customer Service Strategy

Once you’ve designed your chatbots, it’s time to build them into your wider customer service strategy.

It’s important not to allow the rollout of chatbots to disrupt the user experience. Most customers will notice when they are suddenly unable to directly speak to an agent but rather must go through the process of speaking with a chatbot first - however, you can soften this by focussing on the script and engineering a personal and high quality interaction.

Our advice is to implement a series of steps using the chatbot - with the customer then transferred to an agent if the problem remains unresolved.

Best Practices for Chatbot Interactions

The user / customer experience should remain front and centre throughout the design and integration process of your new chatbot. That’s why, as part of the rollout of chatbots, it’s important to ask for feedback where possible and give customers an opportunity to speak with a human if they need to.

It is also crucial that you continue to train and expose chatbots to the latest updates from within your business, so that the information they provide is always up to date and relevant. If you want chatbots to become a reliable go-to for customers, they need to be at the forefront of all the latest updates from your business and industry.

Measuring Chatbot Effectiveness

With all this in mind, it’s time to talk about results - because let’s be honest, there’s no point integrating chatbots and going to all the work of creating scripts if they don’t work.

If a chatbot is not effective, not only will you leave customers frustrated at the lack of answers, but you could lose them completely. As an add-on for your business website, this is a pretty critical one in the customer journey, which is why effectiveness is so important.

Adding a feedback and satisfaction rating is one way of measuring how responsive and helpful chatbots are, with the added measure of response time and resolution ratings showing you how quickly results were delivered and whether they satisfied the customer enough to drive conversion.

It’s also important to track how the tone of the chatbot impacts the customer journey and experience. Customers are increasingly looking for an empathetic rather than a robotic tone, with the right level of escalation according to the problem. It is only through strategic monitoring that you will recognise where and when chats need to be intervened by a human agent.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Of course, alongside the need to keep evolving and making chatbots better in line with customer expectations, we also need to ensure that we skirt around the potential pitfalls and challenges.

Privacy and data security is of particular concern amid the rise in chatbot interactions, with sensitive customer information needing to be absolutely secure. It’s not enough to engineer this behind the scenes - customers need to be reassured if you want them to trust your chatbot and engage with it in the way that you intend them to.

You can do this by linking your privacy policy in the chat and reassuring users that their information will not be released. Chatbot conversations should also be encrypted for added privacy security.

Future Trends and How to Make Chatbots Work for Your Business

With AI and technology constantly changing and updating, we expect to see chatbots continuing to evolve both in terms of their capability and the way that they address customer concerns.

From their tone to the way that they personalise conversations and engineer unique and bespoke responses, chatbots are becoming easier to communicate with and easier to manage.

Suffice to say, the opportunities to touch base with your customers and deliver the advice they need whenever they need it, is supported by the rollout of chatbots. And with the Social Loop team well versed in the technology behind chatbot solutions and how best to integrate them within your business strategy and customer service model, you don’t have to face this ever-evolving technology on your own.

Get in touch with us to find out more about how chatbots can improve your customer experience, streamline your customer service, and increase engagement overnight.