Did you know that 61% of consumers prefer to communicate with chatbots for effective, and quick interaction with brands?

This indicates how popular chatbots are. What’s more, their popularity is likely to continue to increase.

The reason behind this is the tremendous growth and development of machine learning. AI chatbots are responsible for significant structural changes in many organizations. It’s enabling businesses to provide excellent customer services without increasing the number of employees.

There are some amazing benefits of using AI chatbots in business. Such as 24/7 services and improved customer satisfaction. Having said that, there are some chatbot implementation problems as well, such as it’s not easy to design an effective chatbot.

Before we talk about the benefits and challenges of chatbot implementation in detail, let’s take a closer look at the different types of chatbots.

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What Are the Different Types of Chatbots?

Many marketers have noticed the success AI chatbots have on businesses.

But which one should you choose for your type of business?

Which one will fulfill your brand’s needs?

The following is a breakdown of your options.

Basically, there are two types of chatbots – Fixed Chatbots and AI Chatbots.

  1. Fixed Chatbots – As you can guess by the name itself, the information in these type of chatbots is fixed. As a result, they offer limited assistance. Fixed chatbots are usually used to solve repetitive questions or for customers who have limited access to customer services. The major downside of Fixed Chatbot is that they cannot understand human emotions and behavior. Hence, they are not as popular as AI Chatbots
  2. AI Chatbots – Thanks to machine learning technology, these chatbots are able to learn and improve.  Also, they are constantly improved and updated based on interactions and communication with customers. When compared to Fixed Chatbots, AI Chatbots are intelligent. That’s because they are designed based on advanced technology and offer a  positive UX.

So, these are the two important types of chatbots for your website and social media channels. Now, let’s move on and take a closer look at the benefits of using chatbots in business.

Benefits of AI Chatbots

AI chatbots offer you a way to build engaging and personalized experiences with customers. They are intuitive, fast, and convenient.

They’re much advanced and do a lot more than just a live chat software solution.

With them, you can gather customer information, better understand your target audience, and grow your business.

The following are some of the vital benefits of online chatbots that businesses can leverage.

1. Available 24/7

How do you feel when a human agent puts you on hold for a long time as you listen to annoying music?

It's irritating, right?

Usually, people don't like to spend a long time on the phone before they can talk with a human agent.

Now, with the introduction of AI chatbots, customers don't have to wait for so long to get answers or clarification from you. You can design an AI chatbot and replace customer care agents (not totally) with customer care services or emails.

AI chatbots are virtual robots, so they never run out of energy to communicate with your customers. Hence, they can operate 24/7, follow your commands, and help you improve the customer experience.

2. AI Chatbots Can Handle More Customers

Humans are capable of doing multiple things. However, the number of things we can do at the same time is limited. Even if we push ourselves hard and try to manage more tasks, often we end up making errors.

But that's not the case with AI chatbots.

But that's not the case with AI chatbots. AI chatbots are designed to handle multiple conversations and thousands of customers at the same time without any errors. Chatbots enable you to answer your customers immediately, regardless of the time of the day or the number of customers contacting you.

They can also help you collect leads and protect your business from losing valuable prospects.

And how does an intelligent online chatbot do that?

I'll give you an example of Collect.chat. With this chatbot, you can collect customer information interactively without asking them to fill out passive web-forms. The mobile-friendly chatbot collects customer feedback through intelligent questions and measuring their customer experience.

Want to offer your customers who visit your website rich customer experiences that yield better engagement?

Collect.chat allows you to capture their intent and identify and engage leads appropriately. It also offers data to help you engage leads with high chances of conversion.

3. Helps You Save Operational Costs

To run a business successfully, you need to hire efficient employees and obviously, pay them. As your business expands and grows, you need to hire more people to run it, thus increasing your overhead expenses.

In the beginning, chatbots may look like a huge investment, but in the long-run, they can help you save money. That's because you don't have to keep on hiring new people to handle customer service.

All you need to do is integrate an AI chatbot-based customer care service into your business. This will help you take queries from customers and solve them quickly and effectively.

However, if the chatbot encounters any complicated questions, then you can instantly transfer it to a live customer care agent for better service.

4. Helps You Improve Customer Experience

It's important for agents to have a positive attitude while speaking to your customers. However, they are humans who experience good and bad days. This, can, unfortunately, directly affect their attitude while conversing with customers, and that can impact customer experience.

On the other hand, AI chatbots are virtual robots; hence, they don't have emotions.

They are programmed to follow orders and are bound by rules which are created by you. Chatbots always converse with the customer perfectly and politely, regardless of how rude the customer is.

This way, you can enhance and achieve higher customer satisfaction levels.

Chatbot Implementation Challenges

Now that you have understood the benefits of leveraging AI chatbots, you can harness the power of chatbots to achieve better customer satisfaction. However, there are some significant challenges when implementing AI chatbots in your business.

1. Chatbot Security

In recent months, a lot has happened regarding data privacy and security. Customers are sensitive and protective when it comes to their personal data. Hence, it's crucial that you create chatbots that can assure data privacy for your customers.

Your AI chatbots need to collect information and data which are relevant and need to transmit it over the internet securely. If you are going to use chatbots for customer service, then you need to absolutely make sure that it's safe to share information with the chatbots.

Additionally, you need to make sure that the chatbot is hack-proof and that no hacker can get access to your chats. That's because customer's data is sensitive and can be easily misused or mishandled, and it can destroy your company's reputation.

2. Understanding the Emotions and Sentiments of Your Customers

You can also design conversational AI platforms with VoiceBots. They can recognize human emotions and sentiments. If they misinterpret human emotions and sentiments, it can have a huge negative impact on your business.

Having said that, it's challenging to identify the emotion from the user's voice and respond to it accordingly.

So, how can you solve this chatbot implementation challenge?

To overcome this issue and create the best AI chatbot, you'll need to invest a lot of time into training. This way, it can easily identify the correct sentiments and emotions of a human voice and respond in the right tone.

FAQ

Q1. What are the advantages of chatbots?

A. The top advantages of chatbots are:
– They are available 24×7 to serve customers.
– They can handle multiple users at the same time.
– They reduce operational costs.
– They help improve customer satisfaction and engagement rates.

Q2. What are the disadvantages of chatbots?

A. Chatbots have a few disadvantages and chatbot implementation challenges, including:

– They are susceptible to data security breaches.
– They can misunderstand user sentiment.
– They can face vernacular issues.
– They can interrupt the user experience.

Q3. What is the most intelligent chatbot?

A. Kuki or Mitsuku is the most intelligent chatbot, according to Google AI research. It has won the Loebner Prize Turing Test five times for being the best conversational chatbot in the world.

Q4. Are AI chatbots safe?

A. AI chatbots live on the web and are vulnerable to malware and data breaches like other web entities. They can be used for backdoor entry by hackers if not properly secured. That said, they can be made as secure as other customer-facing channels by encryption, authentication, protocols, and user education.

Q5. How many chatbots are there?

A. On Facebook alone, there were around 300,000 bots in 2018. According to Facebook Messenger’s estimates, the number of bot users increased by 100K in 2018. 8 billion messages are sent by bot users daily according to the same report.

Q6. Do customers like chatbots?

A. According to a Drift survey, most customers prefer chatbots over online forms, but they expect faster responses from bots. In fact, 42% of the respondents want chatbots to reply instantly. The same survey also revealed that customers still prefer to chat with a human than with a bot. They would prefer brands to provide proactive customer support through live agents the most.

Q7. Are chatbots the future?

A. Though we can’t predict the fate of chatbots in other industries, they are indeed the cornerstone of customer service in the future. Through sophisticated man-machine conversations and round-the-clock accessibility, they are poised to completely overtake the control from live customer care agents and other customer-facing channels.

Q8. How do you use chatbots?

A. Businesses can use chatbots in many ways, including:

– Personalization of customer communication
– Boosting customer engagement
– Streamlining online interactions
– Lead identification and nurturing
– Improving response rates
– Automating repetitive tasks

Q9. Is Siri a chatbot?

A. Siri is a voice-recognition-enable chatbot that answers the audio questions of users. It’s a virtual assistant or chatbot that leverages artificial intelligence to map voices to users and provide them with apt responses.

Q10. What is the benefit of chatbots for ecommerce?

A. Chatbots offer many benefits to ecommerce brands. They can:

– Simplify buyer journeys
– Offer customer support 24/7
– Provide contextual product recommendations
– Spot high-potential leads and nurture them
– Reduce labor overheads
– Collect customer data and insights

Ready to Harness the Power of AI Chatbots?

It's true that chatbots are more effective when it comes to interacting and communicating with your customers effectively. However, if you overcome the challenges mentioned above, you can not only save operational costs but also improve customer satisfaction.

Did you face any challenges when implementing AI chatbots in your business? Share your experience in the comments and check out the infographic for more information.

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