26 Nov 2021
9 min
From local family businesses to international businesses of all sizes, they are all taking advantage of a new way to grow their support teams without increasing headcount. How do they do it? They adopt chatbots, applications that initiate conversations similar to those between humans, to provide identical ongoing support to customers and employees.
Interacting with chatbots is straightforward, as they use AI and natural language processing to chat with users through text, voice, and images. A conversational chatbot can quickly become one of your flagship players. Whether it’s 2 a.m. or 2 p.m., when your customers ask questions, a chatbot, which works 24/7, helps them answer their queries, thus increasing engagement and loyalty compared to the brand.
Human team members also benefit since they can use the time previously spent on customer support tasks for more complex, high-value work. When you deploy chatbots internally, your employees can use them to get their questions answered quickly.
All of these benefits improve your bottom line. The happier customers and employees are, the shorter your sales cycle, the lower customer support costs, and the engaged and productive workforce. Thanks to the data that your new chatbot captures, you also benefit from a unique possibility to analyze users’ behaviors and potential visitors.
Across industries, chatbots are helping organizations reinvent how they can break down barriers and better serve their customers and employees – all at scale.
For example, a retailer can use a chatbot to notify customers of store locations, hours of operation, current promotions, and return policies. That same retailer can also connect a chatbot to their internal systems to simplify HR tasks and help employees submit time-off requests, log hours, or verify benefits.
But retailers aren’t the only ones who can take advantage of chatbots. Organizations in the financial services, education, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, travel, and hospitality industries are also significant users of chatbots. So, whether you want to streamline processes for customers needing a new insurance policy or planning a dental cleaning, creating a chatbot can have an immediate impact on customers, employees, and your business.
Creating a chatbot is not as daunting as it used to be, where only highly skilled data scientists or developers could make it. Right now, creating a chatbot has become much easier thanks to software and development platforms with little or no code.
But before you move on to developing chatbots, you need to know precisely why you are doing it. The first and most essential step in developing chatbots is to identify your goals. So be prepared to flesh out and document your answers to the following questions:
Developing chatbots can take as little as a few minutes or up to several months. It depends on the complexity of your chatbot, your organization in the process, and the methods you choose to create your chatbot.
Take into account the recommendations to accelerate development and ensure a positive return on investment:
Familiarize yourself with common chatbot development challenges or mistakes that might arise. By preparing in advance, you can avoid many obstacles before they arise.
Avoid common pitfalls, such as:
Chatbot platforms and software with little or no code are growing in popularity as they provide business users with all the tools they need to quickly build versatile chatbots without the need for IT.
Most chatbot software offerings feature an intuitive graphical interface that removes the complexity of developing AI-based chatbots, making it possible to create a chatbot without writing a single line of code. You can use the software to customize your chatbot, connect it to your internal or external systems and services, and deploy the chatbot across multiple channels.
However, some chatbot software has drawbacks. While most help you build a chatbot faster and more affordably than developing it one line of code at a time, some offerings lack essential features, such as connecting to third-party applications and systems, access protection, or monitoring and analysis.
Selecting the right software is essential to building a chatbot that meets your goals. Consider the following criteria.
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