The world is benefiting from the fourth industrial revolution driven by concepts like mobile supercomputing, and artificial intelligence. We can see the impact of AI all around us which ranges from virtual assistants like Cortana from Microsoft and Siri from Apple. A similar revolution is the possibility to indulge in a human-like conversation with chatbots.
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What are customer support AI chatbots and why are they so popular?
Chatbots are artificial intelligent assistants that provide services such as customer support. They can communicate with customers via text messages or online instant messaging. These virtual assistants can be embedded in apps or websites, and Facebook has even integrated them into its messaging service, Facebook Messenger.
Of course, chatbots are not a new phenomenon, but earlier they used to be quite simple. They could only answer customer questions based on the information they had access to. On the other hand, today’s smart bots rely on artificial intelligence and natural language processing – NLP. When they communicate with the customer, they use machine learning to build a database of potential answers over time.
Businesses benefit greatly from such a virtual agent because they save a significant amount of money that would otherwise be spent on human assistants. Instead, the customer service virtual assistant can quickly respond to a variety of questions.
Even customers prefer chatting online with an intelligent chatbot to waiting interminably for the IVR to route their call to a human agent. The conversation of artificial intelligence-based chatbots is very lifelike, so users do not realize they are conversing with a machine.
AI chatbots for customer service comparison criteria
User Experience
The impetus in customer support services is to provide an empathetic and intelligible response to customer queries. This is easily done by chatbots that are designed as a conversational interfaces. Chatbots are created to mimic a conversation with a real person either by text or voice.
The idea is to make the user feel that his query or problem is being recognized and acted upon in a short time. Typically even bow chatbots are used for actions like booking a ticket, product recommendations, ordering food, etc. Instead of typing with the buttons for a text query, customers can simply ask the bot a question in their voice and they will receive a voice response.
This in turn enhances the user experience and the customers go away satisfied with their conversation with a bot. Hence we can say that compared to making phone calls for every little query, customers find it better to converse live with a bot.
Robustness
A robust AI chatbot means one that always generates reasonable responses which do not confuse or provide wrong information. In order to enhance the robustness of chatbots designers also provide the option to ask the user to wait for the right human agent to take charge of the case.
Hence in chatbots, the input is the message put in by the user either in text or voice, and the output is the answer. For instance, if the input is ‘Hi, how are you?’ the output should be ‘I am fine, and you?’ Similarly, the chatbot should not give vague or incorrect answers.
It is sometimes best to keep the solution semi-automatic, because the deep learning system for artificial intelligence-based chatbots may sometimes be incorrect. Hence a domain expert should approve bot responses generated so that over a period of time the bot will be able to handle most scenarios.
Integrations
The modern-day NLP-based chatbots can be easily integrated with Google sheets, email, Customer relationship management (CRM) software, team chat, social media, video conferencing, phone and SMS, developer tools, etc. These integrations are meant to create a better source of information for the user along with a good experience.
You can integrate customer support chatbots with your favorite apps and tools. These integrations mentioned above enable the bot to conduct many customer service functions like adding new leads to CRM, sending an email to customers after a sale, and much more. This ensures that you never miss an opportunity.
Pricing
Let us see how much a chatbot costs in the current times as the pricing differs with different criteria. The price of artificial intelligence-based chatbots is quite varied because the cost depends on the source you are getting it from. If you hire a developer to create a chatbot then it will cost you a lot of money.
However, there are platforms that provide these bots for a lower price. Hence if we take a very wide view then chat bots can cost anything between $0 to $300,000, per solution. The pricing depends on the plan that you choose and the plan that satisfies your requirement.
No-code workflow builder
With the help of no-code workflow builders, even non-technical people can easily build a chatbot. This is because in this system you don’t need to write a single line of code. The tools providing these services have a user-friendly interface and abilities to provide the drag-and-drop option to users.
No-code workflow builders have transformed the market and there is a good reason why they are becoming very popular. They are easy to work with and self-directing, at the same time, they are completely customizable. They allow you to build a conversational AI and NLP-enabled chatbot in a very short period of time, and with no need to write code.
Technology: AI and ML
AI and ML stand for artificial intelligence and machine learning which are transforming a vast array of industries with this evolution in computer science and data processing. As businesses grow there are required to deal with huge amounts of data that is not just incredibly valuable but also very tiresome to collect, process, and analyze.
This is where artificial intelligence and machine learning come into the picture. These technologies help in managing this vast amount of data being collected, to mine it for information, and to act on that information.
Among the four different types of artificial intelligence, the limited memory AI systems are the most advanced and are usually used in creating chatbots. These systems are used to store incoming data and other data regarding the decisions that it makes. Such a system will then analyze the data and take the help of this information to improve over time.
This is the part where machine learning really becomes active. Examples of the application of this technology include virtual voice assistants, self-driving vehicles, and chatbots. The kind of live interaction that some advanced chatbots provide goes a great way in the development of a business’s customer support division among others.
Top 10 popular customer support chatbot platforms
Chatbot
With a simple name like this, you may wonder about the efficacy of this bot platform. However, chatbot over a period of time has established themselves as a great accompaniment to the customer service endeavors of an organization.
This bot platform will help your organization to provide its customers with impeccable customer service and hence you will stand a head and shoulders above your competition. You can enhance the customer’s experience of dealing with your organization with an automated yet smart artificial intelligence-based bot.
This platform also allows you to create customer support bots that offer personalized recommendations tailored to the requirements of your customers.
BotSpice
Botspice is a platform that has created quite a strong niche in the market over a very short period of time. It is an AI and NLP-powered chatbot that transforms your customer’s experience by intelligently dealing with their queries and complaints.
You do not need any knowledge of coding in order to create a customized bot for customer service with the help of this platform. It is a great platform for a contactless customer experience with minimal human interference.
ManyChat
This bot platform allows you to automate and combine Facebook Messenger and SMS to grow your business. By doing this it helps in synchronizing data and conversations from these channels which have very high traffic. This in turn helps you to provide a fast, seamless and harmonious experience to your customers who interact with the customer service bot.
With the help of ManyChat, you can interact with around 1.3 billion Messenger users. You can provide them with an easy and personalized experience with the help of customized and interactive content. The template allows you to start building a bot in minutes with a custom template following your business requirements.
Acquire
Acquire is equipped with conversational chatbot software which has been built with the idea of providing a more lifelike experience to the users. In both areas of lead generation and customer support, the bots created using this platform are honed to provide a better digital experience to your customers.
At the same time, these bots will answer mundane and repetitive questions along with sending automated emails. This allows your team to focus more on strategic tasks. If the chatbot is unable to reply to a customer query it will route the question to a human customer service agent.
ProPofs
The chatbot created with this platform allows you to provide a customizable conversation with your customers. This bot can take care of all the repetitive tasks like answering FAQs and managing repetitive tasks. It will help you in capturing leads and detailed information on them in real-time.
You can also set up open responses and multiple-choice questions to enable you to gain more information from the user. Then again it allows you to delegate repetitive tasks and the ability to have complex queries routed to a human customer service agent.
Amelia
This is a cognitive and conversational AI chatbot designed by IPsoft, especially for use in complex cases. It not only answers simple FAQ-type questions but is also equipped to handle customer service with live conversational automation for deeper processes or complex situations.
Amelia is recognized as a chatbot that provides the most human-like experience to users. This is the reason that it has become quite popular among businesses that require efficient customer support options.
BotMyWork
BotMyWork is a highly fine-tuned Facebook Messenger platform for marketing and customer support. This chatbot is also useful in marketing, and hence it will save you resources by automating some of the tasks of customer care and marketing both.
It takes only minutes to add a chatbot to your website that is linked to your Facebook page. The best part of this platform is that it allows you to opt for a pay-as-you-grow model. This saves a lot of money which can be used when your profits have grown to the next level.
Chatfuel
This chatbot allows you to easily set up and automate your Messenger and integrate it with your customer support system. This in turn enhances the user experience and generates a higher sales volume along with providing expert customer service functions. This chatbot is equipped with AI and NLP and does not require coding knowledge.
Chatfuel is known to reduce 76% customer wait time, which is a boon not just for the customers, but your organization as well. It engages with customers 24×7 and sometimes does a better job compared to a human agent.
Watson Assistant
This chatbot has been created by IBM as an AI-based bot that enables organizations to provide fast, accurate, and helpful answers to their customer’s queries. This bot reduces the burden on your customer support team by automating common FAQ-type queries.
This bot understands the questions put forth by the customers and classifies those questions to decide when to look for an answer from the knowledge base. It also knows when to ask for clarification and direct the inquiry to a human agent.
SAP Conversational AI
This is one of the best chatbot-building platforms for creating customer service-specific bots that streamline the entire system with cognitive and innovative features. This chatbot also enables you to leverage natural language processing or NLP. This in turn allows you to create a life-like chatbot in any language.
This feature is especially important if you are providing products or services to a global market and you can serve your customers from around the world without a barrier of language.
The key benefits of using an AI-based customer support chatbot
The many benefits of using AI and NLP-based chatbots have already been discussed, but let us take a fresh look at them.
Customer experience and satisfaction are the most important differentiators in a highly competitive market. The customer service bots provide your customers with an excellent human-like experience 24×7.
The bots can take care of frequently asked questions and conduct simple tasks like sending after-sales emails to your customers. This leaves your team to work on more strategic and complex tasks.
The chatbots also reduce wait time for customers, because they provide immediate solutions to their queries. They can handle customer conversations 24×7 and make sure that you don’t miss a single customer, whatever time of day or night it is.
How to create an AI and NLP-powered customer support chatbot?
It is very easy to build a chatbot using any one of the above-mentioned or other chatbot-building platforms. These platforms allow for a drag-and-drop feature that allows you to create a bot for any specific area like customer service.
Contrary to the myth, today one need not be a technically savvy person to create a bot. The process of creating these bots is self-explanatory and all you need to do is follow the guidance provided by each chatbot-building platform. Let us look at this process step-wise.
- Identify the purpose of your bot which can be customer support
- Decide where exactly you want the bot to appear – i.e. on your website, app and other places
- Choose the chatbot platform that appeals to you and provides you with what you are looking for at a reasonable price
- Use the chatbot editor to design the conversation so that it can converse with your customers in a human like manner
- Test your chatbot
- Train you bot
- Collect feedback from users – customers
- Monitor the bot to keep adding improvement features.
Verdict
The conclusion is that AI and NLP-powered chatbots are here to stay with us for a long time as far as customer service is concerned. They will also be used in other areas of business and they will keep on improving as the technology of AI and NLP advances with time.
Customer service chatbots are becoming more and more human-like and the day is not far when they will be able to handle the customer service department of any organization almost completely.
The best part is that the chatbot-building platforms like the ones mentioned above are making it easier to create customized chatbots, without the help of a developer. These platforms are a great boon to small businesses and start-ups.
These bots save a lot in terms of expensive human resources and in fact, they sometimes provide a better experience to the customer than a human agent would be able to. Hence if you are looking to enhance the performance of your customer support department then you should definitely make use of a good chatbot-building platform and enhance the experience of your customers.