For businesses to deliver the best communication, it needs to be prompt. If customers aren’t receiving the right care or relevant information, they may be discouraged from using a particular brand. 

AI chatbots can now make a business’s presence felt, allowing customers to find the right answers and at the same time, deliver a seamless experience. 

Research shows that 35% of today’s customers want to see more businesses use chatbots to improve their communication and offer a better experience. 

The best conversational AI chatbot can deliver a range of benefits for businesses and customers, enabling a hassle-free customer journey, every step of the way. 

What is An AI Chatbot? 

AI chatbots are trained to have human-like communication using natural language processing (NLP).

An AI chatbot can interpret and understand human language as it’s written, allowing it to operate on its own. It can also understand a language outside of its pre-programmed instructions and provide communication based on existing data.

Chatbots can learn from previous conversations, allowing them to adapt their answers to new environments and patterns. For example, it could be particularly useful for businesses that want to predict a visitor’s buying pattern on a website. 

How Do AI Chatbots Work?

An AI chatbot is given data that it can then translate into an appropriate response. 

This means that when a website visitor asks a question, the chatbot can interpret their intent, as well as other areas such as tone, and then deliver a relevant response. 

However, for a chatbot to effectively do this, it will need access to a wide range of data. With the right platform, this is easy to do. For example, Helpshift’s user-friendly platform allows you to set up automated chatbots in minutes. 

The idea is that a chatbot can seamlessly answer complex questions in a natural, conversational way.

What Are the Benefits of Chatbots? 

The need to stay available is at the center of businesses’ priorities across various industries. If a business wants to manage its customer’s requests outside of work hours, they need to use an AI-powered chatbot.

Benefits of AI Chatbots for Businesses 

Chatbots can be incredibly useful for businesses and implement a wide range of benefits.  

Increase Customer Engagement 

By using AI chatbots, businesses can improve customer engagement through data-driven insights. 

Chatbots deliver clear and concise responses that avoid any irrelevant information for the customer. If customers receive relevant responses, they’ll stay in a business’s app for longer, maintaining the conversation with the chatbot. 

39% of business owners reported a notable improvement in sessions after implementing a chat bot while the satisfaction rate was close to 90%.

Improve Lead Generation

Chatbots can improve lead generation for businesses in several ways, such as: 

• 24/7 opportunities: Since chatbots offer 24/7 service, lead generation opportunities aren’t limited to the hours when team members are awake. With the ability to direct visitors to resources and answer FAQs, chatbots can essentially convert traffic into leads outside of normal business hours. 

• Gather contact information: Rather than rely solely on static forms, chatbots can quickly collect contact information in a step-by-step format. This ultimately makes gathering lead information a smoother process for both sales teams and prospects.

• Automating sales conversions: Automate a sales funnel with chatbots to prequalify leads based on asking specific questions. This can help the chatbot to direct the customer to the right sales team. 

Reduce Customer Service Costs 

By implementing customer service chatbots, businesses can save money on extra costs that could go into hiring more staff. 

By using a chatbot, a business can benefit in a range of ways:

• Scale chat support during peak hours or new releases
• Automate business processes
• Re-shape customer service models to enhance a business’ communication efficiency
• Agent Efficiency

Monitor Customer Data to Gain Insights

Chatbots are also excellent at understanding customer’s purchasing patterns by leveraging information within the company databases to form a response. They can use this data to analyze customer behavior, allowing them to respond with relevant information. This data can help businesses to market their products effectively and expand their reach. 

For example, if someone is attempting a return, the chatbot might review preview purchases to provide a recommendation on a replacement purchase, instead of a full return.

Chatbots can also be used to collect vital feedback by asking simple questions, allowing businesses to use this and optimize their website further.

Benefits of AI Chatbots for Customers 

Chatbots can also provide a range of benefits for customers by handling requests with instant responses, boosting the overall experience. 

Increased Availability 

With increased support bandwidth, there’s no need for customers to wait for the next available agent to answer their query. 

Chatbots can work outside of standard business hours, allowing customers to contact them anytime it’s convenient for them. 

Omni-channel Messaging

Meet your customers where they are! Chatbots can be powered to answer customer questions across a range of platforms. This can help businesses cover more channels such as websites, messaging and social media platforms.

Multilingual 

By being multilingual, chatbots are not limited to answering questions in just one language. They can answer questions in the language of the customer, allowing them to feel comfortable asking any questions. 

Consistency in Responses

By giving clear and relevant responses, a chatbot can maintain good customer relationships. 

By delivering a personalized response that is relevant to a query, customer experience can drastically improve and form lasting relationships. 

Talk to AI Chatbot Experts

AI chatbots are rapidly transforming customer communication and becoming increasingly popular in a number of industries. 

They have a range of benefits to help customer service staff save time and deal with the more complex questions a business is faced with on a daily basis. 

Helpshift understands the importance of AI chatbots, as our customer service platforms are bots and automated workflows. 

Look at the following resources to learn more about chatbots. 

• Downloadable guide: The Beginner’s Guide to Customer Service Chatbots and AI
• Product page: Customer Service Bots Made Easy
• Blog post: How to Help Your Business Now with Customer Service Chatbots