What is a Chatbot?

The fast pace of technology makes touching base with your clientele easier every day.  You can now buy a car and have it delivered to you at your doorstep without haggling with car dealerships. Or you can get a ride almost everywhere in the world with a few swift clicks on your phone.

In the same medium, consumers want to communicate with businesses without necessarily calling or filling out forms and hoping someone will get back to them. They want immediate answers to questions and control over the conversation. Fortunately, chatbots present an easy alternative to doing that.

What Is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a programmed chat interface designed to help visitors interact with websites. It mimics human behavior and maintains robust conversations with the website visitor. Unlike chatting with a real person, questions and answers are programmed in chatbots eliminating the need to reply to each message. With such a tool, customers can quickly get answers to questions immediately.

Simply put – there are two types of bots: simple and advanced. Simple chatbots respond to keywords/commands that are pre-written and programmed by a developer. This means that if a visitor types words different from the specific phrases or keywords, the bot will not understand. On the other hand, the advanced chatbot uses artificial intelligence – or AI – when communicating with visitors. As such, it understands primary language and responds with various suggestions without needing pre-programmed phrases.

Why Should You Add a Chatbot to Your Website?

Surprisingly, the technology has been around since the 1960s! Although Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri are the most common chatbots known today, this communication tool is found on many websites in different formats. So, are chatbots worth your consideration? What are the benefits of these innovative tools? Here are six reasons to add a chatbot to your site.

1. Improved Customer Service Level – Advanced chatbots can understand basic languages at multiple levels, including semantics, syntax, speech, etc. Thus, it comprehends not just the grammatical sense but the hidden content of messages. Therefore, it responds better to customer queries with helpful information on time, no matter the volume of questions.
2. Target a Wider Audience – Many chatbot developers use the resources of social media platforms like Facebook and Skype to help businesses target broader audiences. Also, these platforms already have many users on them, making them a perfect marketing platform.
3. Help with Payments or Checkouts – Complications involved with checkouts make many customers abandon their shopping carts. Luckily a chatbot with a payment system interface can help shoppers answer queries that prevent them from completing the checkout process.
4. Better User Engagement – Business owners often worry if their websites provide the right user experience. Fortunately, a properly designed, coded, and an integrated chatbot can help entice users by serving them instantly.
5. Deliver a Personalized Experience – As chatbots offer conversations, they make customers feel like they’re talking to a real person in a friendly way. In fact, they serve as the customer service team for retail websites – providing visitors with a product, tracking, and payment details.
6. Help Keep Up with Trends – Many customers expect businesses to innovate quickly. Adding a chatbot to your website repertoire is an affordable and quick way to stay ahead of the competition.

Can a Chatbot to Maintain Consumer Confidence and Increase Satisfaction?

To conclude, as AI grows, chatbots will have a substantial place in the customer service arena for businesses. To properly use a chatbot on your site now, the best advice is to simplify current processes. Make sure it is efficient and straightforward to interact with the chatbots and watch your customer satisfaction soar. With the right prompts, a chatbot can provide quick and efficient service, which helps grow your brand. Are you ready to give this emerging technology a try?