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Developing a Chatbot for Your Website

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Benefits of AI Chatbots 

There are many reasons why this piece of web application technology has become increasingly adopted by businesses. Some notable benefits of AI chatbots include: 

  • Cost savings. AI bots can handle simple questions and issues, and only escalate more complex queries to human service agents, protecting your business’ bottom line. Bots can also scale your online self-service.
  • Time savings – AI bots not only save your customers time by quickly feeding them accurate answers…They also save your service agents’ precious time through audience segmentation! Bots can ask customers to pre-select a certain topic or service department in order to efficiently route the chat directly to the correct service agent. Because they’re online 24/7/365, AI bots keep first response times (FRT) down while keeping customer satisfaction high and neatly organized in your CRM’s contact list.
  • Increased sales – Think of your chatbot as a critical component of your website portal and sales funnel that can deliver relevant info and answers at the most critical time of the buying journey: The decision-making stage. By building a multi-option menu within chat popups, you can add in upselling options and boost lead gen.
  • Improved customer satisfaction – Useful bot experiences with the strong visual appeal can factor into increased customer satisfaction scores. Done right, they can elevate customer engagement by delivering seamless solutions and accurate information quickly. Reducing customer effort contributes to a premium customer experience. An added bonus? Consumers love the personalized product recommendations and messages that bots offer. Have a website with high traffic? Bots can handle it, so scalability is a key component.

How do I make a chatbot for my website?

Full disclosure: Building an AI chatbot from the ground up can be highly labor-intensive and time-intensive. Depending on the technological aptitude of your organization, you may opt for a drag-and-drop interface vs. building a bot from scratch. 

In today’s world, having a computer science degree (or even an understanding of complex algorithms, scripting, code snippets, APIs, or programming languages) isn’t a requirement for building a bot that can load and live on your website’s landing pages. There are plenty of out-of-the-box options available to you that feature easy-to-use templates and step-by-step documentation. 

That said, these turn-key bots have their limitations, so if you are looking for a more personalized and sophisticated option, you can choose to implement a chatbot using a chat provider’s API. You can also choose to outsource your chatbot function to a third-party service provider who manages the entire development and chatbot implementation process for you. 

How can you choose an AI chatbot for your webshop’s needs?

As you select the best AI chatbot for your business, make sure you’re asking yourself these critical questions. Your future self will thank you! 

  • What do I need a chatbot to accomplish? Assess chatbots in relation to your primary business goals. Do you need a chatbot to free up human agent time and energy? Do you need a chatbot to answer simple FAQs about shipping updates or promotional discounts? Do you need to collect basic information such as a customer’s email address to get them in the pipeline for future email marketing campaigns? Depending on your needs, launching a rule-based chatbot might be preferable to an AI chatbot.
  • Does the AI chatbot connect to my customer relationship management (CRM) software? If analytics is important to your business, you’ll want to make sure that these two tools connect seamlessly so you can have insights. There are chatbots that feature integrations with popular CRMs like Salesforce, Zendesk, and more. 
  • Is the AI chatbot pre-trained? Chances are, you’ll want to make sure that your chatbot has some baseline knowledge and curated training so that you don’t have to spend time, money, and internal labor on training this piece of technology to recognize patterns from the ground up. A solution like Simplr will crawl and mine information from your existing knowledge base to augment its capabilities.

To sum it all up 

Chatbots are a great piece of technology that is only getting smarter with time. If your brand is interested in generating more leads and boosting your bottom line, deploying a chatbot on the homepage of your website could be a smart move. Common website platforms like WordPress, Shopify, Drupal, Joomla all have plenty of plug-and-play options from many different chatbot companies. 

In today’s always-on world, having a chatbot can easily differentiate your brand from competitors. No matter your business model, chatbots are a technology that should be leveraged to deliver premium customer experiences. They have become a gold standard for satisfying the ever-increasing demands of the NOW Customer.

Are you ready to harness the power of chatbots? Talk to Simplr today!