Features You Need To Add To Make Chatbots Successful

Chatbots are no longer basic bots that cannot comprehend beyond simple inputs. Today, chatbots are being used to offer a branded experience, which is exclusive, original, and exciting. As machine learning and AI is improving, bots will become a more sophisticated part of contact centers.

Earlier chatbots only ran on rule-based commands. They only responded to certain keywords that were originally fed to them during training. These bots would only perform tasks that are set in the rules by the developer. The room for flexibility automatically reduces here, making the chatbot less adaptable. It was never a scalable option and often frustrated the customers who asked unexpected questions. This is why you need conversational chatbots.

Conversational chatbots are modern solutions that learn the process through deep learning. These bots have high scalability as opposed to rule-based bots. They can recognize different patterns in semantics and revert immediately. Moreover, it learns in real-time and expands its knowledge. Modern chatbots are versatile enough to become a key component in your brand messaging channels.

As automated interactions are on the rise, 64% of businesses believe that conversational chatbots have helped them offer a more personalized experience to their customers. Indeed, chatbots have advanced so much that they are an asset to every company's contact center solution.

5 Features That Will Make Your Chatbot A Success

There are certain features that attribute to this success of AI. Let’s discuss some of these features that make a chatbot successful.

 

In order to emulate human-like personalization and judgment, it is important for the chatbot to recognize the intent of the customer. Customer sentiments can reveal a lot of information which is crucial to offering resolution or pitching a product. Rule-based chatbots cannot recognize customer intent and would often fail. However, chatbots powered by AI, natural language processing, and machine learning can successfully recognize the intent, access historical data, and ask questions to identify what the customer actually wants. Upon learning this, your chatbot can go above and beyond to assist the customer and offer a fulfilling service. As per Statista, 33% of consumers find chatbots ‘very effective’ at resolving their issues

Your team probably wouldn’t want to keep consulting your chatbot provider for conversational edits. It is always advised to choose a solution that gives you complete control over the chatbot. Having an admin panel where you can drag-and-drop conversational inputs, gives your team an important advantage. This gives you complete control over editing your conversational flow. For example, For every marketing campaign or festive campaign, you can simply log in to the admin panel and edit the conversational blocks for the specific campaign. This allows you to have complete control over the chatbot functionality and edit on the go.

It is to my surprise, I mention that certain chatbot-enabled conversations are frustrating. I have often experienced conversations where there was no option to speak with the agent. The chatbot should realize its own capacity. When the bot hits a block and cannot resolve the issue, it should offer the option to connect with an agent. An agent with the right expertise can instantly resolve the issue when the chatbot cannot. Offering this option helps your customer to feel comfortable and trust your brand.

Every chatbot has been personified by their respective brands. At C-Zentrix we call our chatbot Zeni, who is always there to assist you with your contact center related queries. She is dressed in blue-white which is our brand color. These reinforce our brand identity, every time a customer converses with our chatbot.

Similarly, every business would prefer to set a style or color based on their brand identity. Customizing your chatbot enables you to monitor and manage your identity across channels. It allows you to set a name for your bot, create an avatar for it and add a different set of greetings as per your needs. You can also decide on which channels you want to activate your chatbot. Such customizations allow you to establish your brand personality and remind your customers of your values.

Chatbots are going to be integrated across your messaging channels such as Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber, and social media. It only makes sense that your chatbot can be integrated with your omnichannel solution as well, to sustain your cross-channel flow of information and tickets. This gives your chatbot all the access to historic customer data such as previous tickets, last purchases, customer onboarding date, and more. This information will never be limited to one channel but a flurry of multiple channels. When your chatbot has access to all these, it can offer more contextual and personalized responses, all the while making the customer experience synonymous and uniform.

Smart integrations with  CRMs or Order Management System or other business applications are necessary to provide seamless conversation with  Chatbots as they need to retrieve data from various systems, validate and update the users. Integration with e-commerce backend and payment gateways can help customers in their purchase journey. While a natural handover of a chatbot can be to a live chat agent but as per business needs and client’s preference, the chatbot can arrange a call conference between the agent and customer and pass on the context of the interaction to the agent.

Conclusion:

The above-mentioned features are essential to the success of your chatbot. Obviously, there are other micro features such as multilingual support, end-to-end encryption, authentication, and more. These features are common and present in every other chatbot available today.

Chatbots are a cost-efficient solution that can help your brand to automate redundant tasks and make your agents more productive. It can assist your customers effortlessly, and help you achieve your goals easily. One of the most important features is an intent analysis which must be leveraged to perform better. Chatbots, nevertheless are a promising investment for every customer-facing business out there. Contact our experts for a demo.