Technology continues to advance by leaps and bounds, for example, artificial intelligence solutions have allowed companies to improve both internal work processes and systems as well as customer and public service. One of the most important solutions of this type are chatbots.
Present on websites of all kinds, always available when a user enters the page, a chatbot is a system designed to meet the needs and questions of customers and visitors, through automated responses or using artificial intelligence to create a model of "natural language".
For a technical and official definition, we can refer to what IBM says about this technological solution "A chatbot is a computer program that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to understand customer questions and automate responses, simulating a human conversation.
Chatbot Types
There are mainly two types of chatbots: rule-based chatbots and AI-powered chatbots.
- Rule-based chatbots: These chatbots are designed to follow a specific set of rules to understand user input and respond to it accordingly. These bots are programmed with a limited set of default responses that are triggered when the user uses specific keywords or phrases. Rule-based chatbots are easy to build and maintain, but have limited ability to understand the context of a conversation and provide nuanced responses.
- AI-powered chatbots: These chatbots use machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to understand user input and generate responses. They are able to learn from user interactions and improve their responses over time. AI-powered chatbots are more sophisticated and versatile than rule-based chatbots, as they can understand the context of a conversation and provide more personalized, human-like responses.
In addition, there are also two other types of chatbots:
- Menu/Button-Based Chatbots: These chatbots use predefined menus and buttons to guide the conversation and give the user options to choose from. They are commonly used in customer service scenarios and can help optimize the user experience.
- Contextual Chatbots: These chatbots use AI and NLP to understand the context of a conversation and provide personalized responses based on the user's previous interactions. They are more advanced than traditional AI-powered chatbots as they can remember user preferences and provide more accurate responses.
The benefits that a company obtains with chatbots on its website
Lead generation for your company
A particularity that chatbots have is their ability to collect information from visitors, such as their name and email, which can then be used by the marketing department for advertising and getting leads.
Even with a chatbot you can qualify the type of lead and decide if it is worth sending the data to the marketing team or if it is a person who is not of interest to the company. This is achieved by asking questions related to the use of the page by the user.
Increase sales
A proper chatbot on your website makes your new visitors immediately get the information they are looking for, as well as products or services that may seem attractive to them, this increases sales and profits for your company.
One of the use cases for this benefit is using a retail chatbot to offer personalized product recommendations and help place an order.
Save money
Scheduling appointments to answer the concerns of users and customers, in addition to constantly updating the FAQ section can be quite expensive for the company. All this can be saved with an automated chatbot that takes care of these processes on a daily basis.
Building a chatbot and running it is cheaper in the long run than hiring multiple people on the fixed payroll to handle these tasks.
Adequate customer service and improves commitment
With an interactive experience and full of valuable information, customer service benefits, preventing them from waiting several hours or days for an email or spending a long time on a phone call where they probably won't get the answer they want.
The information in the chatbots is given in small fragments, interacting with users and personalizing the response, increasing customer engagement and receiving the precise information they require.
Conversational marketing
In an article published by Tidio they point out “Marketing chatbots can recommend products, take orders, and push customers down the sales funnel using conversational AI. You can even use the data collected by the bots in your email marketing campaigns and personalize future customer interactions. They can also bridge the gap between the customer showing interest in your products and the sales rep joining the conversation.”
At Rootstack we have created several projects using Chatbot technology to make our clients stay on top of their users: offering all the information they need and creating a conversation that feels natural. Trust us to meet your needs.
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