How to Ensure Your AI Chatbot Supports Customers

One of the best AI chatbot features is a customer’s ability to make changes to their account or order.

04:03 25 May 2023

If you’re like most business owners, you probably have a chatbot on your website to help people find answers to their questions and contact your company for support. This is an essential tool to have, but it takes more than installing an AI chatbot to provide adequate support.

Does your chatbot provide sufficient help to your customers? Does it answer all of their questions or provide them with the right resources to troubleshoot basic issues or open a ticket? To make sure you’re providing the best support for your customers, here’s a list of several features that make a chatbot great.

1. Omnichannel messaging

According to Aisera, an AI chatbot should use omnichannel messaging and recall past interactions with each user across other channels. For example, if a user engages your chatbot on Facebook, the conversation should be retained and show up for that user when they engage the chatbot on your website or through another channel.

Some users will move from social media to your website for support, and they will be pleasantly surprised to see their previous chat history. Some people may even expect this feature. Omnichannel messaging is important because it creates a smooth user experience regardless of the channel. Your customers won’t have to repeat themselves when they contact you through your website if they’ve previously connected on Facebook.

2. Self-service options

According to data sourced by Hubspot, 73% of people want to solve their product or service issues on their own; they don’t want to talk to a service representative. This makes sense, given how much time it takes to establish a connection with an agent, explain the issue, and wait for them to finish reading their call script.

Most people have had negative experiences with live support, but have found self-service options to be quick and efficient. When you make self-service easy through an AI chatbot, you give people exactly what they want and reduce the friction and frustration.

So, what is self-service through a chatbot? The main component is a chatbot that provides relevant responses to user queries. In addition to this, your chatbot should give users links to relevant articles in your knowledge base that might help resolve their issue.

When you use a conversational AI chatbot, your customers will be better taken care of because the responses will sound more humanlike and will flow with ease. They’ll feel like they’re having a real interaction, even though they’ll know it’s just a bot.

3. Account and order changes

One of the best AI chatbot features is a customer’s ability to make changes to their account or order. For example, customers might want to change their delivery address or method, add an item to their order, or alter delivery instructions. It also helps to allow customers to cancel their order if it hasn’t been processed yet.

Many people find it easier to engage through a chatbot rather than open a support ticket or send an email. Usually, order cancellations require creating a support ticket, so by making this (and similar) features available through your chatbot, you’ll save customers time and eliminate frustration.

If you’re worried about having to hire a development team to make all this work, don’t worry about coding your chatbot. This technology is now at a point where you can launch an effective AI chatbot without writing code. You just need to choose the right software and set it up correctly.

4. Analyze your data

How will you know if your chatbot is helping customers? You have to ask for feedback. Not everyone will participate, but it’s important to run surveys to ask people to share their experiences with your chatbot so you can fix issues and make improvements.

An AI chatbot powered by machine learning will evolve over time, and part of that will require your input. The only way you’ll know what’s working is to perform extensive testing yourself and/or survey your customers.

A strong AI chatbot will help you retain customers

If you haven’t already, now is the perfect time to use AI to enhance the chatbot your customers engage for support. When you implement conversational AI, your customer support teams will have more time to nurture relationships, generate sales, and perform other tasks that positively impact your ROI.

An AI chatbot won’t replace live customer service reps, but rather, it will enhance your overall customer support system. Your representatives will be less stressed, and your customers will be happy to get the help they need fast.