AI and Chatbots Are Essential for Modern Business Websites

Responsive web design has become an essential tool for any person or business entity that wants to grow a digital presence. This is mainly driven by the fact that almost everyone these days uses smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. And they want to find the information or connect with people online instantly.

However, having a responsive business website alone is not enough. Users demand personalization at all levels. Improved user experience keeps your customers engaged, and you have more chances of figuring out what they require from your platform. This is where AI chatbots come in. What is a chatbot? Let's take a closer look.

Chatbots: Taking Responsive Web Design to a New Level

Chatbots are slowly becoming part of the dynamics of responsive web design. Chatbot for websites will exponentially flood the market by the end of 2021.

Chatbot in Website: How Do They Work?

Chatbots on websites – in essence – are robots designed to automatically engage with users that interact with your brand through a Facebook advert, other social media, or your website. They are basically digital virtual assistants deployed for better customer support.

Allowing your customers to chat with smart bot applications that utilize machine learning lets you build customer relationships through conversations and instant replies to the questions they want answers to. All done through software will enable you to create multiple pathways that users can be taken through based on the various problems they might ask.

Depending on the program, a chatbot can either respond to queries according to user-defined keywords (simple chatbots) or record and learn for future transactions (smart chatbots). Artificial intelligence and responsive web design protocols are making the latter more practical as days go by.

Benefits of Chatbots

Chatbots, even in its conventional form, has helped both startups and giant corporations incorporate and make the most out of both human-based customer service and automated transactions. Artificial intelligence chatting has helped businesses improve their customer support and rapport in a variety of levels. As technology advances, a smart online chat bot becomes the most viable tool for various businesses to thrive in a competitive market.

• Chatbots can improve sales and customer experience - When your company is receiving a large volume of requests regularly, an excellently built chatbot can handle them all simultaneously. Increasing your primary customer support workforce won’t be necessary so that you can save money on operational costs. Also, chat with AI bot tools allow timely product promotions and recommendations, which can help your bottom line.
• Chatbots can record specific questions from consumers - Whether deployed on social media or your website, chatting bots can use the information they receive from users to know more about customer experience and needs. This is how integral chatbots can become for your customer service process. Your clients will feel valued and will keep on coming back for your brand. Just make sure that you emphasize this function when talking to your web design provider.
• Maintenance cost is low - Compared to adding more people to your office, employing chatbots can give you more savings in the customer service department, depending on the application. Once installed, all you need to pay for is the cost of their maintenance and updates of these chatbots. And since there are many affordable options out there that still provide high value to your business, the savings can be considerable.
• Chatbots can automate the same tasks to minimize the time spent on every task - As mentioned, most of your visitors will be asking the same questions. Where is your location? How do you deliver? How much has the delivery cost? These are just some of those questions. When you incorporate a chatbot for your brand, you are reducing your employee’s workload. Not only that, you are giving your visitors a 100% response rate for their inquiries.
• Chatbots perfectly fit a responsive web design - Lastly, but not least, chatbots integrate easily with whatever platform your clients prefer to communicate, i.e., desktop, mobile phones, tablets. They can also be integrated via social media, websites, mobile apps, and more. On top of that, there are now many chatbots that make full use of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to ensure top-quality customer experience.

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a software that realistically simulates real-life human conversations, either via audio or text input. Through natural language processing, a chatbot can sound realistically human most of the time that many users won't even know immediately that they are communicating with a bot. Constant technological advancements will just improve the machine learning process further.

As artificial intelligence in business becomes widely adopted, most of today’s chatbots have AI at their heart as well.

What differentiates artificial intelligence chatbots from regular chatbots? They can “learn” things about users by tracking patterns in data and processing the questions asked by your customers.

These chatbots can then apply the pattern to similar problems or questions using natural language. This ability gives them the “intelligence” to accomplish tasks, solve problems, manage information in real-time, and even figure out human intents.

That is why chatbots are soaring in popularity across many industries, such as retail, e-commerce, finance, banking, IT, and even healthcare. Natural language processing makes them sound more conversational and human. Having chatbots for your websites basically means having virtual assistants ready to help provide a better experience for customers.

How do chatbots work?

And how do they know what to answer? Well, there are several ways chatbots operate.

Pattern-matching bots classify text and produce a response based on the keywords they recognize. Such a chatbot only knows answers to questions in their models and cannot go beyond them.

Another type of chatbot uses algorithms. A chatbot searches for a unique pattern in its database where a combination of patterns creates a hierarchical structure to answer questions.

The smartest chatbots use neural networks, machine learning, natural language processing, or a combination of these factors. They calculate their response using weighted connections and context in data. As time goes on, the neural network grows more robust and more advanced, helping the bot create an accurate set of responses that also sound conversational and more human. This logic is applied in the best AI chatbots.

Artificial intelligence chatbots are ever-evolving in their sophistication. As a whole, the potential of chatbots to develop and streamline business processes is limitless.

Best Chatbot Platforms for 2020

Chatfuel

Chatfuel is an easy-to-use platform for building chatbots without coding, but specifically for Facebook. Chatfuel was incorporated in 2015. The platform offers different editing tools to design your chatbots as you want them and set up conversational rules for your customers on the dashboard.

The chatbot will use NLP to understand and recognize phrases and will send users predefined answers. You can build chatbots to serve as customer service advisors, event virtual assistants, or personal avatars.

A useful feature is that when people interact with the chatbot, it adds them to your database. This then allows you to reach out to them in the future. Chatfuel’s analytics technology provides insights into the performance of the bots. It has created Facebook Messenger chatbots for various big clients, including Adidas, TechCrunch, Lego, and T-Mobile.

Meya AI

Meya AI helps you build sophisticated chatbots or 'cognitive applications' as they call it, without getting stuck on the basics. Its cognitive framework contains everything you will need to build a bot and lets you create, host, and train your cognitive application/chatbot in one place.

Its Bot studio has a code editor, test chat, live debugger, and visualizer. It integrates seamlessly with third-party applications and lets you quickly scale your bots to take advantage of those most popular.

Meya has a dedicated customer support manager that you can communicate with through a private Slack channel. You can expect to receive a response within 12 hours of any query.

Its cloud-based system lets you and your team work collaboratively by allowing you to connect directly to your business backend to send and receive data. You'll also be able to gather insights into your customers and keep them engaged with your business.

ManyChat

ManyChat is excellent for creating Facebook Messenger chatbots for marketing, sales, support, and revenue growth. The platform powers more than 400,000 businesses across the world and has supported 1B+ monthly business-to-customer conversations. Its visual drag-and-drop chatbot-builder allows even novices to set up a Facebook Messenger bot.

It also provides tools to grow your Messenger audience. It lets you broadcast content to all of your subscribers at once. Broadcasts are not based on an algorithm, but go out to your subscribers, who, once they signed up, are forever yours. You can also automate your Messenger marketing and send messages from RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube based on time delays or specific user actions.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a popular chatbot platform choice for brands. One of the most straightforward chatbot applications to install, it’s naturally integrated into all types of media: voice, chat, social networks.

The benefits of Zendesk are spectacular: advanced personalization, sales/conversion tracking, and real-time monitoring. It allows you to record all the information related to the chats from a single screen, allowing the configuration of objectives and different follow-ups.

It is one of the best live chat tools for many businesses, whether small or large. It can be a good fit for 24/7 online service portals that need a broad knowledge base and FAQ searches.

When choosing a software development company that offers web design as a service, make sure to incorporate chatbots technology into your website. They should be updated with the latest tools in the market and integrated with effective digital marketing strategies. Take your time to conduct a little background check through online reviews and recommendations.

Zoho Sales IQ and Zobot - WebriQ Platform of Choice

The Zobot is designed to interact with your website visitors conversationally, based on its natural language programming. It automates the process of interacting with your website visitors and helps you maintain the presence of a helping hand, even when all your human operators are busy/can't respond.

In Zoho SalesIQ, Zobot can be scripted using five different platforms - SalesIQ scripts, Zia skills, Dialogflow, IBM Watson, and Webhooks, and can be used to perform all the actions/tasks required in your chat window and can replace your operators, literally.

What can Zobot do?

• It can handle the chats from your website visitors.
• It can forward the chats to your human operators (if it is confused or unaware of the answers.)
• If all operators are busy assisting the website visitors or are away from work, then the -Zobot can set the chat widget status to busy automatically.
• It can block the IP address of harassers and spammers.
• It can collect inputs from visitors via Calendars.
• Can collect multiple inputs for each response.

WebriQ’s AI platform of choice is IBM Watson

Watson’s assistant, powered by IBM, helps you to build a powerful bot assistant for your website. You can customize the Watson Assistant according to your website business needs, and deploy across multiple channels to bring help to your customers where and when they need it.

Watson Assistant is an offering for building conversational interfaces into any website or application. Most chatbots try to mimic human interactions, which can frustrate users when a misunderstanding arises. Watson’s Assistant is more than that. It knows when to search for an answer from a knowledge base, when to ask for clarity, and when to direct your visitors to a human.

You can integrate the Watson Assistant you have built with Zobot and let them serve your website visitors effectively.

Benefits of using Watson Assistant in Zobot

• Watson’s Assistant is easy to build, and anyone can get started quickly. It doesn't require any coding/developer knowledge to get started.
• It is powered by the AI that understands your users and provides training recommendations as you build and run your assistant.
• Integrating your Watson Assistant with Zobot, you can reach your visitors where ever they are. You have the flexibility to deploy Watson Assistant on your site and in a mobile app using SDK.
• It supports 13 languages, so you can communicate more effectively and extend your global reach.
• You can use SalesIQ input/display cards in Watson Assistant for getting inputs and show output to the visitors. You can configure your bot to respond using buttons, auto-pick, sliders, images, and links. Using buttons allows users to interact with your bot in a way that standardizes a conversation.
• SalesIQ supports dynamic text in the Watson responses, and you can use them in trigger messages and chat responses.

Conclusion

Chatbots are a huge help for any business website. They can provide the help your customers need in a conversational manner. Answers to pressing questions can be given any time of the day, even if your customer service staff aren't around yet. They are smart and can be developed further through machine learning processes in order to provide conversational assistance for customer queries.

Now that we have shed light on the question "what is a chatbot", your next question should be: how do we create a chatbot for your website? We invite you to take a look at our services or schedule a consult with us.