Chatbots have become a common feature of modern websites, enabling businesses to improve customer experiences by providing access to 24/7, real-time support. For smaller companies, chatbots offer a practical and cost-effective solution that eases the burden on customer service teams while cutting response times for visitor queries. In this post, we explore how AI chatbots work and the different ways they can support customer service teams.
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What are AI-powered chatbots?
Chatbots are AI-enabled virtual assistants that interact naturally with website visitors. By using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, they can interpret customer questions and intent, and deliver accurate, meaningful responses.
Machine learning plays a key role in enabling AI chatbots to learn from previous interactions, making them more advanced than older, scripted chatbots that relied on preset menus and keywords. This enables them to understand variations in how people input queries; ask follow-up questions to clarify the user’s meaning; and provide relevant answers to unusually phrased questions.
Importantly, not only do AI chatbots work with websites; they can also integrate with other business systems, including messaging platforms, CRMs, support and knowledgebase systems, and order tracking and accounts tools.
AI can also take your marketing to the next level. Read: The Impact of AI on Digital Marketing
Training chatbots for your website
An AI chatbot’s ability to integrate with your website and systems makes it much easier to train it for your business. For example, it can use your business’s existing content and data, including FAQs, product pages, customer support transcripts, knowledgebase and blog content, to get a detailed understanding of your services and how customers interact with them.
By using your website content for training, AI chatbots can also adopt your brand voice when communicating with customers and ensure responses are in line with company policies. Moreover, they can also pull real-time data from CRMs, inventory and order tracking tools to provide accurate information about stock availability and delivery.
Benefits for small businesses
While human live chat offers many benefits for customers and businesses, staffing online support around the clock is an expensive operation that many small firms can struggle with. Moreover, when support is understaffed and customers face long queues, complaints can often damage brand reputations.
AI chatbots are a practical way to maintain or even extend customer service while reducing the need to increase staffing as a website grows. Key benefits include:
- 24/7 availability – ensuring support is available during evenings, weekends or holidays.
- Faster responses – AI chatbots put an end to queuing and provide customers with instant responses.
- Lower operating costs – AI can reduce the need for additional staffing.
- Greater capacity – Unlike a customer service rep, a chatbot can serve hundreds of users at once.
- Triaging customers – When an AI cannot deal with a query, it can provide a triage service, putting the customer through to the most appropriate or least busy member of the customer service team.
What customers use chatbots for
Most customer service enquiries on websites are about issues that AI chatbots are easily able to handle. These include:
- Providing delivery updates and order tracking information
- Explaining return policies and warranty terms
- Answering questions about product features or availability
- Handling password resets and basic account access
- Booking, rescheduling or cancelling appointments
- Providing support on common technical issues
While dealing with these queries is essential, the work is repetitive and a drain on staff time. Using an AI chatbot to automate responses allows staff to handle high-priority queries while shortening queuing times.
Personalisation and user experience
As AI chatbots can access a customer’s history, browsing behaviour or past orders, they can deliver more personalised experiences. For instance, they can greet returning customers by name and provide updates on recent purchases.
Moreover, a chatbot could integrate with personalised product recommendation engines to highlight products or services that, based on purchase and browsing data, are more relevant to individual customers. Indeed, with the ability to access real-time data, this is one instance where a chatbot could offer more accurate responses than a human working from a script.
Looking to improve customer experiences? Read : How to Implement Customer Personalisation
Chatbot hosting considerations
AI chatbots can use a lot of system resources when processing large amounts of data and dealing with simultaneous customer queries. If this causes the chatbot to run sluggishly, it can be just as frustrating to website users as waiting in a queue and have the same consequences.
To ensure the chatbot performs well and that its operations do not affect the performance of the website, the right hosting solution will need to be in place. Businesses will need adequate storage for their growing data, as well as fast, reliable and secure infrastructure. To cope with spikes in chatbot usage, they may also require a degree of redundancy in their hosting plans or the ability to scale resources at short notice.
Before implementing an AI chatbot, it is essential that you check that your current hosting solution can handle the additional processing demands, including during your busiest times.
Ideal hosting for chatbots, look at the other advantages of the cloud. Read: How the Cloud Can Futureproof Your Business
Conclusion
AI chatbots are a practical way for small businesses to improve their customer service without needing to expand their teams. Able to answer common queries, offer 24/7 support and provide personalised, brand-consistent responses, they are a cost-effective way to meet growing customer expectations and provide high-quality customer services.
Considering an AI chatbot for your website? Our managed cloud hosting solutions provide the scalability, high availability, performance and cost-efficiency small businesses need, together with easy chatbot integration and 24/7 technical support. For more information, visit our Secure Cloud Servers page.
