If you take the time to surf the internet and look-up your competition, you will probably find that they are using a chatbot on their website. It may also be connected to other communication channels on which they appear. If they do and you don’t, many customers may end-up using their products and services instead of yours. That is because answering customers request requires an immediate response today. And to do so, you need your own chatbot. Here is what you should know.

Creating a Chatbot is Easy

Technology is advancing at a speed that keeps getting faster. A few years back, not many people benefited from having a chatbot on their website. The ones that did, invested a lot of money in this tool. But in 2023, you can actually create a free chatbot, by using a base and helping it to learn the language that you expect it to use with potential customers that pass by your site and ask questions about your products and services. Since it benefits from NLP (Natural Language Processing), it is built to learn anything that you may want to teach it. It also possesses machine learning algorithms that will enable it to catch typos, stay away from negative expressions and other language elements that are crucial when you address yourself to customers.

What does a Chatbot do?

You should think of a chatbot as an employee inside a boutique. Its first role is to greet new customers when they arrive on the website and let them know that it is available to help, if they have any questions. If they do, they will write on the chatbot box their demands, and it will respond to the best of its knowledge. Naturally, the information about the company will have to be inserted inside the chatbot, so that it can answer correctly. However, if it doesn’t know the answer to a particular question, it can transfer the communication to an actual employee. Then, the person in charge of the chatbot can add the right response inside it, so that it knows it, the next time it is asked. The more it will be used, the more it will learn.

Why use a Chatbot?

The advantages that a chatbot provides are numerous. Let us start with the most important one: It saves time and money. When you only use employees to answer to customers queries, they often have to respond to simple questions. However, it takes them time which needs to be paid. The more requests you get, the greater the number of employees you need.

A chatbot will handle all questions at once, which means that you only need one. Therefore, you can keep the complex demands for employees, which you will need a lesser number of. Furthermore, it will also save waiting time for customers, which means that they will be happier, and they won’t go looking at your competitors, having found answers to their questions.

The second advantage is that your customers can be served 24 hours a day, every day. This is extremely important online, as they can be located anywhere in the world. Even if your base is mostly in your country, some may be travelling when they need answers to their questions. The chatbot will always be ready to help. Of course, it can also do so in various languages, if you decide that it is useful.

Finally, let’s remind you that a chatbot can be used in any of the communication channels that you use. It can respond to incoming e-mails or to social media requests, as well. In other words, it can be your gatekeeper on all communication channels, all at once.