Intro to Chatbots

Ravi Ramchand
May 5
3 min read

Implementing chatbots on websites and business applications is becoming increasingly popular - as they offer a wide range of advantages, from improving customer engagement, to being scalable and flexible to meet changing business requirements.

What Are Chatbots?

In its simplest form, a chatbot is “A computer program designed to simulate conversation with a human user, usually over the internet” - Oxford English Dictionary. The two main categories of chatbots are Traditional and AI-powered chatbots. Traditional chatbots operate based on keywords. As such, they have limited capabilities as they won’t be able to respond to queries outside of their programming. Conversely, AI chatbots solve this problem by responding based on context, past interactions, and large amounts of training data.

Custom AI Chatbots vs General AI Chatbots

AI chatbots generally fall into two categories, Custom AI and General AI. General AI Chatbots are trained in vast amounts of datasets, can handle a wide range of topics, and excel at handling casual conversations and general research.

Conversely, Custom AI Chatbots are trained using business-specific data, as this would be its primary use case. Therefore, these types of chatbots will excel at handling and answering business-specific questions a user might face. There is a wide variety of implementations for Custom AI Chatbots. One such implementation is the use of AI Chatbots to provide quick answers to customer questions.

The Custom AI Chatbot Advantage

In a survey conducted by Hubspot, it was found that 66% of those surveyed expected a response from the customer service department within five minutes of posing their question. Understandably, this puts strain on the customer service team as they would be scrambling to answer questions on top of their other duties. It has become quite popular for businesses to include these types of chatbots to quickly respond to simple user questions a customer may have, and questions that may be too advanced or complex for it would be directed to a member of the customer service team to solve.

Furthermore, when a customer is talking to a chatbot, it is important for the customer to feel like they are conversing with a human representative. In the same survey conducted by Hubspot, it was revealed that 30% of those surveyed prefer human interaction, but have no problem using a chatbot if they need to. Providing customers with a chatbot that interacts with customers like a human representative would be vital for natural interactions and customer satisfaction.

Custom AI Benefits

Implemented to solve common or easier requests.

The use of Custom AI Chatbots can assist with solving common questions customers have, and escalating the questions to a human representative for more complex questions, thus helping agents with workloads.

Fine tuned to provide a human touch

Having customers interact with a chatbot that mimics the communication style of a representative will lead to more natural interactions and customer satisfaction. Custom AI Chatbots have the ability to be fine tuned to match companies communication style, tone, and personality.

Meet changing expectations

Custom AI Chatbots have the ability to quickly adapt to new organizational standards and meet the changing needs of customers.

24/7 support

Possibly the biggest advantage of using Custom AI Chatbots is that they offer round the clock support to customers who might want a response right away.

Implementing this technology with all its benefits, will lead to increased customer satisfaction through round-the-clock support and quick response times, but it will also assist businesses' customer service teams in handling their backlog of customer questions.

Ready to Elevate Your Customer Engagement?

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