In this article, you will learn everything you need to know about chatbots. We will explain what a chatbot actually is, what the advantages of chatbots are, in which areas you can use them, which chatbot providers there are and which of these, in our opinion, is the best. Let's get started!
What is a chatbot?
A simple definition of chatbots is as follows: "A chatterbot, chatbot or bot for short is a text-based dialog system that allows chatting with a technical system. It has an area for text input and output, which can be used to communicate with the system in natural language.". Still not understood? We explain it in a little more detail below!
A chatbot is an application that usually uses artificial intelligence (AI) to converse with people in natural language. Users can simply ask questions to the chatbot, to which it responds in natural language. Depending on the chatbot, questions can be asked using text input, audio input or both. Basically, a chatbot is a robot that you can talk to, as the name suggests. Chatbots are often used in conjunction with an avatar to give them a personality. Alternative terms for chatbot are virtual assistant, digital assistant or conversational agent.
Most chatbots use natural language recognition functions to recognize what users are saying. This is also known as natural language processing (NLP). In addition, AI can determine what a user really wants to know. These two technologies use machine learning to learn from interactions and improve the resulting recommendations and answers.
What are the advantages of chatbots?
Process automation
Chatbots can be used to automate some processes. This saves time and money and can also reduce error rates. Process automation naturally results in an increase in efficiency.
Improved user experience
Websites are often packed with information and their visitors spend a long time trying to find the right answers to their questions. This naturally leads to a lot of frustration. A chatbot can prevent this by serving users the answers on a silver platter and guiding them through the website.
Increased customer satisfaction
The improved user experience leads to increased customer satisfaction. The chatbot can solve customers' problems in a matter of seconds. This means that customers are no longer stuck on a telephone hotline or have to wait for a support employee to deal with their request.
Increasing the retention rate
A better user experience and the resulting increase in customer satisfaction in turn leads to a higher retention rate. In this case, this rate indicates the percentage of customers who return to the website or store after a specified period of time. Have customers had a good experience with the chatbot on the website? Then they will be happy to return.
Increased readiness
A chatbot doesn't finish work and doesn't go on vacation. It is available 24/7 all year round. It can also answer a large number of queries at the same time. Your customers can visit your website or store at any time and receive an immediate answer to their questions via the chatbot.
In which areas can chatbots be used?
Chatbots offer a wide range of possible applications. They can make product recommendations, assist with tour, hotel, theater and restaurant reservations, provide relevant weather information or even help with internal company processes. But in this article, we want to focus on three areas of application: Customer support, sales and marketing.
Chatbots in customer support
Chatbots improve the overall quality of service and make it easier to evaluate the dialogs that are held with customers. This allows you to respond even more precisely to your customers' wishes. The most important thing is that customers are helped quickly and effectively. Your customers get answers to their questions as quickly as possible and the support staff don't have to lift a finger - a clear win-win situation.
The obvious advantages of chatbots in customer support are therefore the increased readiness and automated answering of user questions. This saves a lot of support costs and resources.
Chatbots in sales
Digital assistants are also very helpful in sales. They are perfect for acquiring new customers or increasing sales. Chatbots can provide your customers with excellent support before, during and after the purchase. They can also make product recommendations, answer questions about products and navigate customers directly to the right products.
Chatbots in marketing
In addition to relieving the burden on support and assisting with sales, chatbots can also become part of your marketing campaign. For example, they can offer your customers discount codes, alert them to current offers or even be part of a competition. Chatbots are perfect for incorporating them into your brand building and storytelling. This not only generates more leads, but also ultimately maximizes your conversions.
Which chatbot is the best?
Basically, using any chatbot that can help users with their problems is a good thing. As long as the chatbot is based on NLP and uses AI, it can fulfill exactly this purpose. This is because these two technologies not only help the chatbot to understand queries, but also to assign them to the correct topic or answer.
Nevertheless, given the considerable number of chatbot providers, you have to differentiate between very good and less good chatbots. An important criterion here is, of course, whether you want to set up and maintain the chatbot yourself or prefer to hire professionals to do so. There are numerous companies that offer a platform that allows you to set up and maintain your chatbot yourself. Some of these are more complicated and require IT knowledge, while others are simple and can be used by anyone. At the same time, there are also many companies that offer the creation and maintenance of a chatbot as a service, while you can sit back and relax. They charge a higher price for this, of course. As is so often the case in life, you need to weigh up the effort and costs.
However, we would like to present a chatbot platform below that we have used for our chatbot on our website. This platform is called melibo.
What is melibo?
melibo describes itself as an "intuitive AI tool". Creating a chatbot with melibo is actually quick to learn and no IT knowledge is required. The tool distinguishes between Q&As and chat flows. The Q&A is a simple question-and-answer game and is perfect for FAQs. The chat flow, on the other hand, is a little more complex. It can be used to establish a direct connection from one chat to the next. This allows the user to be guided through a multi-stage dialog, for example to ask for more information or to define a problem more precisely. Chat Flow is therefore particularly helpful when a dialog cannot be ended with a single answer.
The way you create a chatbot with melibo is a special feature, but not yet a unique selling point. In my opinion, what really sets melibo apart are the features that the tool offers in addition to chatbot creation. In my opinion, the most important feature is the ticket center, which is presented in the following melibo video:
All inquiries that the chatbot was unable to answer are recorded in the ticket center and forwarded directly to support. This saves our customers and leads the effort of having to describe their concerns again via a different medium. In addition, information that was requested in a chat flow can also be converted into a support ticket. At the same time, the chatbot can be maintained and optimized with the help of Insights and the so-called Bot-Gym. In addition to the ticket system, a live chat is also available, but we are not currently using it.
melibo is currently still offering a two-month free trial period. If you also want to relieve your support team, simply follow this link.
