Steps to Choose the Right Chatbot for your Business

Business, Technology

Chatbots have created a new path that enhances communication between machines and humans. They are built to improve the customer service of a company and increase operational efficiency, thereby creating better engagement, decreased churn rates, as well as an increase in overall growth in sales. Chatbots have gained vast popularity over the past few years and they will keep on climbing heights in the coming years too. Thus, the use of chatbots has become inevitable for the success of a business.

Here are some steps that will help you to choose the right chatbot for your business.

  • Consider your target audience

Every business will have a target audience. In the same way, chatbots also have a target audience. A chatbot serves as a link between your business and your customers. Therefore, the bot must be able to understand the needs of the customers and work according to their preferences.

  • Describe your objectives

You can increase your benefits if you can narrow down the specific areas and tasks you can automate. To define your objectives, you must consider the platform you want to implement your chatbot, the queries your chatbot has to answer, the questions your chatbot must redirect to human executives, and the ways it can smoothly hand over the query process.

  • The value proposition you expect

Value proposition ensures that the most important factor in your business is given utmost priority. This decides whether your customers will prefer you or your competitors. For a high-value proposition, you may need Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning capabilities. Therefore, measure and decide the value proposition you need to find the right chatbot for your business.

  • The response speed

Every customer expects easy and quick answers to their queries. Customers won’t tolerate delayed answers. Choosing the right chatbot will help you avoid such problems. While handling complicated problems, your chatbot must be able to answer queries quickly. If the query has to be handed over to a human agent, it must be done faster and more smoothly.

  • Consider functionalities and features

Find the functionalities and features your chatbots need to run a successful business. Study all the chatbots and their features. Decide the ones you need in your chatbot. Ensure to document well while deciding on the features. Features may include analytics, contextual awareness, NLP integrations, etc.

Different types of bots

Businesses have already started using chatbots. Customers now expect real-time answers from chatbots on their websites. Chatbots can be classified into different types.

  • Action chatbot: This chatbot asks for some data from the users to perform a particular action.
  • Social Messaging chatbot: They use social messaging chatbots so that customers can use social media to communicate with the chatbots.
  • Scripted chatbot: These chatbots will use a set of questionnaires to communicate with the customers.
  • NLP Chatbots: They are Natural Language Processing chatbots. They can understand spoken or written language to bring the response.
  • Contextual chatbots: They are the smartest chatbots as they use machine learning and artificial intelligence for interaction.