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AI has become a strategic ally for businesses. Gone are the days when integrating AI into business operations was a luxury. Choosing AI chatbots to empower your goals has become a necessity.
The AI chatbot industry is poised to be worth USD 20.81 billion by 2029, with an annual CAGR of 24.32%. That’s right!
Every business is adopting AI chatbots to serve their customers better, improve employee productivity, and ensure more revenue than ever before. This poses the next important question: Is picking the right AI chatbot easy?
Well, no. Until you have done your homework, that is.
In this blog post, we discuss everything you need to know about choosing the right AI chatbot, its advantages, how to pick one, and more.
Let’s start.
Before we move ahead to learn the nuances of choosing an AI chatbot for your business, let’s understand the types of AI chatbots in the market.
Getting familiar with different types of AI chatbots will help you make an informed decision down the line.
These chatbots operate based on certain predefined rules and protocols. When questions are asked, these chatbots respond to them based on these rules. These types of chatbots are developed to handle situations or queries already anticipated by their developers. Some of the common tasks assigned to these chatbots are FAQs, straightforward tasks, verification, simple customer queries, etc.
Rule-based chatbots can deliver consistent customer experiences. They are also easy to build while ensuring top-notch responses to common questions.
These types of chatbots are very rigid. They cannot function outside of the questions programmed for them. These chatbots cannot respond effectively to custom queries from users.
These types of chatbots are the result of integrating generative AI and Machine Learning capabilities into regular chatbots. These technologies allow the chatbots to understand customers’ natural language questions and converse with them like human beings.
AI-powered chatbots are designed to respond dynamically to queries based on their training.
As they can mimic human conversations, they can answer even the most uncommon questions about a domain it is trained on.
They are also suitable for the following tasks:
One of the biggest advantages of developing AI chatbots is that they can learn from interactions and improve their responses. They become better and can offer more human-like conversations over time.
While the benefits are alluring, AI chatbots take time to develop. The cost of AI development can also be high as it needs high-quality data for training.
You also need to finetune them constantly to make them better. All these ensure higher upfront investment.
When you combine the capabilities of AI chatbots and rule-based chatbots, you get hybrid chatbots. They are more versatile and scalable than the previous types of chatbots we discussed. These chatbots rely on AI tools and technologies to offer personalized responses to users. And they do it by conforming to the rules and decision trees set by the AI chatbot developer for streamlined and consistent responses. Thanks to their flexibility and cost-effectiveness, you can use them as precursors before you build fully AI-powered chatbots for your business.
These types of hybrid chatbots are suitable for delivering simple to complex user queries. They are also highly reliable for consistent response qualities.
A considerable challenge in creating hybrid chatbots is the resources needed to develop and maintain them. They need AI technologies, data, etc., for training and human intervention to finetune them further. But the results are worth the effort.
The advantages of using AI chatbots in your business are numerous. From improving efficiency to streamlining tasks, enhancing productivity, and bolstering customer service, AI chatbots can make significant strides in your growth.
Let’s check some of the crucial benefits of using AI chatbots in a business.
AI chatbots can provide 24/7 customer support. They can also quickly respond to inquiries and handle a large volume of customer interactions simultaneously. All these lead to improved customer satisfaction and reduced response times.
Automate repetitive tasks in your business using AI chatbots. These bots can also handle a higher volume of customer interactions compared to human agents. Your business can ensure significant cost savings as you can reduce the number of human customer service agents.
You can use AI chatbots to provide consistent brand experiences to your users no matter what channel they are on. Even with an increasing number of interactions, AI chatbots can deliver quality service.
Chatbots are a great way to collect customer data for your business. The data can then be analyzed to arrive at insights that will inform you of customer trends, common issues, and other issues for better decision-making.
You can deploy the AI chatbots 24×7. They work for hours together and deliver timely customer service when your customers need it. Your customers can rely on them even outside of business hours, leading to better customer satisfaction.
Using chatbots also allows your business to cater to customers who speak different languages or are from different backgrounds. This enables you to take your business to even people who may be a minority in your primary market.
Businesses can integrate chatbots into a variety of communication channels. Websites, mobile apps, or any messaging platforms. This facilitates a unified and convenient customer experience across multiple channels for all.
You must pay attention to several factors that affect your business when selecting an AI chatbot. From your business goals to domain requirements, customer expectations and integration capabilities, assessing these key elements helps you choose the best AI chatbot.
Such a chatbot will allow you to serve your customers better, ensure process efficiency, and improve productivity.
Your business is trying to implement an AI chatbot to meet certain goals. Understand these goals better. Here are a few business goals that most businesses want to use chatbots for:
Offer customer service to users on multiple touchpoints, like website, social media, etc.
Implement sales automation in business and use chatbots for lead generation, lead scoring and nurturing, sales emails and calls, etc.
Data analytics for sales forecasting, customer behavior analysis, sales analysis and reporting, etc.
Keep these goals in mind when prospecting AI chatbots. Certain chatbots can deliver better and more efficient results in some areas. Align the type of chatbot with your goals to pick the most suitable one for you.
Many businesses fail to look at this. The chatbot you choose must also be suitable for the industry you work in. You need the chatbot to have some capabilities that are integral to the industry.
For example, if you are in the healthcare industry, you need to get a chatbot that puts a lot of emphasis on privacy and data security. For an e-commerce industry, you need a chatbot that can offer personalized product recommendations.
Imagine if you choose a chatbot that does not offer strong security features for your healthcare business. It can be catastrophic for your business.
Hence, look at your industry and assess its expectations before finalizing a chatbot.
Your chatbot has target audiences. Determine their goals, expectations, and pain points before you even start considering a chatbot. You may be developing the chatbot for your customers or employees. Each of these audiences has different goals to serve.
Hence, understand these goals and their preferred communication challenges. This will help you pick a chatbot solution to meet these challenges well.
You can figure out these challenges in the following ways.
The complexity of questions the chatbot needs to answer can vary from business to business.
Certain businesses often get simple direct questions, while other businesses get not-so-direct queries. Check this before you choose a chatbot for your business. If your business often gets simple questions, a rule-based chatbot is the best option.
AI-powered chatbots are the best for businesses that constantly get custom or complex questions.
You may already use several tools and systems to run your business. When picking a chatbot, consider how well it can integrate with your existing platforms and systems.
The most suitable chatbot will seamlessly integrate with your CRM, ERP, and other platforms.
Some of the tools that you may be using to run your businesses smoothly could be:
Seamless integration of the chatbot with these tools is crucial to make the chatbot available for everyone.
In addition, it can also use data from these platforms to improve over time.
What you need from the chatbot may differ from another company, even if you belong to the same domain. This means that you need enough customization capabilities from your chatbot.
The chatbot and its responses must align with your brand voice, style, and overall personality. Hence, check how customizable the chatbot is before you go with it.
This is also crucial for your future growth plans. As your business grows, you must add new features, capabilities, and functionalities to the chatbot. Or your growth may be clipped.
Migrating one chatbot to another is a headache and may backpedal your business.
When you set out to choose a chatbot for your business, you will have a budget with you. And if you don’t, you need to start with one.
The budget needs to be set aside based on the capabilities and features you are looking for. It will help you eliminate some of the chatbot options that don’t meet your expectations right at the beginning.
It allows you more time to focus on the chatbots that fit your bill. Failing to have a budget may be counterintuitive as you need to calculate development and maintenance expenses for potential ROI.
Hence, the budget should be set right at the start to make an informed decision.
AI chatbots have different use cases in different industries. Let’s check them out here in this section in the following industries.
Now, there are several AI chatbot developers, providers, and platforms. All of them claim to offer the best support to businesses. But it rarely is the case.
That’s why we bring you a few steps you can use to assess these service providers and choose the best option.
There could be several service providers to choose from. To find the most suitable one, you need to get your hands dirty. This involves deep research.
Here are a few things you can do.
These factors will help you understand who fares better in the industry and can help you. In the end, pick an AI chatbot development company that has industry experience and a strong track record.
It is not always easy to figure out the best AI chatbot or the platform. The best way to do it is to check for demo and trials. Many platforms offer free demos and trials that you can choose to go with. Most demos are free, and you don’t need to commit to using the service after the trial or demo.
These demos and trials help you get into the actual capabilities and functionalities of the chatbot. It will help you understand areas where the chatbot works well and where it does not.
You can also evaluate the user experience, ease of use, security, integration capabilities, etc., firsthand. During the trial, you can also understand how responsive the chatbot is and how it handles data.
All these can provide you with unique insights to guide your purchase decisions.
You will need technical support and assistance for one thing or another while using a chatbot. It could be for a technical issue, understanding certain features, or even for billing issues.
And to solve all these issues, you need timely customer service that is responsive. A team who can work on the issues right away. Who is responsive to your calls and emails.
Most of the time, many chatbot service providers are keen on selling their services but not on providing timely customer service. Hence, you need to be careful here.
Apart from such customer support, check how good their learning support is. A few things to evaluate are:
Now, we have looked at the types of Chatbots, their use cases, and how they can benefit your business. But what about businesses that have already used them and reaped the benefit?
In this section, let’s check out a few businesses that have used AI chatbots to grow their operations.
Babylon Health is an AI-powered health chatbot. The solution was developed by the UK-based Babylon Health to help users diagnose their health issues by interacting with the chatbot. The startup was later acquired by eMed, a healthcare services organization.
The chatbot combines its AI conversational capabilities with traditional healthcare services. In 2022, the startup was able to achieve a valuation of USD 5.5 billion and over 5 million users. It is reported that the chatbot has exceeded over 100 million consultations.
You might even have used this at your home or office. Designed to create a smart home ecosystem for users, Alexa has time and again proven to us the capabilities of AI-powered chatbots. Using Alexa, users can enjoy smart home automation, customization, and entertainment like never before.
Amazon’s Alexa has over 26% of the market to itself as of 2024.
After finding the right AI chatbot developer or provider, you need to implement the same successfully to make it work for your business.
Here are a few tips to use to successfully implement AI chatbots
Before implementing the AI chatbot, define your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) celery to measure the success. Failing at this means that you don’t know where you are going and how to measure success.
There could be several factors that determine the KPIs. If you are implementing it for the sales team, work with the team to define the goals and the KPIs.
Once you have these goals and KPIs in place, go ahead.
An interesting thing about AI is that the more you monitor and optimize it, the better it will perform. This goes for AI-powered chatbots, as well. With AI at its heart, your chatbot needs to be constantly monitored and optimized.
Optimizing the systems for better performance and responses. As you add new features, remove bugs, and make the bot better, the performance will also get better.
Build a monitoring workflow for the AI chatbot aimed at optimization.
One of the biggest advantages of AI-powered chatbots is that they continuously learn and improve. You must keep the chatbot updated with new data, trends, and customer preferences to enhance its capabilities.
Improving the training data will also help the chatbot learn your users’ expectations faster. Have a monitoring and optimization workflow to make the chatbot better.
All these efforts will ensure better and more accurate responses from the chatbots.
As a business, integrating the latest technologies into your business operations is vital to growth. AI chatbots have become the next big thing for many businesses. As we have already seen in the case of Babylon and Alexa chatbots, they have the potential to transform your business. However, picking the right AI chatbot developers and platforms has a lot to do with the success. And we hope that our guide has given you enough insights into choosing the right AI development agency.
With years of experience in our credit, Fullestop can also offer you tailored AI chatbot development services to help your business grow and expand. Our expertise in AI and the latest technologies makes us an ideal candidate to help you with your AI chatbot project.
