What's a bot for?


There are 3 main reasons to use a chatbot on your website: 

1. For sales or marketing purposes

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Conversations, even automated ones, can help engage your website visitors more by arousing their interest and offering them an interactive experience, which can take many forms: for example suggesting gifts (using a carousel to display products), or a pre-estimate (using variables).

If they continue to show interest, you can of course
transfer the conversation to a respondent who will be able to complete a sale or make an appointment, if applicable using a connector linked to your API or CRM.

If your site receives many
foreign visitors, you can also engage them even if your teams don’t speak their language, which is detected by your browser: you are free to create a bot scenario that you can have translated into multiple languages, for example to answer commonly asked questions or questions specific to international delivery, and offer you new opportunities while reassuring these visitors.

 

2. A productivity improvement approach

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Bots can take care of the initial phase of conversations and become real assistants for your respondents: this is what we at iAdvize call pre-qualification of conversations. Thanks to their scenario, your bots determine the best respondent for a visitor and may collect their information, such as name or order number.

They
then hand over to an agent or qualified ibbü expert, who immediately appear in front of interlocutors who really need them, with all the necessary information.

This time saving and efficiency gain allow you to process more requests, and even to
replace contact forms and emails, which often require numerous back-and-forths before being resolved. A partially automated conversation using a bot not only allows for a better experience, as it is more interactive, but thanks to transfers to agents, your resolution times can decrease drastically!  

 

3. For assistance or customer support

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Choosing chatbots allows you to fully automate the processing of recurring requests for which visitors do not necessarily need to speak to a human, by redirecting them to the right information pages.

Thanks to intent detection, bots can also
take over from traditional FAQs while providing a more interactive experience for visitors, since bots can themselves suggest answers to questions that visitors may phrase in various ways.

You can also take this personalization a step further by using
connectors that will allow your bots to query your API or CRM directly and respond to your visitors about tracking a specific order or information related to their customer account.

And if you can fully automate this type of conversation, it means that
your support will effectively be available 24 hours a day for your site visitors: an impressive performance! 

 

4. Conversely: what a bot isn’t for…

So chatbots have many advantages when it comes to engaging your visitors, boosting productivity, and even fully automating certain requests. They nonetheless have some limits which we recommend taking into account in your strategy:
  • The conversational skills of bots, even when enhanced by your teams, can never match those of humans, who are capable of showing empathy, rephrasing a complex query as they see fit, or grasping a misunderstanding or subtlety that a bot would not be able to pick up. For this reason, sometimes your visitors need to chat with a human and we advise you to make this option available in your scenario as much as possible, ideally quite soon, and to ensure that your teams have good availability for successful transfers.

  • For the same reason, we advise you to be transparent and avoid giving a human name or avatar to your bot: your visitors will not be fooled and may immediately doubt not only the authenticity of the experience, but also that of your brand.

  • Certainly, automating your conversations, even partially, can mean a real gain in productivity for your teams and improve your visitors’ experience... but it’s down to you to make sure this always happens! A scenario with many questions could make it seem like you’re being as efficient as possible, yet it would be frustrating and boring for your visitors.

    Be sure to test your scenarios and monitor the drop-off rate in your scenario report.