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Providing quick, personalized, knowledgeable, and proactive online customer support has become a prerequisite for the success of any company. Unsatisfactory support services may result in a bad reputation and lost customers for your business. An AI chatbot, or a chatbot tool, is a digital technology solution mainly used for customer service and delivering promotional or otherwise useful content. Using artificial intelligence technology, an AI chatbot can convincingly replicate a user's chat-based interactions with another human. Initially, businesses had to create a support center, train the employees, and pay their salaries to run the customer support processes. These services were always prone to human errors and communication barriers. Also, human-based customer support services were limited to shift timings and couldn’t be available 24/7. AI allows computer programs to simulate a user conversation with a natural language through messaging applications. More and more brands are now leveraging AI chatbots to provide service to their customers and even market their brands. ## What is a Chatbot Platform? Artificial Intelligence chatbot platforms, or AI chatbot apps, are virtual assistants communicating with people using natural language. A customer will, therefore, not have the sensation of talking to a machine. This is possible thanks to artificial intelligence and pre-set answers designed to simulate a human conversation. Chatbot is derived from combining the two English words “chat” and “robot.” Initially, automated chatbots were available as rule-based chatbots. They were programmed for specific tasks and were limited in functionality. Modern AI chatbots can deliver a human-like conversational experience in an instant messaging style. They can understand user intent and learn different phrasing in which questions are being asked. They use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to simulate a user conversation. An AI chatbot platform is nothing more than software based on AI, conceived and designed to answer user questions automatically. ## Main Features of AI Chatbots To Look Out For When deciding on an Artificial Intelligence chatbot technology for your website, check out the main features of the different AI chatbot platforms. This will prevent you from missing out on any important feature your business might require. Modern customers are connected to brands through various channels across the internet and demand instant solutions to their problems. Precisely for this reason, the AI chatbot is mainly used to offer quality customer service. This is advantageous for both businesses and customers. The best AI chatbots also offer mobile apps that can be used to access services. Your chatbot platform should offer unlimited chat history to avoid paying for extra memory. The AI chatbot technology allows companies to cut costs by offering a 24-hour service without hiring extra staff for night shifts. This also helps the companies increase the degree of customer satisfaction and allows consumers to receive the information and support they need quickly and at any time. ## Changing Customer Requirements Customers are now connected to the brands across a number of platforms. This includes the website, social media, and the official app. Therefore, companies must determine how support can be provided across all platforms. In addition to customer care, AI chatbots can help companies in sales processes such as lead generation, telling a story through a storytelling strategy, or supporting the purchasing process for an online shop. To understand what AI chatbots are, you need to think of the Internet, which has accustomed you to a remarkable response speed compared to the past. Thanks to search engines that can provide us with enormous information on all our questions. For this reason, as a user, you might find yourself extremely frustrated when you find yourself immersed in offline processes - often cumbersome - which take away your time and attention. This is enough to explain the AI chatbot phenomenon, which, thanks to the advances in artificial intelligence, makes it possible to communicate with machines and obtain answers, albeit to specific and circumscribed questions. ## Benefits of Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Online AI chatbots are excellent for automating customer support and lead generation tasks. They are mainly designed to provide information or services to customers without human interference. AI allows bots to understand user requests and provide programmed and personalized responses. It is no coincidence that these programs are used to give consumers a high-level service through different communication channels, becoming a precious aid for omnichannel marketing. In summary, it can be said that the most important benefits guaranteed by AI chatbots to customers are essential: Generally, an AI chatbot provides information in FAQs, content regarding products or services, and everything that users can usually acquire from a customer service operator. Using AI chatbots, companies can considerably save the time and costs associated with human resource activities. These efforts can be used to carry out other important activities. Following are some major benefits of using artificial intelligence chatbots for your business: ### Round-the-Clock Availability AI chatbot software is online and available 24/7 and at a very low cost for businesses. In short, it is like always having active customer assistance. Unlike people, once an AI chatbot is installed, it can handle requests at any time of the day. This way, the customer doesn't have to wait for help from a company operator. ### Reduced Costs AI chatbots eliminate the need for manpower during online customer interaction. This is obviously a big plus for companies that get multiple requests simultaneously. In addition to cost savings, businesses can align the AI chatbot with their goals and use it as a means to improve customer conversion. ### Learning and Updating One of the main advantages of using AI-powered chatbots is that they keep self-improving their conversations and interactions through machine learning capability. When hiring a new employee, regular training is required. However, AI chatbots "form" themselves (with some limitations). ### Improved Assistance AI chatbots can handle most of the customer service tasks and independently manage some requests for assistance. AI chatbots can be entrusted with the most common requests, such as the telephone number of the various departments, how to replace a product purchased by mistake, how to make a return, provide delivery status, and other requests that do not require human interaction. Only the most complex requests that require more accurate explanations can be passed on to customer service. By using AI chatbots, businesses can achieve greater automation and efficiency in managing assistance requests, and no customer will be left waiting for answers to trivial questions. Human agents can deal with a limited number of clients simultaneously. This restriction does not exist for AI chatbots, which can handle as many requests as needed at the same time. This is one of the main advantages of using AI chatbots, as no customer is left unattended, and several problems are solved simultaneously. Currently, AI chatbot companies are already working on developing voice AI chatbot services. ### Seamless Transactions AI chatbots can be used to manage simple monetary transactions and provide recommendations. For example, in online booking services, you can ask your customers questions and thus obtain all the information you need to find the best tickets or solutions for them. By allowing customers to book services online independently, you will have satisfied customers and build a good reputation for your business. AI chatbots can effectively manage monotonous banking tasks such as blocking stolen cards, identity verification, and confirmation of transfers. In the future, AI chatbots could also be used in e-commerce platforms to manage the return of goods or the replacement of individual items. Customers may also be able to update or cancel their orders. ### Enhanced Data collection When a customer requests assistance remotely, several formalities are performed to verify the person’s authenticity, such as collecting the main data concerning them. For example, the authorization to manage the account remotely and other additional information such as email and telephone number is verified. An AI chatbot application could be used to speed up the procedure before passing the request to an operator. In this way, the resolution of the problem will be faster, and the operator will immediately have all the main information they need at their disposal. It will allow you to resolve customer queries instantly. ## How To Add an AI Chatbot To Your Website? Simple integration alone is not enough to guarantee the AI chatbot's success on your website. You need to devise a strategy that must be planned to obtain excellent results. You must identify the goals you intend to achieve and the most suitable type of answer to pursue them. If the AI chatbot has to respond to user requests, you must set up responses to satisfy them. This will only be possible if you know your target and its needs. The AI chatbot must be implemented in a larger marketing strategy as it can only prove useful if placed in a well-defined system. If your website is not easily navigable or your social pages are not taken care of, a virtual assistant can provide no added value to your customers. It is therefore advisable to analyze and, if necessary, intervene on these aspects before proceeding with the implementation. The next step will be identifying the most suitable channels for the best performance. You can decide whether to implement the AI bot on your website or instant messaging platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, Apple business chat, and WhatsApp are the most used to date. ### Personalized Customer Journey Design It is necessary to use a personalized customer journey design service, where the processes and priorities of the service are defined. This will allow the service to establish the operating margin of the bot, the tasks it can solve on its own, or when the intervention of a human operator is necessary. Furthermore, a system for monitoring the efficiency of AI ​​customer service must be defined through KPIs that can be analyzed and allow for better performance to be obtained. Furthermore, the evolution of AI must not be missing through the continuous improvement of its interaction ability. One of the paths to pursue is that of emotional analysis, which allows conversational AI to analyze the customer's feelings and emotions from the tone of voice so as to be able to offer a deeper understanding of the request and consequently respond in an increasingly efficient way. ## What Is The Future of AI-powered Chatbots? AI chatbots are expected to revolutionize customer support and be a crucial driver of business success. AI chatbots are constantly updated to provide seamless, realistic, automated conversations. Using conversational AI for customer service opens up various future perspectives that guide toward ever-greater automation of contacts and transactions. AI is helping chatbots, and voice bots reproduce more "human" behavior. You need to focus on a "trained" artificial intelligence algorithm. This will allow you to switch from a responsive to a predictive perspective so as to be able to positively change customer care management and consequently increase the customer's customer experience. In the future, AI chatbot adoption by businesses will likely increase rapidly. ## Best AI Chatbots In 2023 All AI chatbots have the common purpose of automating customer support and sales tasks for you. Below, we will discuss some of the best chatbots you can use for your business. ### Infobip

AI chatbots have been thrust into the realm of relevancy with the advent of Open AI's ChatGPT, Google's LaMDA, and multiple other companies trying to keep up with the AI revolution. This begs the question, what exactly is an AI chatbot? And, what are the distinct advantages and disadvantages that chatbot technology brings to various sectors present within society? ## What Is An AI Chatbot? In layman's terms, an AI chatbot is an artificially intelligent program specifically designed to interpret human language, process it, and then output results based on its understanding. Depending on what kind of chatbot it is, these answers can be quite varied. For instance, an AI chatbot platform specifically meant for customer inquiries might not be great at summarizing a letter, but it'll be excellent at customer interactions. Similarly, while OpenAI's ChatGPT might not be able to lodge a complaint, it is excellent at answering more general questions. For instance, while a regular chatbot is constrained to a particular ruleset and cannot go beyond it, an AI bot can contextually understand a question, even if it has never seen it before, and provide a relatively accurate response. As an example, healthcare providers can use AI chatbots to quickly filter out and respond to medical queries based on their urgency. In situations like these, developing a rule based chatbot that can identify injuries based on whether they are critical is nigh impossible. On the other hand, an artificially intelligent chatbot can easily bifurcate between the urgency of a particular medical question based on the sentiments and urgency the user is expressing alongside cross-matching the particular situation with its index of databases and therefore is able to output a relevant response. ## How Do AI Chatbots Work? AI Chatbots use natural language processing (NLP) to interpret input and also generate contextually aware output. Here's how the machine learning algorithm of an AI chatbot works: 1. The AI chatbot picks up contextual input 2. The input is bifurcated into portions and the sentiment, tone, and intent are understood by using natural language understanding (NLU) 3. Now, the input is matched up with its intent and relevant information is fetched from the database 4. Once the information is filtered and fetched, it is presented back to the user as a form of output by using natural language generation (NLG) This particular approach to a chatbot is static in nature. In essence, this model does not improve over time. Therefore, this kind of chatbot is primarily used for customer experience chatbots where the AI chatbot does not necessarily need to accommodate newer information over time. On the other hand, chatbots such as ChatGPT are dynamic in nature. They improve over time and their models are retrained constantly to add more accurate answers, respond to more complex queries, and increase their prevalence of using natural human language. This is achieved with the help of reinforced learning. Each interaction you perform with an AI chatbot stands as an opportunity for improvement for the machine learning algorithm. Depending on whether you are satisfied with the answer, the computer program understands how it could have done better or worse thereby improving human conversation. Besides just reinforced learning, these chatbots have access to the Internet. This also allows them to fetch and process new data from the world wide web and train themselves with it as well. ## What Is The Difference Between Chatbot and AI Chatbot? By definition, an AI chatbot operates on the premise of natural language processing and machine learning whereas a regular chatbot is bound by scripts and pre-programmed commands that help it make a particular decision. In the grander scheme of things, an AI chatbot is far more dynamic, can analyze a lot more data, and can also resolve more complex queries. But, until AI chatbots are perfected, regular chatbots are still widely used and even have some benefits such as them not needing as much processing power compared to an AI chatbots. ## Do All Chatbots Use AI? No, not all chatbots use AI. Depending on their use case, a brand might opt to go for a simple rule based chatbot instead of AI chatbots. Primarily, this is because AI chatbots tend to be more expensive to maintain and operate compared to regular chatbots. Plus, not every brand needs an AI agent to answer queries as they simply fall into a few rule sets which do not require dynamic interaction. For instance, a food delivery service will only have a set number of customer queries that it needs to respond to which may not require the dynamic responses that AI chatbots provide. ## What Are the Benefits of an AI Chatbot? AI Chatbots can be used for a variety of user interactions. And, their beauty is in their versatility. So, they're extremely beneficial for almost all use cases and can act as a wonderful aid for human agents. Here's a look at some of their advantages: - Contextual Understanding: An AI chatbot can understand the urgency and emotion of a certain query and relay it to human agents in a contextually relevant manner improving overall customer experience. - Reduced Overhead: From a company's perspective, the inclusion of artificial intelligence in their workflow can help reduce customer service costs as irrelevant queries can be filtered out and automated responses can be used to answer questions instead of needing human intervention everywhere. - Speed and Responsiveness: The sheer speed at which artificial intelligence chatbots can answer questions and interpret customer data goes a long way in improving customer engagement thanks to conversational AI. - Better Customer Interactions: The usage of AI chatbots also results in better customer interactions as agents will already be aware of the gravity of a certain situation as it will already be filtered through AI. So, situations that require human intervention can be dealt with accordingly with the help of machine learning. - Adaptability and Training: Once an AI chatbot understands your workflow, it can easily adapt to other sectors that it may not have been originally intended for. So, whether it is lead generation, human resources, scheduling appointments, or manning phone lines, artificial intelligence chatbots will be able to easily assimilate to any situation. - Constant Availability: AI chatbots have zero downtime and are available 24/7. So, whether your customer is using mobile apps to reach your brand or with a website, a small business can easily integrate AI chatbots and can have their queries answered via conversational AI at any time. All in all, chatbots have turned into a pivotal tool for enterprises. They make it much easier to answer hordes of outstanding customer inquiries and eliminate tedious, manual labor for human agents. However, it is important to understand that natural language processing is not an alternative to actual human interaction. While customer experiences have certainly been improved with the addendum of AI chatbots, they still are a far cry from an actual human's ability to perceive nuance and provide an accurate response. So, while some customer questions might be answered by AI technology, the true key to having a large sum of satisfied customers is to create a hybrid mix between virtual agents and AI driven chatbots to ensure that your customer journey is smooth for everyone. However, you, as a manager will have to make the decision in deciding what sort of framework works best for you based on user input and the current state of AI bots. If your user's intent isn't really grasped by AI, your customer support experience will largely be defined by virtual human agents. However, if you've seen great success with rule based chatbots or have less tedious queries, you'll be able to offload more of your customer questions from virtual assistants to an AI bot instead. ## Are AI Chatbots Important? AI Chatbots are extremely important in improving customer support and are generally used in messaging apps by various brands to improve their efficacy of answering questions quickly and accurately. While these software programs can vary in complexity and design, they all have one primary purpose, to improve customer experience as much as possible. Because of this, while businesses may not completely switch to virtual artificial intelligence any time soon, having your own chatbot in an enterprise setting can prove to be extremely beneficial for all industrial sectors.