All You Need To Know About Chatbots

What Is Chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer or software program stimulating human conversation or conversing through text or voice interactions. They follow a pre-defined set of rules to respond to customers’ commonly asked queries or use artificial intelligence(AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to mimic real-life, human-like conversations.

Based on their functioning principles, chatbots use different technologies to perform. Today, most businesses use chatbots to engage with their website visitors, prospects, or customers to answer FAQs, generate leads, and provide order details.

As a business or enterprise, you can custom-build a chatbot that suits your specific application, branding, and operations. The best case scenario is to connect with a top-notch cloud communication brand like Route Mobile, which offers next-gen no-code custom chatbot builder Roubot. More on that later!

How Do Chatbots Work?

Chatbots leverage large datasets businesses or websites provide to generate relevant customer responses.

It uses a menu-based or keyword-based system where a selected suggested input term triggers the pre-defined information to answer the customer query. However, with AI intervention, this process becomes more sophisticated, complex, and nuanced, even though it is still based on the following three-step stages:

• Trained on available or feed large data sets to understand the given query or message
• Analyse the relevant and correct information to form a cohesive answer for the asked query.
• It uses text analysis, NLP, ML, and other algorithms-based systems to understand the context and improve the answer. Also, the same is used to learn and adapt to get better at answering for the next time.

History & Evolution of AI Chatbots

ELIZA was the first chatbot created by a developer named Joseph Weizenbaum in 1996. It used foundational yet game-changer systems like pattern matching and substitution methodology to mimic a human conversation.

The goal was to stimulate a natural human conversation in a much more engaging and entertaining way. It is only now that advanced AI components like NLP and sentiment analysis have dramatically improved the contextual pattern matching and human-like conversation element.

Here’s what the evolution of chatbots looks like:

Name	Year	Developer
ELIZA	1966	Joseph Weizenbaum
PARRY	1972	Kenneth Colby
Jabberwacky	1988	Rollo Carpenter
Dr. Sbaitso	1992	Creative Labs
A.L.I.C.E.	1995	Richard Wallace
SmarterChild	2001	ActiveBuddy.Inc
Siri	2010	Apple
Google Now/Google Assistant	2012	Google
Cortana	2014	Microsoft
Alexa	2014	Amazon
ChatGPT	2021	OpenAI
Google Gemini	2023	Google
Microsoft Copilot	2023	Microsoft

Types Of Chatbots And Their Use Cases

• Menu or Button-Based Chatbots: Menu or button-based chatbots allow users to access a series of options or buttons to resolve queries or provide requested information. You can consider them detailed and interactive buttons or menu-driven FAQs within your customer service toolkit. They are most simplistic in their design and use case, which is ideal for businesses that want straightforward customer interactions.
• Rule-Based Chatbots: This type of chatbot operates on a set of pre-defined rules to respond to specific questions or commands. The rule-based chatbot is mainly designed to handle scenarios expected by businesses or their developers. They can only operate in potentially defined scenarios with predictable outcomes, ensuring consistency through reliable responses to common queries.
• Keyword Recognition-Based Chatbots: These chatbots are designed to perform detailed and meticulous analysis and are capable of identifying patterns and trends. These chatbots choose crucial keywords from the interactions and provide much more nuanced, comprehensive, and contextually relevant responses.
• AI-Powered/ NLP Chatbots: These are much more advanced chatbots that leverage natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and text analysis, i.e., primary components of artificial intelligence (AI) to respond to queries with a high level of comprehension, personalisation, and contextualising. These chatbots can adapt and learn over time through consistent interactions, improving their response time and ability to answer more accurately.
• Contextual Chatbots: A contextual chatbot is an advanced type of chatbot designed to engage in conversations that are not only relevant but also personalised based on the context of the interaction. Unlike traditional chatbots that rely heavily on keyword recognition and scripted responses, contextual chatbots utilise sophisticated technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning to interpret user intent and sentiment more effectively.
• Hybrid Chatbots: Hybrid chatbots are a combination of rule-based and AI-powered chatbot systems offering a much more versatile approach to user interactions. These are quite helpful in navigating complex and nuanced conversational through leveraging AI while still relying on the constraint of the decision trees and predefined rules set in rule-based systems for better consistency.
• Generative AI Chatbots: Generative AI Chatbots have the capability to auto-generate unique responses in real time instead of choosing from a predefined one, making the conversation more nuanced, detailed, and informative. With a highly personalised user experience, they are much more sophisticated than menu-based, rule-based, or keyword-based chatbots and are able to handle complex queries efficiently.
• Voice-Enabled Chatbots: Voice chatbots use spoken language powered by voice recognition technologies to communicate with high-level multitask users, giving them hands-free and off-screen convenience and accessibility. They offer a much more conversational, intuitive, and natural user experience, especially when typing is impractical.

How Do Chatbots Help Businesses?

24/7 Automated Customer Support

Users expect the brands to respond faster, even during peak hours. And this can only be possible by using the chatbots for the first interaction with the prospect. They are faster, automated, and can provide 24/7 support around the clock, even when agents are offline. It also eliminated the overreliance on manual or human customer assistance and tackled its limitations, i.e., available only during business hours.

Another entirely resolved challenge is the inefficiency of customer agents, where conversational AI-based chatbots can cater to more customer queries in less time. It eliminates the frustration of customers facing delayed responses or, worse, having to wait for the next working day to resolve their queries.

Route Mobile offers Roubot, a drag-and-drop chatbot builder with seamless integration to multiple communication channels. This makes it easier for businesses to create a customised AI chatbot per their specific application.

Also Read: An Overview Of Roubot’s Unique Application

Facilitating Self-Service Options

Chatbot features conversational AI that can streamline the customer experience, making it faster, more effective, and seamless; customers do not need to rely on human customer assistance to resolve a problem entirely. This is indeed true when we evaluate how customers interact with a brand.

Effective Lead Generation & Qualification Process

Chatbot equips your communication strategy to be proactive in terms of customer outreach and engagement. These can capture leads and engage with them through valuable information such as personalised recommendations and resolving queries.

Further, they can filter and qualify leads based on analysing customer interactions, leading to better conversion and accelerated business growth. It offers tools featuring all the essential information that customers can access easily. This certainly improves the self-service quotient of the brand’s customer support strategy.

Helps In Saving Cost

According to the CX Trends Report, 68% of EX professionals believe that AI and chatbots will reduce the cost over the coming years.

Chatbot allows automated responses to common customer inquiries that help in reducing hiring and staffing costs and resource allocation. Additionally, technologies like AI, NLP, no-code and click-to-configure bot builders further aid in saving tons of expenses.

Provide Much More Personalised Experiences

63% of business leaders agree that AI chatbots provide hyper-personalised experiences to customers. Chatbots collect user personal data to create personalised experiences for the customers for better engagement. It also offers businesses a way to achieve high customer satisfaction as well.

An effective AI-powered chatbot can be integrated with other systems such as CRMs, marketing automation tools, customer service tools, etc.

Offer Scalability

Different aspects of businesses, including customer service managers, deploy chatbots to boost productivity and efficiency. Since chatbots can easily handle simple tasks, they can also hire additional customer support agents.

Chatbot helps businesses to scale by accessorising the technology and automating and enhancing their process. It allows customer service to attract more customers or potential buyers on a larger scale.

Ensure Omnichannel Support

Customers reach out to the brand through a wide array of communication channels, including phone, social media, and various messaging apps like WhatsApp Messenger and Facebook Messenger.

They expect the conversation with them to be cohesive and consistent across channels. It must be seamless across platforms, so they just have to continue their journey or conversation from one platform to another.

Customers also want brand consistency in their messaging, tone, and overall vibe, irrespective of their channel or platform.

Help You Understand Your Target Consumers Better

AI chatbots engage with consumers regularly. They can identify patterns in the customers’ preferences, queries, and challenges. With their ability to retain information, businesses can utilise chatbots to gain more detailed information about their consumer base.

The AI-powered chatbots are also great for receiving customer feedback through surveys, forms, and other methods.

Offering Consistent Chatbot Personality For Effective Branding

Chatbots must have unique personalities that must be maintained across the platforms and throughout the customer journey. The personality, tonality and kind of automated response it generates must align with your brand identity.

More than anything, conversational chatbots must mimic the nuances of humans so the interaction feels natural. Customers are more likely to leave the conversation if it feels too boring, lifeless, and irrelevant.

Businesses must focus on customising a chatbot from a reputed business service provider like Route Mobile, offering an intelligent bot named Roubot offering:

• No code/low-code platform
• drag-and-drop flow builder
• Customised chatbot
• Live chat integration
• Seamless integration with various communication channels like WhatsApp, SMS, Telegram, etc
• Intent-focussed chat navigation
• Real-time bot analytics
• Industry-specific pre-defined templates

Helps In Error Reduction

AI-powered chatbots help in minimising human error and further aid in automating routine tasks and conversations. Chatbots ensure streamlined processes, boosting overall productivity, reducing the wait time, and improving personalisation.

They are programmed on large data sets of information to deliver accurate responses and consistently lower the chances of human error in customer interactions.

Leveraging Chatbots For Ecommerce

47% of users are open to buying products through a chatbot. Since AI chatbots offer a high level of user engagement, they provide much more personalised assistance to customers during their interactions. Within the chatbot window, customers can:

• Manage their account
• Track their order
• Ask queries about the product/services
• Easy and quick payment

Customers can also get personalised product recommendations, offers, and discounts based on their data. Conversational Commerce is one of the most effective applications of chatbot integration aimed at generating leads and revenue. It offers superior customer engagement through:

• Personalisation
• Upsell & Cross-sell
• Payments
• Order details
• And more.

Then, as per Juniper Research, the global retail spending on Chatbots is forecasted to reach $72 billion by 2028. If not anything, the amount of investment going into the future of chatbots, specifically in the retail industry, states its effectiveness.

Must Read: Mastering Conversational Marketing With Chatbots: Your Ultimate Guide

Industries That Leverage AI Chatbots Have A Competitive Advantage

Travel & Hospitality

Chatbots are emerging as powerful digital or virtual assistants for travellers and reliable travel companions to help with travel plans, booking, and other activities.

These chatbots can provide real-time travel updates, notify about weather changes, offer personalised recommendations, assist with flight and hotel bookings, and so much more.

Chatbots in the hospitality industry are focused on making the traveller’s journey smoother, easier, and hassle-free. It aids in improving the overall travel experience from beginning to end.

Healthcare Industry

Chatbots are transforming healthcare through intensive patient management, streamlining administrative tasks and improving the overall efficiency.

This provides a competitive advantage, increased productivity, and reduced workload on healthcare professionals, including appointment management, data integration, healthcare monitoring, initial symptom assessment and more.

Financial Services

Chatbots in the fintech industry revolutionised personal finance management for customers.

The virtual assistants help customers explore their account details, perform routine inquiries, and provide accurate, customised responses to build customer satisfaction.

Logistic And Supply Chain

Chatbots play an integral role in optimising business operations in the logistics and supply chain industry. It offers real-time access to information such as tracking info for shipments, the live status of cargo and so on.

It also aids in automating routine tasks, order processing, sharing information, and tracking inquiries from customers and others efficiently.

Through automation, it reduces error rates and boosts operational efficiency during logistic and supply chain processes.

Education

Chatbots are playing an integral role in digitising education and academic assistance. It helps streamline processes, aiding in answering frequently asked questions. These chatbots make the educational journey much more smoother.

Government Public Services

All the government public services can benefit from chatbots in terms of operational efficiency, engagement, informational accessibility and inquiry satisfaction on a larger scale. Overall, it helps boost the efficiency of such services, reduce costs and improve people’s experiences with them.

eCommerce/Retail

Chatbots are pathbreaking in the ecommerce or retail industry, where they act as virtual shopping assistants. These chatbots offer personalised product recommendations, help customers through purchases, and frequently answer questions. It also helps engage with customers, ensure customer satisfaction, and build customer loyalty.

Also Read: The Role Of Chatbots In Patient Compliance

How To Create Your Own Chatbot?

To create your own chatbot, choose a no-code chatbot builder platform like ours; Route Mobile’s Roubot allows you to create custom chatbots for your business for specific applications.

The platform features a drag-and-drop no-code chatbot builder with an easy-to-use and intuitive interface, making even non-technical person easily create their chatbot in no time.

It is important to decide the objective, messaging, and branding of your chatbot that must align with your overall business strategy.

Optimise the welcome message through which your bot will introduce itself to the target prospect or visitor. Make sure it is transparent and clearly announces its purpose.

How To Choose The Best Chatbot For Your Business?

Selecting the right AI chatbot helps manage customer engagement, streamline operations, and improve overall business efficiency.

However, choosing the right option can be a hassle with all types of options available in the market. Here are simple yet effective steps to follow when choosing the best Chatbot for the business.

Step 1: Start With Understanding Your Business Requirements

Understand the need of your business to choose the Chatbot to address your challenges effectively. Chatbots serve various purposes, from automating customer support to boosting your business customer engagement.

Identify the areas where your Chatbot is going to fill and determine how it will add value. But how do we evaluate the business requirements? Here is how :

• Identify The Gaps

  Pick the pain points from conducting surveys and feedback forms. These help gather insight from your employees and customers to understand the common issues. This will highlight the areas where chatbots could bring better efficiency and results. For example, this could be automating the sales process, providing better customer support, or supporting internal operations.

• List The Issues

  Write down the pattern you notice and specific problems. For example, if a customer has long wait times, your goal can be to reduce the response by 30%.
  Create a list of potential use cases where the chatbots can help, and prioritise these based on urgency and impact.

• Engage & Research

  Gather the feedback from people, departments, and stakeholders. Look for the industry standards of your competitors. Research how they have been utilising the chatbots and what benefits they have been using.

Step 2: Identify The Specific Goals

The next step is to set clear and measurable goals for your chatbots to serve. Defining what the Chatbot should focus on, providing a framework, and evaluating the overall success.

Make sure these are aligned to your business objectives, trackable, and monitored.

Here is how you can find specific goals :

• Define The KPIs

  Outline the outcomes that can be measured. For example, it can increase customer satisfaction by 40%.

  Establish your KPIs or Key Performance Indicators that should be aligned with the company’s objectives and goals.

• Use The SMART Criteria

  Divide your specific goals into SMART, i.e., Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. This adds a timeline to your goals, ensuring you have step-by-step levels to achieve and assess your chatbot performance.

  Determine the goals in detail. Let’s say it’s for handling customer inquiries 24/7, so set how many queries your chatbot will manage each day.

Step 3: Check The Chatbot Compatibility

Compatibility with your existing system is a crucial step to ensure a smooth and hassle-free integration. Your selected Chatbot should integrate seamlessly, whether it’s your website, customer support software, or CRM, without requiring you to change a lot.

To find out if Chatbot is compatible or not, here is what you can do:

• Evaluate The Existing Tools

  Start with a list of tools you’ve been using, whether it’s CRM, email marketing, or more. Check the chatbots and their integration options with the existing tools.

• Read The Requirements For Integration

  Some chatbots require API access or plugins for smooth functions. These can be pre-built and integrated beforehand. However, make sure you check these requirements beforehand.

• Consider The Omnichannel Compatibility

  If the business communicates across different channels, including emails, social media, and websites, look for a chatbot that can be compatible with omnichannel compatibility.

Step 4: Pick The Right Type Of Chatbot

Different types of chatbots come with their own set of functions. This depends on the set goals to determine which type is going to serve the purpose.

• Review Each Type Of Chatbot

  Once you know what you are looking for in the Chatbot, the next step is to find the right type.

  Understand the different types that have been mentioned previously. Based on your identified needs and goals, pick the Chatbot that can serve those purposes.

  Look for the functionality that aligns with the requirements; for example, choosing an appointment booking chatbot can be a better fit if your goal is to offer better appointment scheduling for your business.

Step 5: Set Your Budget, Resources & More

Before you commit to any chatbot solution, make sure you have enough resources, whether it’s setting a budget to evaluate which technical sources to implant and manage.

You can consider the basic version for a more user-friendly interface and minimal coding knowledge.

• Start With Budget & Time

  Consider setting the cost of the initial setup for your chatbot. It includes maintenance and future expenses.

  Look for factors like how much time it will take for your team to get used to the new system. Different chatbot types have different levels of learning curve, with more advanced options needing more training.

• Look For Technical Expertise And Support

  After your budget is set, next is to look for the technical aspect, whether it’s learning new skills or having no code chatbot solution that needs minimal technical expertise.

  Besides this, identify what type of support you might need depending on the type of Chatbot you choose.

Step 6: Look For The Large Integration Options

A chatbot’s ability depends on its access to and utilisation of data to provide a personalised experience. The more data your Chatbot can access, the better and more meaningful response it can generate for the customers.

To ensure your Chatbot offers you an effective pull and process of data from your system, here are a few pointers :

• Understand Data Access & Requirements

  Identify the data that your Chatbot requires to access, such as CRM data, purchase history, or FAQ information. These data can help in providing better customer support and serve the goals.

• Research For Features Offering Data Handling

  Look for chatbots that have features that integrate data with existing data in real-time. With that, verify that the Chatbot is complying with the data protection regulations.

Stats And Interesting Facts About AI Chatbot

Here are some exciting, relevant and latest statistics and interesting facts about AI chatbots for businesses:

• People are ready to talk to chatbots. In fact, they are interested and excited to engage. 82% of consumers would use a chatbot instead of waiting for a human agent.
• The global chatbot market size is expected to grow from $7.01 billion in 2024 to $20.81 billion in 2029.
• 87% of consumers say they’ve had either a neutral or positive chatbot experience.
• AI chatbots will be powering 95% of customer interactions by 2025.
• 80% of customers with multiple chatbot experiences reported a positive experience.
• Most people have been exposed to, tried to, or already used chatbots at least once, if not multiple times already. A whopping 96% of customers have actually heard about chatbots and know what they are.
• 55% of consumers opt for self-service customer support over talking to a human representative.
• About 38% of customers find it annoying when the chatbot fails to understand the context.
• Companies can reduce their customer service costs by upto 30% by utilising a conversational chatbot.
• Teresa Haun from Zendesk says by 2030, 80% of interactions will be solved entirely by AI without any human intervention.
• According to Gartner, by 2026, the volume of traditional search engines will drop by 25% due to the dominance of AI chatbots.
• Rarely do people find chatbots not to be useful. In fact, only 2% of customers believe that chatbots are not helpful.
• Forbes says 60% of millennials use chatbots, and 70% reported having had a positive experience.
• According to a study by Tidio, 50% of consumers expected fast response time and around-the-clock availability as the top problem on their priority list to be solved by a chatbot.

Must Read: How Do NLP Chatbots Work?

Best Practices Of AI-Powered Chatbots – Do’s And Don’ts

Here are some of the best practices for AI-powered chatbots that every business must follow to gain the best results.

Do’s

• Identify Your Problems First: Before thinking about building your chatbots and integrating one, take a step back and consider what problems your business faces. Identify the ones that can be solved through the chatbot. Brainstorm and write all these issues by topic and rank them to see what is the most pressing concern. If solved, consider which of these problems will help your business grow the best and fastest. What is the biggest roadblock to the success of your company? You can also classify them as much as possible.

  For example:

  • Customer Support Problem
    • Performance related issues
      • Poor customer engagement
      • Low customer satisfaction
      • Lack of customer feedback
    • Budget-related issues
      • High staff cost
      • High new employment training cost
    • [And so on…]
• Set Clear & Well-Defined Goals: Once you’ve figured out the problems causing hurdles to your business growth, it is time to define clearly what you want your chatbot to achieve. Make it a SMART goal, i.e., specified, measurable, achievable, reasonable, and time-restrictive. When your goals with the chatbot are well-defined, you can easily track the progress and measure the success of the chatbot’s performance or campaign by using the relevant KPIs.
• Know Your Target Audience: Chatbot designing requires consideration that accommodates the needs and preferences of your primary targeted customers. You can do that by conducting customer satisfaction surveys, creating detailed customer profiles, and analysing the customer service data to recognise commonly asked queries your chatbot must address. Understanding what your audience seeks will help you tailor the chatbot interactions and responses to ensure they provide maximum value to them.
• Leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP): Ensure you utilise the NLP capabilities of AI to make the interactions more intuitive and personable. It helps businesses craft a chatbot to comprehend complex queries and context-based conversations. With that, they respond with a wide range of responses, adapt and improve over multiple interactions and develop to achieve more nuanced conversations.
• Embracing Transparency With Your Chatbot: Chatbots must be transparent in their approach. Trying to be over-smart and catch an audience’s attention without any relevance won’t go far. Not to mention leaving a wrong impression on the prospect. Ensure that your chatbot immediately communicates what it can help them with. It must clearly outline its capabilities and how it will be able to help the person.
• Using Chatbots To Collect Information: Businesses must use chatbots to gather information from users in a friendly and conversational manner. This user-friendly approach boosts customer engagement when customers interact with your chatbot, and data collection is seamlessly integrated into natural conversations to align with the chatbot’s overall goals.

• Design The Tone Of Voice For Your Chatbot: The chatbot represents your brand. It is extensive and must align with your overall brand tone and voice. This makes crafting a unique and consistent chatbot tone that emulates your brand’s personality essential. You must ensure the chatbot’s voice is conversational, natural and human-like. It must be relatable and tailored to your target customers.

  For example, if your brand focuses on the Gen-Z audience, the chatbot’s tonality and conversation style must be relevant and relatable. This also includes analysing the previous customer interactions, identifying the conversational flow and focusing on replicating it.

Also Read: The Power Of Advanced NLP And Machine Learning In AI Chatbots

Don’ts

• Limited To Just Single-Case Use: Brands can certainly begin with single-use case chatbots to figure out what works and what doesn’t for them. However, once they identify that, they must expand to automate other processes across departments in the company. Never get tunnel vision for single-case use of a chatbot, especially when it is clearly working for you. Ensure you leverage the full potential of the chatbot’s diverse applications for automation, customer service, and more.
• A Chatbot That Lacks Personality An impressionable chatbot is as bad as not having a chatbot in the first place. Chatbots are meant to be personable, interactive, smart, and unique enough to attract the target users to interact with them. That’s why people easily remember AI-powered voice assistants like Alexa or Siri as they build a bond with their users. Chatbots must not be dull and boring in their personality. It is one of the most common chatbot mistakes, which is the reason behind high bounce rates, less engagement, and increased customer frustration. Some things to ensure are:
  • Must have icon or branding of your company
  • Must represent or reflect your brand’s personality and tonality
  • Make it witty, empathetic, and polite
  • Must have an easy-to-remember name
• Allocating Inadequate Funds & Resources: Often, business owners do not take chatbot integration as seriously as a software development project. It would require essential funds and resources if you want to perform your chatbot efficiently and drive groundbreaking results for your business. A common mistake from companies is undervaluing the chatbot, hence allocating inadequate funds and resources to exploit its full potential. Every business needs proper strategic preparation before they create, customise, and integrate chatbots into their system.
• Making It Harder For Customers To Take A Leave: Many brands do not provide an easy exit option in their chatbots to reduce early dropout of customers. This is a huge mistake as not only does it make the customer frustrated, but it also leaves a negative impression on the brand. Forcing brands to stay interested in the conversation does not work. In fact, it backfires almost every time. The best thing you can do is engage the customers with the right responses and still give them an easy exit for a better chatbot experience.
• Not Leveraging Chatbot Analytics: Perhaps the most unforgivable chatbot mistake is not utilising the power of data-driven insights businesses can gain from their chatbot analytics. It can provide deep insights into customer behaviour and find communication gaps. Without using chatbot analytics, you can not improve its performance, preventing it from reaching its full potential and expanding its use cases across departments within your company.
• Lack of Clarity: If you’re employing a chatbot just because your competitors are, then you probably would also lack clarity on the purpose, planning, and strategy aspects of chatbot integration. Even if you hire a reputed cloud-communication partner like ours at Route Mobile, offering our smart bot, Roubot, to build your own customised chatbot, we would still need to know your objectives and what you want to achieve overall.

However, Route Mobile offers strategic professional help to guide businesses in creating their chatbot specific to their industry usage and application for maximum profitability. Ensure you have a clear goal, a strong business case, and a strategy leading your team in the right direction.

You want the chatbots to:

• Get qualified leads and boost conversion for your sales team
• Assist visitors on your website with their buying process
• Provide customer support to your buyers after purchase

Pro Tip: Communicate with your sales, marketing, and customer support team. Try to identify the gaps in the process where a chatbot can be an effective solution. And start building the chatbot with the purpose and objective in your mind.

• Not Finding The Right Balance Between Business And Developers Needs: Unlike our competitors, Route Mobile’s Roubot does not struggle with having a single-focussed objective to address either business or developer needs. Chatbots you create for your business must be effective for making data-driven decision-making, but they also must not feel limited when handed to your developers. Fortunately, very few, like Roubot, offer customisation for deploying a chatbot that is a perfect marriage of both, addressing the needs of the business and developers.
• Faking Chatbot As Real Person: Many business owners and marketers have this notion that customers do not prefer to interact with chatbots. This is not true at all! In fact, 62%, i.e., the majority of customers, would prefer to use an online chatbot instead of waiting for a human agent. This makes them create a chatbot that pretends to be a human. That is where the problem arises as customers think that they are talking to a human, and they eventually lose trust in the brand. On the contrary, if brands keep it transparent about using an NLP-based chatbot that almost sounds like a human, yet customers are informed about it, they are far more likely to be impressed and prefer to engage.
• Not Testing Your Chatbot Enough Before Launch: Chatbots are virtual assistants or brand representatives for an online business. Before launching them, they must be rigorously tested. A thorough check is warranted every time a new feature is deployed to avoid any critical mistakes. Hiring a third-party reputed chatbot building platform such as Route Mobile’s Roubot is the best idea to ensure proper testing, quality checks, and assessment before its launch. The team of smart and expert developers actually tries to break into the chatbot and cause errors to see how it withholds. Also, it asks complex questions that a customer would ask to judge their responses and rate them.
• Relying Too Much On Chatbots for Customer Support: The potential of chatbots in customer service, especially leveraging AI components such as NLP, ML, and evolving emotional intelligence, is so profound. Yet businesses must draw a line as chatbots are not meant to replace humans entirely. Instead, they focus on resolving simple or less complex issues and sharing information. It has limitations where anything beyond its training model requires human intervention to seamlessly escalate the complex issue to a human customer service expert or sales expert. This ensures an overall positive chatbot experience for the users, leveraging its full potential without exhausting its capability.
• Trying Too Hard: What’s impressive about NLP chatbots is their ability to mimic human conversation and keep it so natural that customers barely feel like talking to be sold on anything. They are merely having a conversation that organically lands up to either a brand awareness effort, a lead generation, or even an effortless sale at a time or over. However, the worst mistake one can make is to make chatbots too pushy and salesy about their product. Instead of attending to the customer’s preferences and needs, it tries to vomit out bland scripts. It ends up annoying customers and warding them off.

Pro Tip: Use custom and personalised, personality-based chatbots using NLP and sentiment analysis to respond with context and emotional intelligence in order to build a rapport with the customers.

• Not Measuring KPIs: Without setting up KPIs, i.e., the right metrics, businesses fail to measure the progress or success of their chatbot performance. The relevant KPIs you choose for the chatbot campaign depend upon the objective you initially set. Is it for automated customer service? Or do you want it to capture leads through engaging with helpful content? Make sure your KPIs are quantifiable, concrete numbers backed by existing data that can be measured.

Conclusion

The evolution of chatbots from simple rule-based systems to sophisticated AI-powered NLP-driven bots changes how brands communicate with their audience and how prospects interact with the companies.

Their ability to enhance customer communication through automation, advanced data analysis, contextualisation, personalisation, and human-like conversations makes chatbots indispensable for businesses.

Chatbot integration for your business requires some detailed pre-meditative planning on identifying the problem, setting clear goals, choosing the right type of chatbot and a reliable platform with abundant next-gen features.

Choosing a reliable business service provider with expertise in chatbot integration is crucial for successful implementation, avoiding common chatbot mistakes and following crucial strategic practices.

We at Route Mobile are a leading communication brand offering a chatbot builder platform, Roubot, allowing businesses to create custom smart bots for their business as per their required application. Our experts will guide you throughout the process. Contact us today to start now!

FAQs

What Are Some Common Mistake To Avoid When Implementing A Chatbot?

The most common mistakes to avoid when implementing a chatbot are:

• Underestimate the funds & resources required
• Limited to only single-use chatbot
• Chatbot that lacks personality or is off-personality
• Not utilising analytics to improve performance
• Not providing easy exit options for users

Can Chatbots Handle Complex Queries? If so, how?

AI-powered chatbots leverage NLP and sentiment analysis to comprehend the conversation with better context and emotional depth. Since they learn, adapt and grow over continuous interactions, they develop a more nuanced understanding of people, empathy and connection. As a result, these chatbots can handle much more complex queries with seamless human-like conversation.

What Are Some Top Industries Benefiting The Most From Chatbots?

The industries most benefited from chatbots are healthcare, fintech, travel, e-commerce, and education.