A chatbot is a computer program designed to interact with humans and engage in conversations through different channels, such as websites and messaging platforms. By leveraging natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, chatbots can understand user queries and provide relevant responses without the need for human intervention.
Additionally, chatbots can also perform basic tasks, such as making reservations or providing product recommendations, making them a useful tool for businesses to improve customer engagement and streamline operations.
Why Chatbots?
Most of the businesses nowadays are moving towards chatbots as they provide new opportunities to improve customer engagement processes. Chatbots also provide operational efficiency by reducing the cost of customer service.
However, live agents play an important role in customer support as well. Regardless of how well chatbots handle customer queries, human intervention is needed to configure, train and optimize a chatbot.
Here’s our beginner’s guide to chatbots to help you better understand this powerful software.
What are the benefits of using chatbots for businesses?
Improved customer service
Chatbots can provide 24/7 customer service and support, which can improve response times and customer satisfaction.
Cost savings
Chatbots can help businesses save money by automating tasks that would otherwise require human intervention.
Increased efficiency
Chatbots can handle multiple conversations simultaneously, which can increase the efficiency of customer service and support operations.
Personalization
Chatbots can use data and machine learning algorithms to provide personalized responses and recommendations to users.
Scalability
Chatbots can easily handle high volumes of conversations, making them ideal for businesses with large customer bases.
Brand consistency
Chatbots can be programmed to deliver a consistent brand message and tone across all conversations, ensuring a cohesive customer experience.
Lead generation and sales
Chatbots can be used to engage with potential customers, qualify leads, and drive sales.
The beginner’s guide to understanding chatbots
Chatbot Builder
A chatbot builder is a platform that allows you to build chatbots with very low or 0 codings. They help you create and design various conversation flows and define corresponding actions. They also have the ability to analyze interactions.
However, on the technical side, they use a mixture of AI and machine learning algorithms to make the bots understand the conversation, process the text and extract information, and respond to the user while preserving the context of the conversation.
NLU, or Natural Language Understanding, is used to understand what’s being said, or the meaning of the captured, unstructured data.
NLP, or Natural Language Processing, turns the user text into structured data.
And NLG, or Natural Language Generation turns the structured data into text that a human can understand.
What is Artificial intelligence and machine learning?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is an area of computer science which is sometimes described as machine intelligence. It allows chatbots to perform tasks that usually require human intelligence, like decision making, language translation, or speech recognition.
Machine learning (ML) is the ability for systems, like chatbots, to learn from the past experiences by identifying the patterns in human language. It is a branch of AI.
Thanks to machine learning, properly programmed AI chatbots can be improved over time with minimal human supervision.
It is usually a little box installed on the corner of your website.
Visitors on the website can get instant and fast support through a chat widget which makes it easier to connect with your business.
Anything that a user says or asks a chatbot is utterance. For example, a user asking a query like, “What’s the weather like in California?” is utterance.
Intent is what a user is trying to ask a chatbot. For instance in the example given above the user wants to know the temperature of California at the moment they ask.
Entities are the keywords in a user's utterance that makes the intent of the user more clear or basically adds value to the intent. In the above example entities are “weather” and “California.”
Attributes are described as packages that include information (e.g., name, email, phone number) a chatbot collects while chatting with a user. Attributes help a chatbot to personalize its responses.
Bot: Please enter your Name.
User: Hi, I am Maggie.
Bot: Welcome Maggie, How can I help you?
API stands for Application Programming Interface. It’s a toolset that lets two apps communicate with each other’s services and allows developers to integrate new apps into existing software.
Webhooks, also known as Web Callbacks, are automated API responses. They allow you to connect your chatbot to web services and pass and retrieve data through them. Hence, providing capabilities to have an efficient communication between your chatbot and web services. Unlike typical APIs, webhooks provide channels with real time information.
Software integration is the process of two or more applications being connected. For example, with various integrations, you can connect your chatbot with apps like Facebook Messenger, Slack, WhatsApp, Teams etc. with no coding.
Greetings are the initial messages the bot sends to the user. As truly said, First impression matters hence the way of initial greeting matters as it provides opportunity to provide a strong first impression.
Fallbacks are the default messages that are sent to the user when the chatbot doesn’t know how to respond to the user's query.
Bot: Sorry, I did not get you, please try asking your question in another way.
Transfer is an action that redirects a user conversing with the chatbot to a live agent. It can be triggered when the user’s problem is beyond the scope of the chatbots. The agents take up the conversation from there.
For Example,
Bot: Sorry, I did not understand your query. Would you like to speak to an agent?
Type “Yes” or “No”
Quick responses are short instant messages that provide users with possible options. They help users make their decision faster and also improve the flow of the conversation.
The reply suggestions are displayed below the message. Selecting a quick reply is optional, and the user can still type another answer.
It’s a feature that allows you to make a replica of an existing chatbot. It is helpful when you need to build a more complex chatbot flow but you don’t want to start it from scratch.
Training the bot is one of the most crucial aspects of building an intelligent chatbot. The way your chatbot responds to your customers depends on how you train it.
Here are some factors to consider when building your chatbot.
It’s time to transform the way you operate your business
AI powered Chatbots are drastically changing the way the businesses operate nowadays. They drive efficiency, improve productivity, and lead to happier customers.
Register with Engati to learn more about our conversational automation solutions.
