A complete guide to AI chatbots

What are AI chatbots?

An artificial intelligence chatbot is a computer program that can simulate human interactions using natural language processing (NLP) to understand speech and generate humanistic replies.

An AI chatbot functions as a first-response tool that greets, engages with, and serves customers in a familiar way. This technology can provide immediate, personalized responses around the clock, surfacehelp centerarticles, or collect customer information with in-chat forms.

AI chatbots can escalate conversations to a live agent when necessary by intelligentlyrouting requeststo the right representative for the job. Even better? When the time comes, your agents won’t miss a beat because AI chatbots can log important customer information in a centralized database, so your entire organization can access contextual details.

AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Bard use natural language processing to power a large language model (LLM). LLMs can be used for generating everything from images to music based upon a word input. ChatGPT is a form of generative AI – meaning it can take in a large amount of data and create new data that it thinks you will want.

How do chatbots use AI?

Chatbots use two main types of AI: natural language processing and machine learning.

• Natural language processingenables bots to interpret customer requests, including slang, typos, and abbreviations.
• Machine learningallows bots to improve over time as they gain more experience, much like humans.

To illustrate this, let’s look at the Zendesk AI bot to see how it uses a deep learning model and its existing knowledge base to provide better customer support. After training our bot with NLP and machine learning, it can:

• Understand the context of asupport ticket
• Associate questions with answers
• Choose the right help center articles to assist a customer
• Learn from each interaction to deliver more relevant and customized service
• Arm agents with additional context

AI chatbots are most successful when they can learn from thousands of service interactions (like those already saved in enterprise CRMs), machine learning algorithms, and scripts.

Popular AI chatbots at a glance

22 best chatbot software and apps

Now, let’s take a closer look at some of the top AI chatbots on the market.

1.亚博

An AI chatbot’s ability to understand and respond to user needs is a key factor when assessing its intelligence, andZendesk botsdeliver on all fronts. They help businesses provide better AI-powered conversational commerce and support.

If you already have ahelp centerand want to automate customer support, Zendesk bots can seamlessly pull relevant information directly from your existing亚博官方appand answer customer questions. The technology is a powerful extension of your team and a support system for your customers.

For companies that want more control, our click-to-configure bot builder provides a user-friendly visual interface, empowering your team to design rich, interactive, and customized conversation flows with absolutely no coding required. This is a great option for companies that need to create an AI chatbot without expending valuable resources.

亚博Zendesk先进机器人也来pre-trained和erstand the top customer issues specific to your industry. Bots can automatically classify requests by intent for more accurate answers and share customer intent information with agents for added context.

Zendesk and OpenAI integration

Zendesk’s unique approach to Al revolutionizes customer experience solutions by delivering intelligent responses to customer inquiries because of its ease of use and deep expertise in customer service. Combining the industry-leading capabilities of the Zendesk Suite with the power of OpenAl helps businesses deliver a more intelligent customer experience while saving time and money.

The Zendesk Suite already includes many Al-powered CX features right out-of-the-box, such as conversational messaging, bots, agent productivity tools, knowledge management, advanced analytics, and self-service tools.

Zendesk is leveraging OpenAl for even more including:

• Content Summarization:Instantly summarizes long tickets to save agents time by decreasing time-to-ticket resolution.



• 亚博官方app创建知识库和宏:Builds on Zendesk’s proprietary system that evaluates missing support articles and creates articles instantly and boosts productivity by allowing admins to create new macros.



• Expanding agent replies:Allows agents to create a robust ticket response with one click based on just a few words typed.

*Available in Early Access

Features:

• Intent recognition
• No-code bot builder
• Omnichannel deployment
• Integrations with third-party systems for API calls
• Intelligent routing
• Intelligence in the context panel
• Customer data collection
• Intent recognition
• Automated ticket prioritization
• 24/7 automatic replies
• Contextual responses
• Seamless agent handoffs
• Multilingual
• Built for CX

Pricing:

• Suite Team:$55 per agent/month
• Suite Growth:$89 per agent/month
• Suite Professional:$115 per agent/month
• Suite Enterprise:$169 per agent/month

Plans billed annually

Free trial:14 days

2.ChatGPT

Image source

ChatGPT went viral in 2022, blowing users away with its conversational capabilities and capacity to understand the context of messages. But it’s important to note that ChatGPT is far from an out-of-the-box solution if you’re hoping to use it for sales or customer support.

While the technology does boast impressive writing and parsing capabilities, you will need a programmer to customize themodel available on its APIand develop customer service functionalities that support your business’s unique needs.

然而,自定义编码你的机器人并增加相对应的人rtunities for innovation. For example, Instacart is using the software to answer customer questions with shoppable answers, and Shopify is using it to offer buyers an AI-driven shopping assistant that provides personalized recommendations.

Just remember that ChatGPT can’t pull information from the web or surface knowledge base articles. Plus, it is taught entirely by human trainers, which means it can occasionally generate incorrect answers.

Features:

• 强化Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)
• Conversational AI
• Conversation data preservation
• Contextual understanding
• Continuous learning
• Multilingual
• 24/7 service and support
• Content creation
• Code writing
• Complex problem-solving

Pricing:

• ChatGPT:Free
• ChatGPT Plus:$20/month

ChatGPT is free during the research preview, but this may not be permanent. While OpenAI works to perfect its software, there’s a free version in exchange for response feedback to help the AI learn and continuously provide better answers.

Free plan:Available

3.Bing Chat

Image source

Microsoft Bing recently rolled out its new AI chatbot in partnership with OpenAI. While you may want to test out this emerging technology, you’ll have to join the waitlist before you can.

一般来说,必应(Bing)聊天是一个很好的资源or those seeking fairly well-known information and assistance with strategy or content planning. Althoughsome sayit’s less conversationally creative than its competitors, it has the potential to become a useful resource for customer service teams in the future due to its ability to access current information from multiple sources on the internet, including a business’s website or help center.

However, the technology has also experienced its fair share of mishaps. For example, soon after its launch, the bot, which incorrectlyidentified itself as Sydney,started generatinginaccurate information,such as trying to convince a user that it was 2022 in February of 2023.

For that reason, it may be best to hold off on using this technology for customer service purposes until the bugs have been worked out.

Features:

• Complex research capabilities
• Conversational replies
• Image generation

Pricing:

• Free

4.Google Bard

Image source

Google has released its new LaMDA-powered chatbot, Bard, to a limited audience in Britain and the U.S.

Currently, people can use Bard for a number of casual use cases, including writing outlines and blog posts or generating new ideas. Google is calling it a “launchpad for curiosity.” So far, the new technology seems to perform very well withmath and logic-based questions.

Business use cases will likely progress in future iterations, but at this time, the technology needs more work before it’s fully customer-ready. To its credit, Bard strives to avoid distributing false information. However, it doesn’t give users the same answer every time,shows some biases, and is still in the experimental phase.

Like any brand-new chatbot, it’s still learning and has some flaws—but Google will be the first to tell you that.Googlestates that the tech can provide inaccurate information, and you shouldn’t use it for legal, financial, or medical advice. In time, and with more consistency, this emerging technology may become a solid tool for businesses.

Features:

• Information distillation
• Brainstorm plans and solutions
• Create drafts for various content types
• Summarization
• Co-editing

Pricing:

• Free

5.Einstein GPT by Salesforce

Image source

Einstein GPT fuses Salesforce’s proprietary AI with OpenAI’s tech to bring users a new chatbot. It is the latest iteration of Salesforce’s previous chatbot, Einstein.

While Einstein GPT is a sales cloud tool, it can also be an asset to support teams. From helping representatives fine-tune their emails to generating replies to simple FAQs, this bot has several use cases.

Customer service teams can use the tool to collect, streamline, and unify all customer data. It can also deliver content and support across various teams, including sales, IT, and marketing.

Features:

• Article recommendations
• Reply suggestions
• Case classification and routing
• Service analytics
• Prediction builder

Pricing:

• Starter: $25 per user/month
• Professional: $75 per user/month
• Enterprise: $150 per user/month
• Unlimited: $300 per user/month

Free trial:30 days

6.Ada

Image source

艾达是一个自动聊天机器人由人工智能和NLP。It deflects repetitive tickets with a self-serve solution that lets customers change their information, upgrade their accounts, schedule appointments, and make payments.

Ada’s automation platform acts on a customer’s information, intent, and interests with tailored answers, proactive discounts, and relevant recommendations in over 100 languages.

Features:

• Rich messaging
• Mobile chat
• AI training insights and suggestions
• Ticket creation and handoff
• Bot KPIs
• A/B testing

Pricing:

• Core: Contact for a quote
• Advanced: Contact for a quote
• Pro: Contact for a quote

Free trial:Available

Learn more about Ada for Zendesk.

7.Netomi

Image source

The Netomi Virtual Agent empowers you to resolve customer service tickets within seconds. It easily integrates with existing back-end systems for a simple self-service resolution that can increase customer satisfaction.

For instance, the platform can access customer and order information within your CRM system to determine and communicate the status of an order to your customer.

Netomi boasts top-tier NLP and includes customer service and email-based chatbots. Leverage Netomi to automate specific workflows, guide agents in their responses, and fully resolve tickets within the tools your team already knows and loves.

Features:

• Conversational AI
• Rich messaging
• Proactive messaging
• Integrated knowledge search

Pricing:

• Contact for a quote

Free trial:Available

Learn more about Netomi for Zendesk.

8.Certainly

Image source

Certainly is a bot-building platform made especially to help ecommerce teams automate and personalize customer service conversations. The AI assistant can recommend products, upsell, guide users through checkout, and resolve customer queries related to complaints, product returns, refunds, and order tracking. It also gathers zero-party data from conversations with visitors, which you can use to hyper-customize shopping experiences and increase customer lifetime value.

Certainly helps businesses of all sizes open, update, and close tickets with pre-made functionalities. Plus, it has multiple APIs and webhook options for reporting, data sharing, and more.

You can quickly deploy Certainly with pre-built integrations and templates so your team and execs can see its value as soon as possible.

Features:

• Premade and build-your-own customizations
• Omnichannel support
• Conversational web SDK

Pricing:

• Starter:Contact for a quote
• Pro:Contact for a quote
• Premium:Contact for a quote

Free trial:14 days

Learn more about Certainly for Zendesk.

9.DeepConverse

Image source

DeepConversehelps businesses deploy chatbots that can deflect tickets through multi-step resolution flows and provide precise answers based on user intent.

DeepConversechatbots can acquire new skills with sample end-user utterances, and you can train them on new skills in less than 10 minutes. Its intuitive drag-and-drop conversation builder helps define how the chatbot should respond so users can leverage the customer-service-enhancing benefits of AI.

Using DeepConverse and itsconvenient support integrations,您可以创建聊天机器人的能力giving simple answers and executing multi-step conversations. Bots can hand customers over to human agents seamlessly when issues need further assistance.

Features:

• Automated follow-ups for multi-step conversations
• Train AI in under 10 minutes to answer recurring questions
• No-code platform
• Ticket deflection
• Complex interactive support

Pricing:

• Basic:Get in touch for pricing
• Professional:Get in touch for pricing
• Enterprise:Get in touch for pricing

Free trial:14 days

Learn more about DeepConverse for Zendesk.

10.Laiye

Image source

Laiye, formerly known as Mindsay, enables companies to provide one-to-one customer care at scale through conversational AI. The company makes chatbot-enabled conversations simple and efficient for non-technical users thanks to its low- and no-code platform.

Laiye’s AI chatbots include robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent document processing (IDP) capabilities. They seamlessly utilize support integrations to allow human agents to easily enter and exit conversations via live chat and create tickets.

With the bots automatically handling the most common customer questions, agents can focus on solving the complex issues that require a human touch.

Features:

• Flow builder
• API integration
• User feedback

Pricing:

• Contact sales for pricing

Free trial:30 days

Learn more about Laiye for Zendesk.

11.Dixa

Image source

Solvemate is Dixa’s chatbot designed for customer service, operations, and IT teams in retail, financial services, SaaS, travel, and telecommunications.

The Solvemate Contextual Conversation Engine™️ uses a combination of NLP and dynamic decision trees (DDT) to enable conversational AI and understand your customers.

Users can either type or click buttons with pre-built selections because Solvemate uses a dynamic system that combines decision-tree logic and natural language input.

Solvemate is context-aware by channel and individual users, so it can handle highly personalized requests. You can also offer a multilingual service experience by creating bots of any language. If necessary, a human agent is always just a click away, and the handovers are seamless.

Using Solvemate’s automation builder, you can streamline customer service processes such as routing tickets, answering common questions, or accomplishing other routine tasks.

Features:

• Conversation history
• Intelligent routing
• Advanced search
• Activity log
• Integrations

Pricing:

• Essential:$39 per agent/month
• Growth:$89 per agent/month
• Ultimate:$139 per agent/month
• Custom:Get in touch

Free trial:14 days

Learn more about Solvemate for Zendesk.

12.Zowie

Image source

Zowie is a self-learning AI that uses data to learn how to respond to your customers’ questions, meaning it leverages machine learning to improve its responses over time.
This solution is especially popular among ecommerce companies offering a range of products, including cosmetics, apparel, consumer goods, clothing, and more.

Zowie’s automation tools learn to address customer issues based on AI-powered learning, not keywords. Zowie pulls information from several data points like historical conversations, knowledge bases, FAQ pages, and ongoing conversations. The better your knowledge base and the more extensive your customer service history, the better your Zowie implementation will be right out of the box.

Features:

• Ready-to-use integrations
• Automation data reporting
• Intelligent ticket distribution
• A/B testing and service analytics
• AI-powered learning

Pricing:

• Contact for a quote

Free trial:Not available

Learn more about Zowie for Zendesk.

13.Ultimate

Image source

Using NLP, Ultimate’s virtual agent enables global brands to automate customer conversations and repetitive processes, providing great support experiences around the clock via chat, email, and social. Built for your omnichannel CRM, Ultimate deploys in-platform, ensuring a unified customer experience.

It’s also well-adopted among companies in industries like Healthtech, telecom, travel, financial services, and ecommerce.

When you start with Ultimate, the software builds an AI model unique to your business using historical data from your existing software. This helps you determine what processes to automate and helps the AI learn how to speak in your brand tone and voice.

Features:

• Language detection
• Advanced conversation flows
• Integrations
• Omnichannel support
• Multilingual reporting

Pricing:

• Contact sales

Free trial:Not available

Learn more about Ultimate for Zendesk.

14.Meya

Image source

Meya bills itself as an automation platform consisting of three components: the Grid, the Orb, and the Console.

网格是Meya的后端,在那里你可以代码有限公司nversational workflows in several languages. The Orb is essentially the pre-built chatbot that lets you customize and configure it to your needs and embed it on your app, platform, or website. And the Console is where your team can design, create, and execute your customers’ conversational experiences.

Meya enables businesses to build and host complex bots that connect to their back-end services. Meya provides a fully functional web IDE that makes bot-building easy. The cloud code and managed database come with every bot and allow you to customize your bot and delight customers.

You can also use integrations to improve team efficiency. Your bot will listen to all incoming messages connected to your CRM and respond when it knows the answer. You can set the bot to pause when a customer gets assigned to an agent, and unpause when unassigned.

Features:

• Visual flow editor
• Chat UI customization
• CRM and process integrations
• Advanced analytics

Pricing:

• Dev:$99 per month
• Pro:$999 per month
• Partner:$3,000 per month

Free trial:14 days

15.Thankful

Image source

Thankful is an AI-driven customer service solution for ecommerce businesses. Through routing, agent assistance, and translation, the software can fully resolve high volumes of customer queries across channels, giving customers the freedom to choose how they want to engage.

Thankful’s AI delivers personalized and brand-aligned service at scale with the ability to understand, respond to, and resolve over 50 common customer requests. Thankful can also automatically tag numerous tickets to help facilitate large-scale automation.

Features:

• Natural language processing
• Works within your help desk
• Collects incoming support tickets and takes action
• Personalized responses

Pricing:

• Contact for a quote

Free trial:Not available

Learn more about Thankful for Zendesk.

16.Haptik

Image source

Haptik uses intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) to create a transformative customer experience. The platform is designed specifically for CX professionals in the ecommerce, finance, insurance, and telecommunications industries. In addition to streamlining customer service, Haptik helps service teams monitor conversations in real time and extract actionable insights to reduce costs, drive revenue growth, and improve automated processes.

Haptik IVA serves as the first line of support for brands, deflecting inbound support tickets and allowing agents to focus on complex, high-value customer issues—elevating the user experience and boosting CSAT and NPS at every stage of the customer journey.

Features:

• Omnichannel messaging
• Buyer-focused commerce assistant
• Behavioral data and reporting
• Pre-built smart workflows
• Chat transcript

Pricing:

• Contact for a quote

Free trial:Not available

Learn more about Haptik for Zendesk.

17.Forethought

Image source

Forethought—powered by SupportGPT™—is a leading generative AI company providing customer service automation that allows support teams to maximize efficiency and ROI and chatbot is a core part of the suite.

Forethought’s product suite enables seamless customer experiences by infusing generative AI, built on Large Language Models (LLMs), at each stage of the customer support journey: resolving common issues instantly with a bot, predicting and prioritizing cases, assisting agents with relevant knowledge and response writing, and providing actionable insights—all from one platform.

Features:

• AI-powered and insights-driven bot builder
• Automated omnichannel support
• Powered by Natural Language Understanding, not keywords
• Customized chatbot responses based on historical ticket data and intent detection
• Ability to build intricate workflows automatically
• Intelligent ticket deflection and triage
• Multi-lingual support

Pricing:

• Contact for quote

Free trial:Not available

Learn more about Forethought for Zendesk.

18.Fin

Image source

Fin is Intercom’s latest AI chatbot, and users can now join the waitlist. The program was built using ChatGPT with customer service teams in mind.

Fin can understand complex questions, follow up with clarifying questions, and break down hard-to-understand topics. It also pulls information exclusively from your business’s existing knowledge base to help prevent the “hallucinations”—made-up information that AI generates when it doesn’t have the correct answer readily available—that other popular bots experience.

This chatbot can also help customer support agents provide better service by collecting crucial information and routing more complex questions to a trained staff member.

Features:

• Easy installation
• Conversational AI
• References existing knowledge base

Pricing:

• Starter:$74 per month
• Pro:Contact for a quote
• Premium:Contact for a quote

Free trial:14 days

Learn more about Intercom for Zendesk.

19.ProProfs

Image source

ProProfs improves customer service and sales by creating human-like conversations that help companies connect with customers. The software makes it easy to build a custom bot from the ground up with drag-and drop-features, so you don’t need to hire a programmer to launch.

ProProfs prioritizes ease of use over advanced functionality, so while it’s simple to create chatbots with no code, more advanced features and sophisticated workflows may be out of reach.

The AI chatbots can provide automated answers and agent handoffs, collect lead information, and book meetings without human intervention.

Features:

• Mobile access
• Pre-made responses
• White-label capabilities
• Advanced reports and analytics

Pricing:

• Team package:$19.99 per operator/month

Free trial:15 days

Free Plan:Available for 1 operator

Learn more about ProProfs for Zendesk.

20.HubSpot

Image source

HubSpot is known for the CRM, customer service, and marketing tools it provides for teams of all sizes across many industries, but it is less well-known for its chatbot. However, for basic needs—especially for existing HubSpot users—HubSpot’s chatbot is a great way to get started.

Among other things, HubSpot’s chatbot enables your sales teams to qualify leads and book meetings, your service team to facilitate self-service, and your marketing teams to scale one-to-one conversations. Plus, it comes with goals-based templated conversation flows and canned responses. And the visual editor is easy to use for non-technical users.

It’s worth noting that the more advanced features of HubSpot’s chatbot are only available in the Professional and Enterprise plans. In the free and Starter plans, the chatbot can only create tickets, qualify leads, and book meetings without custom branching logic. Professional and Enterprise plans add custom branching logic and advanced targeting. Still, even with all the features, HubSpot’s chatbot is limited when compared to the advanced functionality you’ll find in many other AI chatbots.

Features:

• Lead qualification
• Scheduling
• 增刊ort ticket generation
• No-code custom chatbots

Pricing:

• Starter:$18 per month (includes 2 users)
• Professional:$450 per month (includes 5 users)
• Enterprise:$1,200 per month (includes 10 users)

Free trial:14 days

Free plan:Available

Learn more about HubSpot for Zendesk.

21.Zoom Virtual Agent

Image source

Zoom Virtual Agent, formerly Solvvy, is an effortless next-gen chatbot and automation platform that powers good customer experiences. With advanced AI and NLP at its core, Zoom delivers intelligent self-service to resolve customer issues quickly, accurately, and at scale.

Unlike traditional chatbots, Zoom provides personalized, on-brand customer experiences across multiple channels. So wherever your customers encounter a Zoom-powered chatbot—whether on Facebook Messenger, your website, or anywhere else—the experience is consistent.

Zoom also provides great ROI with low maintenance costs, doesn’t require engineers, and learns and improves over time from interactions with your customers.

Features:

• Intelligent natural language processing
• 可操作的分析和报告
• Custom flows and messaging

Pricing:

• Contact sales

Free trial:Not available

Learn more about Zoom for Zendesk.

22.Boost.ai

Image source

Boost.ai has built the world’s most user-friendly conversational AI platform to let customer service teams automate support and has deployed more virtual agents than any other company.

Boost.ai has worked with over 200 companies, including more than 100 public organizations and numerous financial institutions such as banks, credit unions, and insurance firms in Europe and North America. On top of its virtual agent functionality for external customer service teams, Boost.ai also features support bots for internal teams like IT and HR.

The software makes it simple to build, launch and maintain a virtual agent. Drive down support costs and engage customers 24/7 with the user-friendly conversational AI platform that allows you to deliver quality customer experiences at scale and without limitations.

Features:

• No-code builder
• NLP and NLU
• Conversation analytics

Pricing:

• Contact for a quote

Free trial:Not available

Features of AI chatbot software

At the end of the day, AI chatbots are conversational tools built to make agents’ lives easier and ensure your customers receive the high-quality support they deserve and expect. As you search for AI chatbot software that serves your business’s purposes, consider purchasing bots with the following features.

1. Bot-builder tool

Build better botsto impress customers from the very start—no code needed (unless that’s your preference). While a no-code bot builder is a convenient tool, many solutions require the expertise of a developer, so it’s up to you to take stock of your needs and resources before settling on a bot. You can use AI chatbots to:

• Function as the first point of contact for inbound support tickets
• Deflect support tickets that don’t require specialized knowledge
• Streamline internal workflows
• Triage support requests
• Reply to customers quickly with pre-made responses
• Send automated article suggestions
• Discern customer intent

You can also train your AI to articulately answer common questions and analyze conversation metrics.

2. Omnichannel deployment

Deliver exceptional customer support and boost sales across channels by deploying an omnichannel chatbot.

When you deploy an AI chatbot across multiple communication channels—such as SMS, your website, and social media—it can open and escalate tickets and even route them to the appropriate agent if it can’t resolve an issue on its own.

The primary benefit of bots that support omnichannel deployment is that they know your customers and can help provide a consistent experience on all channels. Many chatbots can gather customer context by carrying out a conversation with them or accessing your business’s internal data to streamline service.

An omnichannel chatbot also creates a unified customer view, allowing for cross-functional collaboration among different departments within your organization. Your chatbot can collect information from customers and document it in a centralized location so all teams can access it and provide faster service.

3. Integrations with third-party systems

You can use an AI chatbot for live chat on your website or connect it with third-party systems so the bot can pull data into a conversation.

So when a customer starts a conversation with your bot, it can guide them to the most relevant answer based on their query. By using integrations, your bot can access information like:

• Order details and tracking
• Payment history
• User IDs
• 增刊ort ticket updates
• Locational data

Additionally, some generative AI capabilities can work together to build more intelligent customer experiences. OpenAI, the private research laboratory that developed ChatGPT, integrates with Zendesk, adding to the power of Zendesk’s proprietary foundational models with OpenAl’s capabilities.

4. Intelligent routing

When a customer submits a support request, AI chatbots can open a ticket, tag it to enhance routing rules, and forward it to the best agent for the job—this is calledomnichannel routing. Rather than just sending support requests to the first available agent, Zendesk bots can route tickets based on:

• Agent skills
• Activity status
• Capacity
• Conversation priority

Benefits of using chatbot software

The benefits of AI chatbotsgo beyondincreasing efficiency and cutting costs—those are table stakes. Bots are most powerful when humans can work with them to solve key business challenges.

1. Provide convenient 1:1 service, 24/7

Chatbot technology allows businesses to be constantly connected and to satisfy customers’ desire for instant support.

Customers today expect help as soon as they need it on channels that are convenient for them. When deploying an AI chatbot across your customers’ preferred channels, ensure your customers have access to streamlined support during implementation and whenever agents aren’t online.

2. Increase customer satisfaction

AI chatbots can help you serve customers where they are—and they’re on messaging channels. In fact, messaging apps have the highest customer satisfaction score of any support channel, with a CSAT of98 percent. Customers want to interact with brands on the same digital channels they’re already using in their personal lives.

Business messaging apps lend themselves to more convenient and rich conversational experiences—and they can be substantially cheaper than a voice interaction. They can also be more convenient for support teams, as web and mobile app messaging allows customer service agents to reply to customers remotely at any time. Some of these apps include:

• Facebook Messenger for business
• WhatsApp for Business
• Twitter for Business
• Apple Business Chat(which integrates with iMessage)
• Web and mobile app messaging

Generative AI tools, including the technology that powers ChatGPT, can also improve customer satisfaction by helping agents provide faster support. Agents can create a robust ticket response with one click based on just a few words typed with the OpenAI and Zendesk integration.

3. Scale while cutting costs

TheZendesk Customer Experience Trends Reportfound that many customer service leaders expect customer requests to grow, yet not all businesses are ready to add more team members to the payroll.

This gap represents a sweet spot where a chatbot can help.

Rather than hiring more talent, support managers can leverage bots to increase productivity. Chatbots can act as extra support reps, triaging simple questions and repetitive requests.

4. Increase your team’s impact and output

通过平凡的inquiri提高人员的工作效率es off their plates and freeing them up for complex questions. Chatbot software also lets you gather customer information upfront and immediately connect customers to the right agent for their issue.

The time that automation gives back to agents is invaluable. It was key for razor blade subscription serviceDollar Shave Club, which used Zendesk bots to manage subscription updates. Subscription-related tasks originally accounted for 20 percent of Dollar Shave Club’s support requests, and with AI, the company was able to save time and provide a better customer experience.

“We wanted to deflect these kinds of tickets and have more meaningful, consultative conversations with our members, and [Zendesk bots have] been the answer,” says Trent Hoerman, Senior Program Manager at Dollar Shave Club.

5. Unlock more opportunities for conversion

Online chatbots can boost conversions with smarter self-service. A chatbot can enable customers to use a help center and find knowledge base articles tailored to their needs.

A bot can also:

• Provide customers with information about new products and company initiatives.
• Automate cross-sell and upsell activities.
• Assist customers with simple problems and questions.
• Send customers proactive messages to maintain loyalty and drive revenue.
• Share coupons and special discount codes with customers based on their preferences and shopping history.

What are some use cases for chatbots?

It’s true that AI applications like ChatGPT and Google Bard promise to change the way we work, but for as many jobs whose functions can be automated, real humans will still play an integral part – especially in customer service roles, where real expertise and empathy cannot be replaced by AI.

Here are some simple yet effective use cases for chatbots.

Chatbots can answer FAQs

A bot is especially useful for automating basic, repetitive questions—the kinds of questions your team has grown to expect and can resolve in one touch.

Customers prefer to use chatbots for simple issues, giving agents their time back to focus on high-stakes tasks and offering more meaningful support.

Because bots aren’t meant to handle every issue, they work alongside your agents—routing customers and providing context—to arm them with all the information they need to jump in and resolve issues faster.

Chatbots can bolster self-service

Most customers check online resources first if they run into trouble and want to solve their own problems. AI chatbots can highlight yourself-service optionsby recommending help center pages to customers in the chat interface.

Rather than sifting through a huge catalog of support articles, customers can ask chatbots a question, and the AI will scan your knowledge base for keywords related to their query. Once the chatbot finds the most relevant resource, it will direct your customer to it.

Over time, as your chatbot has more interactions and receives more feedback, it becomes better at serving your customers. As a result, your live agents have more time to deal with complex customer queries, even during peak times.

Upwork市场流行的自由职业者,可以证明this. Brent Pliskow, the VP of customer support at Upwork, says: “Integrating Forethought with Zendesk has resolved 58 percent of our chat interactions, leaving only 42 percent to be handled by our support team.”

Chatbots can help provide global support

You can also integrate bots into global support efforts and ease the need for international hiring and training. They’re a cost-effective way to deliver instant support in every time zone.

AI chatbots can provide customers with answers in every language, too. A chatbot can ask your customers what language they prefer at the start of a conversation or determine what language a customer speaks by their input phrases.

This is especially beneficial for global brands likeFútbol Emotion, a specialty sporting goods retailer operating out of Spain and Portugal. Using Zendesk Suite and Sunshine Conversations, the company provides outstanding conversational support at scale. Fútbol Emotion also introduced a multilingual experience to serve a larger audience, which was essential as it expanded to serve Africa, Greater Europe, and the Middle East.

“The combination of synchronous and asynchronous channels in Zendesk allowed us to reduce the agent learning curve because we divided the complexity of work by channels and languages,” explains Daniel Hsu, the ecommerce manager at Fútbol Emotion.

Chatbots can help with ticket spikes and fluctuations

Since chatbots never sleep, they can support your customers when your agents are off the clock—over the weekend, late at night, or on the holidays. And as customers’ ecommerce habits fluctuate heavily due to seasonal trends, chatbots can mitigate the need for companies to bring on seasonal workers to deal with high ticket volumes.

For instance, a chatbot can help customers on Black Friday or other high-traffic holidays. It could also take some pressure off your support team after product updates or launches and during events.

ConsiderSpartan Race, an extreme wellness platform that deployed a Zendesk chatbot to help its small team of agents tackle spikes in customer requests during races. Spartan Race has seen a 9.5 percent decrease in chat volume, extending its team’s live chat availability by three hours every day.

Chatbots for sales

Beyond customer service use cases, you can use chatbots for prospecting.

A chatbot can help with lead generation by capturing leads across multiple channels. It can also pass a prospective customer to the next step in the sales process, whether via a human sales agent or an email and phone number capture.

For example, a bot can welcome website visitors and ask them if they want to contact sales. Prospects can leave their contact information and a note about their needs, and the bot can pass on the details to the right team.

A chatbot can ask qualifying questions such as:

• How large is your company?
• What is your job title?
• What features do you need?
• What problem are you experiencing?

You can integrate a bot into your sales CRM the same way you integrate it into your customer service software. This ensures seamless handoffs between bots and sales representatives, equipping sales teams with context and conversation history.

Chatbots for marketing

Similar to sales chatbots, chatbots for marketing can scale your customer acquisition efforts by collecting key information and insights from potential customers. They can also be strategically placed on website pages to increase conversion rates.

Marketing teams can use chatbots as a tool for customer engagement, too. The mattress brandCasper, for instance, created a chatbot for people who have trouble sleeping and want a late-night friend to talk to. The bot’s single purpose is to bring people closer to the Casper brand. And since AI-powered chatbots can learn your brand voice, they can converse with customers in a way that feels familiar.

Chatbots for abandoned carts

Shopping cart abandonment happens when online shoppers add items to their carts but leave before buying. The worldwideshopping cart abandonment rateis nearly 70 percent, and this number has only been increasing over the years. Customers abandon their carts due to unexpected shipping costs, a complicated checkout process, or a lack of trust.

Chatbots can be a great way to answer any questions a customer might have to give them the confidence to purchase or upgrade their account. Even if a customer isn’t ready to connect, providing a quick and convenient option to get in touch builds trust.

一个废弃的车聊天机器人还可以提供客户a discount to provide an incentive to purchase. The chatbot just needs access to customer context that tells it when a customer has an item in their cart, so it knows when to offer that discount.

AI takes the abandoned cart workflow further with intelligent, personalized recommendations. So instead of simply trying to save a sale, an AI chatbot can also help increase the total value of a customer’s cart.

Chatbots for internal support

Businesses can even use chatbots to support employees. A chatbot is a handy addition to any internal support strategy, especially when paired with self-service.

Many IT teams use a knowledge base to mitigate repetitive questions and empower employees to self-serve. A chatbot can help scale your internal self-service efforts by directing employees to help center articles, which can be particularly helpful during employee onboarding or company-wide changes.

IT or other internal teams might also use a bot to answer FAQs over convenient channels such as Slack or email. Similar to chatbots for external support, internal support chatbots ensure employees get fast help around the clock, making them useful for global companies and remote teams with employees in different time zones.

What are some AI chatbot trends?

If your organization hasn’t started using AI bots to assist your customer service team and streamline support, start considering it. Since the emergence of ChatGPT, chatbot technology has continued to progress, and customers increasingly expect quick and convenient resolutions. It’s safe to say that AI is here to stay.

Not sold yet? Here are some AI stats, trends, and predictions that may change your mind.

• The strides ChatGPT made in 2022 with creating humanistic text ushered in other major AI advancements like Microsoft’s Bing AI, which utilizes the powerful tech. (CNBC)
• Google is testing “Apprentice Bard”—a new AI chatbot that went into development in response to the sweeping success of ChatGPT last year. (CNBC)
• 65% of business leaders believe bots are becoming more human-like. (亚博)
• 67% of customers believe that bots provide mostly correct information. (亚博)
• An AI bot can carry out and close a customer conversation in six messages or less. (Tido)
• The chatbot market is expected to be worth $5.9 billion by 2032. (Precedence research)
• 77% of customers report that AI bots are useful for resolving simple problems. (亚博)
• 62% of customers would rather use a service bot for faster support than wait for a customer service representative. (Tidio)

Which AI chatbot is right for you?

The right chatbot software for your business depends on a few different factors. Primarily, your current support needs and available resources.

If you need a bot that works for your business and the customers you serve, ensure your customer service solution offers user-friendly customization capabilities, whether they’re built-in, third-party integrations, or custom-coded.

Try answering the following questions to find a chatbot solution that makes sense for your support team’s operational needs.

What problem are you looking to solve—and what resources do you need to solve it?

Before using a bot, identify pain points within your organization and take stock of the resources you already have to solve them. Here are some things to pay attention to:

• The number of support requests you receive daily
• Recurring questions and repetitive tasks
• Employee efficiency and downtime
• Current bot capabilities
• Wait times for agents with special skills
• Reasons behind long wait times

From there, you can determine what resource gaps you’re dealing with and select a chatbot with the functionalities to fill them.

Is your chatbot flexible enough to work across different channels?

Customers expect to receive support over their preferred channels—whether they’re interacting with a human or a bot. They also expect options.

As such, it’s important for your chatbot to work across a range of channels, making omnichannel deployment for AI chatbots a must-have.

Ideally, your bot should be able to communicate on all the digital channels your customers use, including:

• Websites
• Mobile apps
• SMS
• Slack
• WhatsApp
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter

What level of context will your chatbot need?

If your support center is relatively small or doesn’t handle high volumes of support requests, your bot won’t need as much data to provide solutions.

However, contact centers and robust customer service departments should select chatbots with machine learning that can learn and improve over time. Keep in mind that you will need to continue training your chatbot to make sure its outputs are accurate.

“While AI technologies grow ever ‘smarter’ at understanding customer inputs, what you tell your bot to output is just like any other content your business manages—it must be monitored, kept up to date, and audited frequently for performance and relevance,” says Madison Hoffman, director of self-service and automation at Zendesk.

A key component of any artificial intelligence solution is data—the more data you have, the faster your AI chatbot can learn and improve. In short,more context leads to better chatbotsand more personalized conversations.

How will you manage conversations between chatbots and agents?

If you’re already thinking about ways to improve the flow of contextual
information between sales and support representatives, an AI bot can be the perfect way to ensure accurate customer data collection and logging.

Businesses need tools to deploy chatbot conversations on the front end and manage them on the back end. This helps agents understand the intent behind every conversation and streamlines handoffs between agents and chatbots.

Do you already have resources that your AI bot can recommend to customers or use to learn?

If you have a亚博官方app, a good place to start is with a bot that suggests articles from your existing help center content and captures basic customer context for the fastest time to value.

If you want a little more control, look for a bot builder with a visual interface. This allows you to design customized bot conversations without writing any code.

A bot is nothing without its knowledge base. If you were to try implementing a bot into your workflow without it, you would risk giving users incorrect information.

Meanwhile, systems that can’t pull information from the internet wouldn’t have any data to pull from to make decisions or have conversations.

Frequently asked questions about chatbots