But while chatbots are helping to streamline business processes, sometimes companies can misunderstand their functionality, leading to poor performance and frustration among customers. This is why it’s crucial to optimize your chatbots and implement them the right way. In this article, we’ll discuss how businesses can create a better bot experience for their customers and eliminate common chatbot user mistakes. 

Train your chatbot

Suppose you want to make chatbots part of your customer service team. In that case, you have to train and optimize your chatbot’s functionality to understand customer queries and preferences. 

Open-source data such as Twitter Support can lay the foundation for chatbot optimization and development. It can increase your chatbot’s knowledge base by teaching it some of the common questions that customers may ask. However, open-source data can be pretty generic and may not reflect your particular brand and associated queries. 

What’s more, machine learning models may fail to recognize similarly-phrased questions even within the same conversation. That can be detrimental if you’re trying to establish a consistent brand personality. 

This is why it is essential to collect your company’s conversational data as well. A personalized, unique data-set can give your chatbot more information about your business. Chatbots can then translate these data sets into specific customer requests with exact answers for each query. 

Personify your chatbot 

GIving your bot a personality is an excellent way of communicating your brand’s personality beyond just logos, symbols, and design. It can also make customers more likely to engage with your chatbot and prevent it from falling into error loops. 

For a unique chatbot personality, first, segment your customers into different categories. This will help you give a unique language and conversational script to each chatbot you assign to each customer category. For example, a chatbot for customers ages 20 and below can be equipped to use emojis in their answer scripts. 

Understanding your audience’s hobbies, interests and ages will help you more fluently converse with particular audiences. Research shows that 87% of millennials believe the success of an organization depends on more than just its financial performance. This translates to customer experience and how well a brand communicates with its customer. 

If all your chatbot does is collect information and copy from various databases, it will be difficult to create a consistent persona that can engage and delight. When you gather customer insights, use them to help train your bots to behave in a way that targets customer needs and shows the value of your brand. Similarly, if you have a creative brand, consider using emojis and have a personalized, colorful interface for your chatbot. 

Write engaging dialogues

There are many strategies for writing engaging content for your website, and bots are no different. There’s a significant difference between a chatbot simply answering questions and keeping customers engaged with answers. Engaging a customer means the chatbot provides valuable information with every answer script but also keeps the customer curious about other products or services. 

Many businesses make the mistake of writing a clever script way too early. Remember to first understand what your customers are looking for and what they hope to achieve from the conversation. Only then can you develop answers according to each customer journey and scenario. 

You can also use A/B testing to find out which dialogue resonates best with your customers and whether bots are improving conversion rates. If two different kinds of answer scripts are displayed to customers over time, the answer script with the highest conversions will emerge as the more suitable one to use permanently. 

Enable the self-service option 

Often when customers stumble upon a website, they don’t know that they have the option of conversing with a chatbot. So make sure you make it immediately clear on your landing page that customers have a self-service option available.

It is important to give the customer a choice between opting for self-service or talking to a customer representative. Being offered a choice makes them feel valued and in control of their choices. A bot can also be a lot more efficient for quick inquiries, and this will save your representatives time to focus on more in-depth interactions. 

Create a global appeal

If you have a global brand, you must support your customers worldwide. According to recent surveys, 80% of companies are already using chatbots or planning to do so, so it’s essential to optimize their chatbot behavior to interact with different customer demographics. 

You should equip your chatbot with translation capabilities, along with the ability to learn complex words and phrases in different languages. The problem arises when chatbot supporting technologies require a new language rebuild or complex supporting platform that may lead to a fragmented, disparate solution system. 

Installing these chatbot solutions can be costly for an organization and might not be supported by customers’ devices. So ideally, training your chatbot in multiple languages may be more manageable and effective. 

Test and optimize

Once you have trained your chatbot, remember to conduct regular functional tests that provide information on conversation flows, user experience, the accuracy of answers, and speed of response. Ask for customer feedback, and make a conscious effort to improve the chatbot experience for customers.

Here are a few testing strategies you can use: 

Intelligence Testing: This is an assessment of how well your chatbot is equipped to understand things like customer’s emojis, idioms, and questions. It also means how well the chatbot can recall specific information or keywords used during a conversation.

Conversational Flow Testing: This is a typical UI/UX testing tactic that focuses on fundamental questions and testing scenarios and how well a chatbot can provide solutions. Chatbot technology can be a big help in improving UX on your site, but only if implemented effectively. 

Automated Testing: This happens between two chatbots, and it’s an interesting way to run and produce new transcripts consistently. However, it is still essential to evaluate your bots’ replies and find ways to make them more precise and natural.

Error Handling Test: This is a test for checking how well your chatbot can handle unexpected queries. Suppose the chatbot fails to produce the desired result. In that case, your developers and copywriters need to come up with emergency answer scripts for the chatbot to deal with unexpected scenarios. 

Conclusion

When used the right way, chatbots can improve the relationship between your brand and your customers. A fast and seamless customer experience lies at the core of every successful business, and a chatbot can provide exactly that. 

Chatbots offer 24/7 customer support that reduces an organization’s marketing and operational costs. They also free up time for employees to focus on other value-added tasks. By optimizing your chatbot with these techniques, you can serve your customers better. 

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A huge part of these “humanly” upgrades is because of advancements in AI technologies and natural language processing (NLP). With the small stuff out of the way, the focus has turned toward developing chatbots that understand multiple languages – helping companies expand globally. 

Providing immediate and non-robotic voice assistance to current and potential clients across the globe is an indispensable tool for businesses, breaking age-old language barriers. 

Digital trends in 2021 that are impacting businesses

The introduction of the world wide web was the start of a digital revolution. For the first time, businesses had a new playing ground to set up shop in a globally accessible realm. 

Now, in the 2020s, it seems like no company can exist without having a digital presence, with millions of consumers migrating to online shopping due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The way we use technology has also shifted with 63% of all online traffic in the US coming from smartphones. We work, play, and socialize using our mobile devices. The same study also found that 90% of this time spent on our mobile devices goes to using mobile-dedicated applications. 

Of course, this didn’t come without evolutions to human behaviors, especially with the widespread use of handheld devices and extended access to internet connections. Since consumers are surrounded by data and advertisements at an increasingly fast pace, businesses must adjust their strategy to one that captures their attention and leaves potential clients hungry for more. 

Attention span is decreasing and as a result, businesses only have 8 seconds to convince a potential client to sign up for or purchase their services, making it merely impossible to do business the traditional way. 

To help with this, more businesses are using apps and mobile software with various features that can integrate with chatbot services, allow them to stay connected with clients, and take care of other business formalities such as processing payments and sending invoices. Creating chatbots that are mobile-friendly and personalized can further increase the chances of engagement. 

Personalizing interaction with multi-national clientele 

When it comes to top marketing techniques, personalization is key to creating an engaging user experience. AI-powered chatbots are enhancing personalized user experience by providing seamless online interactions with consumers – from providing 24/7 customer support to allowing them to make seamless payment transactions. 

With 8 out of 10 businesses using AI-powered chatbots, it’s fast becoming an essential element of customer experience without the need for human intervention. There are other benefits to using AI-powered chatbots for your business such as being able to automate tasks, decrease labor costs, reduce human error, and keep track of data and analytics.

The birth of conversational AI technologies has taken NLP to a whole new level, especially when paired with machine learning models. This trailblazing trio forms a database with multilingual information collected, training algorithms to interact in a less robotic, more natural form. While it sounds super technical, several multilingual chatbot platforms allow organizations to build directly into their workflow without writing a single line of code. 

These AI technologies are helping online businesses scale to new heights in 2021 by allowing them to create chatbot personas that increase personalization and, in turn, conversions. Incorporating the ability of multilingual chatbots to understand languages allows consumers from all over the globe to interact without compromising the quality of conversation.

By recognizing the need for bots that interact and understand different languages, businesses of all sizes can enjoy a competitive edge in the market, honing in on one weak spot that others fail to recognize. 

Chatbots at risk: How companies can tighten security

It’s easy to get swept off one’s feet by everything chatbots can do. Companies can increase their online presence, bump up customer satisfaction, and decrease the need to hire extra help. However, there’s one concern, in particular, one should keep in mind. 

Companies dealing with any customer data and information of any kind are legally obligated to keep it secure. Chatbots face risks due to several factors – a few of the most prominent including unencrypted communications and lack of HTTP protocol. The risks of online attacks are on the rise and, along with it, the damages one could cause.

Collaborative analysis between IBM and Ponemon Institute found that the average cost of a data breach in 2020 was $3.86 million, an amount that few companies can bounce back from. 

With the expansion of the attack space and push for digital transformation, organizations are left in a bind. Threats are all over the digital landscape, and organizations need to take measures to protect their digital assets and data when implementing multilingual chatbots.

Advanced techniques like dynamic application security testing (DAST) offer organizations a way to amp up security without halting production. According to the security analysts at Cloud Defense, “DAST is a type of black-box application testing that can test applications while they are running. When testing an application with DAST, you don’t need to have access to the source code to find vulnerabilities.” 

DAST’s ability to work in runtime makes it a solid choice to defend against risks found in authentication and session management. When combined with current cybersecurity procedures, companies can decrease their risk of dealing with an attack and increase their MTTR.  

Bots: A fairly new technology with big business benefits

Numerous startups have invested in multilingual chatbots, seeing them as a necessity to get ahead of the crowd. Part of remaining competitive on a global scale is giving customers more of what they want. Lack of understanding due to differences in language can send the wrong message and turn potential customers away. 

Apart from gaining customers, businesses without a large following are concerned about customer retention and recognize the increasing importance of customer service. Without the need to transfer calls to foreign countries or keep customers on hold for lack of employees on the clock to answer, organizations can enjoy a higher customer satisfaction rate and keep customers instead of losing them.

AI-powered technologies are evolving company infrastructures, putting them in line with the modern-day customer. Though chatbots are a relatively new technology, they’re sure to trickle into industries across the board. Before long, we will all be talking with chatbots instead of humans when we need customer support and advice – leaving us questioning just how human bots can be.

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Chatbots require a programming language as well as artificial intelligence (AI) to function well in response to customer queries; nowhere is this more true than in the banking and finance industry, where a helpful chatbot can make it easier for users to process transactions and use funds productively.

This is due in large part to AI chatbots having the ability to provide 24/7 availability to customers who may need financial assistance at any time of the day. 24/7 availability and improved user experience are just a few things to pay attention to as AI chatbots scale with different businesses, and they are crucial features to have for any business in the banking and finance industry. 

Let’s take a look at the top three benefits that organizations operating in the banking and finance industry can enjoy from using AI chatbots, as well as what to expect from AI chatbots and their trends in the future: 

Live chat increases customer engagement and conversion

Banking and finance businesses need 24/7 user support to enhance their customer service landscape and ensure customer transactions can continue to process without error. 

It’s important that AI chatbots can support customer needs through automation, which is a must-have for financial and banking organizations that want to cultivate conversational relationships with their customers through the use of AI chatbots. Intelligent, conversation-like interactions with AI chatbots can help resolve user inquiries and concerns quickly and overall improve a business’s customer experience.

Some organizations may not be convinced that an investment in AI chatbots is worthwhile, especially if the goal is to achieve a smooth and conversational customer service experience with artificial intelligence. But as online marketing expert Dan Fries of Blue Tree points out, “Although determining whether it’s an automated chatbot or a real person on the other end isn’t always easy, it’s clear that live chat services overall are here to stay. There are good reasons for this. Live chat can increase customer engagement and visitor conversion, help your sales and customer service teams maintain flexibility, and offer valuable analytics information.”

24/7 customer service that works well through automation and AI is best used as an augmentation to real-time customer service, rather than a complete replacement. It’s difficult as of now to determine how AI-enabled inventions can avail themselves in the years to come, but it’s safe to surmise that they will best be used to augment, complement, and extend human capabilities rather than totally replace them. 

This assumption is based on a study of human-machine interactions at 1,500 companies, which concluded that the displacement of humans with machines results in short-lived increases in productivity.

Cloud-hosted AI offers better web application security

Considering the fact that 80% of businesses will have implemented chatbot automation by 2022 and that 90% of bank-related interactions will be automated by the same year, it’s wise for banking and financial organizations to invest in chatbot security measures so they can keep using them reliably into the future. 

Customers who are using web-based applications that make use of AI chatbots need to have a secure environment in which they can query and interact with a bot, which means that innovative security measures need to be at the forefront of businesses’ plans to integrate their AI chatbots successfully.

Enter private cloud computing: it’s the counterpart to public cloud computing and offers exactly what it spells out in its name — privacy. according to cloud computing expert Barbara Ericson of Cloud Defense, “security is often the number one reason why big businesses will look to private cloud computing instead of public cloud computing. Private cloud networks, by their very nature, offer better web application security and defense, which can be vital for companies that handle a lot of sensitive customers, wealthy individuals, or other information.” 

Network administrators can also use private cloud networks for AI chatbots to handle additional security tools, such as providing information about which users accessed what data, any changes made, and emergency controls.

Companies in the banking and financial industry that are determined to use private, cloud-hosted AI for strong web application security shouldn’t forget to secure their cloud computing systems against cybercriminals. It’s essential for businesses such as these to protect devices that connect to their cloud computing environment with encryption, preferably with WiFi Protected Access 11 or WPA2 password protection, to specifically target previously identified vulnerabilities. The importance of password protection keeps resurfacing time and time again, and users are being encouraged to enhance their privacy by making use of various forms of password protection software.

AI encourages safer online trading and investments

Artificial intelligence just wouldn’t hold as much promise as it does in the financial and banking industry if it didn’t have the potential to drive more eCommerce sales and higher rates of online trading and investments. 

Businesses can integrate their chatbots into their website or eCommerce app, which allows trading chatbots to increase the number of online sales. If you’re feeling skeptical about this statement, just remember that approximately 40% of customers want suggestions from chatbots and that online customers are willing to spend $400 or more in online stores that come with AI chatbots.

If your business is set on using AI chatbots in tandem with its eCommerce presence, then it also has the ability to encourage safer online trading and investment-making. 

Online trading, including options trading, brings with it several risks that inevitably target large financial institutions and their valuable assets of data, such as data breaches, viral attacks, phishing, and identity theft, all of which occur due to inadequate security measures. Learn more about why options trading is risky and how to mitigate these risks. Fortunately, businesses can work with online brokerage institutions to survey their network landscape as well as their AI chatbots for vulnerabilities that criminals can take advantage of. 

Among the most popular and effective measures that these security experts can help your business implement to safeguard your AI, web applications, and network include two-step authentications, SSL encryption, server security, and inactivity logouts. 

Financial and banking organizations that are using AI chatbots should feel compelled to investigate these security measures to minimize the number of entry points cybercriminals can use to infiltrate their network and ultimately compromise the integrity of their AI as well as customer-facing services to facilitate online trading and investments. 

Summary

Businesses in the financial and banking industry are wise to adopt AI chatbots now as they continue to gain traction as supplements to online customer service systems. Live chat with AI chatbots can help increase rates of customer engagement conversions, enable better security for customer-facing web applications, and encourage more robust means to safeguard users as they make online trades and investments. 

As AI and AI-enabled chatbots continue to make waves in finance and banking as well as other industries, it remains to be seen which of the benefits they offer have the greatest lasting impact on how businesses with eCommerce presences handle online customer service and security.

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While some of these tools are focused on providing this kind of functionality, others have been designed to increase the level of trust that your customers place in you. The canonical example of this is the chatbot, which can automate many aspects of the customer journey, and allow you to focus on providing a great service to your most valuable customers. 

Approaches like this have come to be known as “conversational commerce”, and they provide a powerful new way of utilizing AI to drive sales. 

In this article, we’ll look at what conversational commerce is, how it can drive your business forward, and how to use it.

What is conversational commerce?

The term “conversational commerce” was first used in 2015. However, the concept behind this “new” form of advertising is not new. Essentially, conversational commerce attempts to replicate the experience of interacting with an in-store sales assistant, but via online systems. It uses chat, messaging, or other natural language interfaces to facilitate interaction between people, brands, and services.

The central idea behind conversational commerce is drawn from a crucial realization that there is a right and a wrong way to use bots: chatbots are not, primarily, an extension of your analytics and segmentation systems, but are best looked at as semi-autonomous sales assistants in themselves.

In case this rather general definition is still vague, it can help to look at some examples of conversational commerce. Today, you really don’t have to look far to find successful examples of conversational approaches, because many of the biggest and most innovative brands in the world are using the technique.

Sephora’s virtual artist, for instance, is a chatbot that also includes elements of augmented reality to allow users to use selfies to ‘try on’ makeup. Similarly, Kik bot utilizes a customer’s history to generate personalized recommendations. Both tools require users to fill in a basic questionnaire, which is then fed as input to their recommendation engine. However, after the completion of this initial step, customers’ interactions with these systems are completely (and convincingly) conversational.

The advantages of conversational commerce

There are several key advantages to using conversational techniques for eCommerce retailers, and this approach Is useful in different ways for different retailers.

For instance, moving to a conversational on-site marketing system – such as by having a chatbot engage with customers as soon as they land on your estore – can be very effective for eCommerce stores that are going through a period of rapid growth. 

Without careful design, adding dozens (or even hundreds) of new product lines to your store can quickly leave your customers feeling confused. A chatbot that is able to direct them to the product they are looking for, in a way that is both friendly and engaging, can help to avoid this.

Of course, some companies take a different approach and are focused on selling one product. The challenge faced by these firms is a different one – how to explain the advantages of their product in a way that is responsive to the needs of individual consumers. 

Conversational approaches are also useful here and have been used to great effect by one of the best examples of growth marketing in the last year – Zoom, which has seen installations rise by over 700% since last March. By deploying a chatbot that can take potential customers through the key features of their software, the company was able to capture a large share of the video conferencing market this year.

Finally, whatever the current objectives of your business, it’s important to recognize that the way in which people interact with brands is changing. Specifically, the meteoric rise of voice assistants in the last few years means that consumers are far more comfortable searching for products in a conversational way, and are increasingly demanding this functionality from their favorite brands.

How to use conversational commerce to increase sales

If you’ve read through the examples of conversational commerce marketing above, you’ve probably already got some ideas as to how you can deploy this technique in your own business. It’s important to realize, however, that conversational techniques (and, indeed, chatbots) can be usefully applied to almost any form of an eCommerce store. Here’s how:

Retail sales

The most direct way to use chatbots is to drive sales of products directly, as this is one of the easiest ways to start bringing conversational elements to your online store. By giving chatbot access to key information on your range of products, it can be used to provide a customized, conversational interface for customers visiting your website. 

Driving subscriptions

Subscription models have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity this year, as the Covid-19 pandemic has driven many customers to look for curated products and content in lieu of the in-person shopping experience. As a result, technological tools that allow brands to easily implement subscription models have also done well for this very reason.

Using a chatbot to encourage your customers to purchase a subscription – or to upgrade their existing subscription – can be achieved easily, and relies on the same kind of training as that used to teach conversational interfaces about a range of products.

Affiliate marketing

The potential of chatbots goes far beyond directly marketing your products, however. Once you’ve deployed and trained a chatbot, you have control of a very powerful marketing tool, and it could well be that other companies will pay you to send customers their way. 

One of the most effective strategies as well as to reach out directly to the sellers of products rather than through third parties such as Amazon. As Ottawa-based website developer and online marketer Gary Stevens of Hosting Canada says, “Amazon is the big dog here, but given Amazon’s slashing of commission rates, it’s become much more profitable to go directly to the seller.” 

Using chatbots in this way, or essentially as a tool for affiliate marketing directly to sellers, is relatively new but already meeting with great success. The central idea, here, is that a chatbot can be used as a customer researcher – instead of just responding to queries, it can proactively reach out to customers in order to understand what kind of products will appeal to them. The customer can then (with their permission, of course) be referred to a third party who offers these products.

The bottom line

Chatbots and conversational approaches can increase trust and sales in all the ways we’ve listed above. However, it’s also important to recognize that they can only take you so far – that no matter how many cutting-edge applications of AI you are using, at some point your customers will want to talk to a real human.

Chatbots, by removing the requirement to spend hours explaining basic product features, help you to do that. They ensure that the conversations you have with your customers are as effective as they can be and that you are focusing on what really matters – building a relationship with your loyal consumers.

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