4 Things You Need to Know When Considering Chatbots

When I have conversations around Conversational AI Chatbots, I cover the core of what our solution offers: Conversational chat automation and improving customer service engagement.

In each conversation with a prospective customer, we look at how a chatbot can integrate standalone with their company’s website or integrate with their existing live chat to handle incoming customer service chats. This means agents need to handle fewer chats, calls, emails and tickets!

But I believe chatbots provide additional values to organisations. These extra opportunities are often overlooked by people buying chatbots:

1. Chatbots Are Not Just For Customer Service

We often expect that anyone visiting a website and using the chat services is there to talk about something that went wrong or needs help. This is why we usually classify chatbots as customer service tools. But in reality, how frequently do you actually get a question that sits with another team, like HR, sales or marketing?

The reality is that when you ‘train’ a chatbot, just like a human, they are never limited to what they can learn. You can train the bot to learn  customer service related questions or FAQs. But you can also teach them about your products, how to get in contact with certain departments, HR-related questions, you name it. The bot can answer these questions too.

Personally, I find that this is the missing piece when we cover the value in our solutions. Bot Whisperers sometimes overlook that chatbots don’t have topic limitations and that they’re capable of helping customers across a wide range of subjects, including HR, sales and marketing use cases, not to mention customer service.

2. Onboarding With Internal Chatbots

Right, so you and your team have spent hours and hours building your chatbot. Your customers and website visitors are in awe of your chatbot’s knowledge! Great, but why should it be exclusive to them?

Your bot has been taught an immense wealth of knowledge. This information is a goldmine for new colleagues on your team. I can’t take full credit for this idea since one of our more tenured customers made me aware of this hidden benefit.

This customer took one of their existing ‘external’ chatbots, cloned it, added a few more internal FAQs, and ‘tada’ - the onboarding bot was born. The result: the firm’s onboarding team and their team managers have fewer ‘generic’ questions left to answer and the new employee onboarding is more rapid than before.

What’s great about this is that the transfer of existing knowledge when an old colleague leaves is less of a worry! As long as the chatbot is there and keeps learning, it will never ‘forget’ information. The same can’t be said for us people when we’re out the door, unfortunately!

3. Advanced Analytics and Learning from Customers

So this one slightly depends on the chatbot provider you end up using; the one we provide at GetJenny (more info here) does offer this in their premium package.

So what I'm talking about here is a feature that not only shows the chat history to the Bot Whisperer, but also runs AI and machine learning capabilities to highlight unanswered questions and automatically suggest Q&A pairing.

This means that when a user is interacting with your bot, it collects those moments in conversation when it was unable to answer their question and highlights these to the Bot Whisperer in JennyStudio. It then automatically gives Bot Whisperers the opportunity to create a new answer to this question or through its Q&A analytics offer and suggest already existing answers.

In JennyStudio, any unanswered questions get reported to Bot Whisperers and suggested Question-Answer Pairs are suggested. If there isn't a close enough match available, you can create a new Q&A Pair. Learn More...

This is when I get the ‘Wow’ response from our customers. They see how much time this saves, not only when initially building the chatbot, but also how simple it is to continuously improve their chatbot with ease. Don’t forget, chatbots have been around for quite a few years, and features like these prevent the old ‘didn’t understand, ask again' response we used to see back in the days.

All chatbot packages from GetJenny have these analytics as standard:

• Full chat conversation history
• conversation and message metrics
• response rates
• most prompted responses/topics

4. Plan Out Your Chatbot Project

Finally, and this one is more of a housekeeping thing, is planning your chatbot project efficiently.

Like many other chatbot providers, we can help you build your first chatbot using existing data, from using machine learning to analyse your previous chat conversations, and get FAQs from your websites. We also have  awesome Customer Success Managers (shout out to you Annu and Juho) who can help you build your initial chatbot. But it takes time before the bot is ready!

If Ii had a penny for every time I’ve heard someone say - ‘it only needs to be ready in 3 months - we have loads of time!’ - I wouldn’t be a millionaire, but definitely could get a value deal at McDonalds.

At GetJenny, some of our customers have their chatbot live in 7 days! But a bot isn’t ready just because it can answer a few questions. As explained in point 3; chatbots take new input from your customer when they use it, so it takes time to get to ‘full capacity’. Often we find that the initial bot building phase before the first go-live is significantly shorter than the amount of time spent improving the bot as we learn more about customer expectations from real conversations while live.

So, if while you are reading this you realize that you ‘only’ need the bot in a few months - let’s chat today! As they say - rather sooner than later.

Hope you found this valuable - if you have any feedback or comments, feel free to reach out to me directly (ersin@getjenny.com) or to one of my lovely colleagues at sales@getjenny.com.

Cheers, Ersin