According to a study conducted by Salesforce, 57% of customer service professionals believe that ChatBot will soon become a key service channel. With this in mind, ChatBots are the solution to increasing user satisfaction without requiring a greater "time" investment from your teams. Better than that, conversational bots are a way to save time for your teams but also to increase their productivity: by relieving them of secondary tasks, the bot allows them to devote this saved time to missions with higher added value. Let's go, we explain everything!

What is a chatbot

Before getting into the heart of the matter, let's stop for a moment to define exactly what a ChatBot is.

Far from being a new technology, the first chatbot, ELIZA, developed by Joseph Weizenbaum, professor at MIT, was born in 1966. Far from the chatbot we know today, ELIZA played the role of a psychotherapist by interpreting patients' statements in the form of questions thanks to the recognition of keywords.

It is finally in 2010 with the appearance of Siri, Alexa, Cortana but also many others, that the conversational bot became popular. Concretely, a ChatBot, or conversational agent, is a computer software that simulates and processes a conversation offering the possibility to a physical person to ask questions and get an immediate answer. You have certainly already conversed with a chatbot without even knowing it.

There are two main categories of ChatBot:

• Programmed chatbots are the most widespread category of chatbot to date, despite their rather basic functionalities. These conversational assistants are able to provide answers to the most commonly asked questions such as informing the user about opening hours.

• Predictive Chatbots: More sophisticated and interactive, predictive chatbots or virtual assistants learn and improve over the course of conversations. By relying on predictive analysis, they are able to analyze the behavior of previous users to improve and personalize the answers given according to the profile of the interlocutor.

Why use a chatbot

Used by companies, the primary objective of a chatbot is to improve the customer experience by allowing the user a way to get information even outside the working hours of the customer service. Let's zoom in on some of the many advantages of a chatbot for your company:

1 ChatBot increases customer engagement

The data collected by the ChatBot enriches your customer database allowing you to acquire new information about your potential buyers to adopt a more relevant communication but also to create more targeted marketing campaigns. Armed with more information about your prospects, you can create a tailored buying journey and if necessary make changes to your products to meet the expectations and needs of your customers. By creating a personalized offer, you ensure customer satisfaction, which in turn leads to customer loyalty.

Some ChatBots go even further by proposing a redirection to agents if they are not able to interpret the data and therefore respond to the request. This prevents a customer from getting stuck in a dead-end conversation that would eventually dehumanize the customer relationship and damage satisfaction.

2 Relieves your customer service

The Chatbot doesn't just work to improve the customer experience. It saves time and simplifies the management of requests made to your customer service department. The ChatBot can help users find the answer to a problem in your FAQ or help center, thus limiting the number of requests made to your support. Its VoiceBot version can filter and direct incoming calls according to the user's request. The end result is time savings and greater peace of mind for your teams, who can now focus on higher value-added missions.

3 Boosts sales

From simple information to online payment, ChatBots can be present at several key stages of the purchase process, making them a real asset to boost your sales.

The immediacy and 24/7 availability of your website allows your visitors to get information about your products/services even outside of your customer service hours, allowing them to place an order without having to wait for a return from you. This speeds up the sales process. The ChatBot can also become a real personal assistant. By asking questions to the visitor, it can collect valuable information allowing it to make a selection of products and services likely to seduce the user and thus increase his shopping cart.

Use a ChatBot internally

Very often used for customers, the ChatBot also has many advantages for internal use within your company.

1 Automates the work of human resources

Far from the idea of replacing human resources, the ChatBot is presented as a third-party solution that allows the department and its employees to avoid recurring questions and focus on higher value-added missions. Thus, employees can go directly through the conversational agent to obtain information on vacation requests or other recurring requests. But the ChatBot can do much more by supporting the HR department in other specific tasks such as recruitment by offering candidates the possibility to ask the latter for information on available offers.

2 Simplifies change management

Informing and facilitating the implementation of a major change within the company, such as the implementation of new software within your organization, can be a real headache for your IT teams. This is where a ChatBot comes in, facilitating the support work to be done with employees. The implementation of a new software raises many questions that a conversational bot can answer, thus relieving the work of IT teams.

3 Customer Service Support

In addition to an external use for visitors, the conversational agent is a real ally to your customer service employees to help them respond as quickly as possible to the requests received. The conversational agent acts as a search engine allowing customer support to find information more quickly, thus reducing response times. Like health insurance with AmeliBot, the ChatBot allows to manage the peaks of solicitation in times of crisis by offering policyholders a communication channel available 24 hours a day. Thanks to such a solution, the business saves time but so do the customers. No more repeated calls or waiting on the phone for simple information or to reschedule an appointment.

Combine a chatbot with online appointment booking

Agendize integrates with many conversational bot solutions to allow professionals in any industry to "enjoy" the combined benefits of these two digital tools. From now on, you offer users the possibility to make an appointment with an account manager and thus agree on a personalized time of exchange to address all aspects of the needs and define together a suitable solution.