Chatbot is rapidly revolutionizing and is taking every industry by storm. Whether it is the education sector or the healthcare industry, a chatbot is in great need for their automating customer support workflows. Since the need should be addressed with a conversational AI chatbot, there are plenty of AI tools available in the market. This often confuses the end consumer to choose the right one for their business. And when we closely look at the problem statement, the easiest way to choose a customer service chatbot platform is to evaluate the customer service chatbot features.
When it comes to implementing a customer service chatbot for a website, there are several features that businesses should consider. The features can range from helping improve the overall user experience of a website to increasing the customer satisfaction score. In this article, we’ll explore some of the must-have features for a customer service chatbot that will give you complete clarity.
Must-have Features for a Customer Service Chatbot
Based on the criticality of business use, here is a list of CS chatbot features that you need to consider.
1. Omnichannel Support
The omnichannel support feature tops the list as it is required for every business. This is further classified as omnichannel messaging that is generally attributed by the chatbot platform companies.
Omnichannel messaging is a feature that allows users to communicate with chatbot across multiple channels using a single dashboard. The channels can be Website, eMail, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and other channels. With this feature, customers can receive instant support through their preferred channel, making it easier for them to communicate with the business. And for businesses, there is no hassle of opening every platform if they have to interact with customers as they get a unified dashboard.
2. Natural Language Processing (NLP)
NLP is another important feature that user needs to consider before opting customer service chatbot for the website. As NLP is a vital branch of AI when it comes to chatbot development, it enables the chatbot to understand and interpret customer messages, regardless of how they are phrased. This helps to ensure that the chatbot provides accurate and relevant responses to customer queries when they are prompted.
Along with NLP, there are other AI branches that you can look out for ML, NLU, and NLG. These are also equally important when it comes to distinguishing the chatbot features from the rest.
3. No-Code Visual Chat Flow Builder
A no-code visual chat flow builder is a feature that enables businesses to create and modify chatbot interaction chat workflows without any coding knowledge. This makes it convenient for companies to customize and personalize their chatbot which ensures to meet their specific needs.
No-code visual chat flow builder is intuitive, and it makes an interactive experience for the chatbot backend users with all the visual elements that are available. As it creates an engaging experience and gives complete freedom for the users to have their requirements fulfilled by a chatbot.
4. Live Chat Handover & Management
Live chat handover and management is a feature that enables the chatbot to seamlessly inter-exchange the conversation with a human representative when required. This ensures that customers receive the help they need in a timely manner and can get their queries addressed if any human intervention is required.
When there is a huge influx of customer service queries, chatbot users also need to be ready to manage them. This is why you need to see whether the chatbot can intelligently manage and hand over customer queries based on criticality or if it needs to be manually operated.
5. Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is an AI feature that powers the chatbot to detect the tone and emotion of customer messages. This can help the chatbot provide more empathetic and personalized responses depending on the scenario and make the customer feel valued through it.
This feature also helps businesses to identify the areas where they need to improve their customer service. It instantly boosts customer retention and ensures that customers will not get disassociated from the company.
6. Easy Customization
Similar to visual chat flow builder, businesses also need to consider this feature if they do not have a vast tech team to support it. Because easy customization is a feature that helps businesses to customize their chatbot without any technical knowledge. And when you do not have associates without tech knowledge, it becomes hard for them to use the chatbot for customer interaction.
Customization can include changing the chatbot’s appearance or visual identity, modifying its responses, managing users, or adding new features whenever it is introduced.
7. Chatbot Training
Chatbot training is about training a company’s chatbot to better understand customer queries and provide more accurate responses. It is a major component of machine learning and business need to have the input where they can have their own datasets uploaded to the server to train the chatbot.
Training the chatbot can help improve the chatbot’s performance in terms of better message delivery and increase customer satisfaction rate when customers get relevant solutions to their problem statement.
8. Integration with CRM and 3rd-Party Apps
CRM integration with a chatbot is a key feature when your business has a huge customer database. As companies look forward to tracking their customer service teams’ performance, it is a helpful feature for businesses to have. This also helps the CS teams to be more organized and know the activities happening around them.
Integration with other 3rd-party apps is also needed. For instance marketing automation software. The integration can help businesses streamline their marketing workflows and provide outreach facilities to support the customers.
9. Multilingual Capabilities
When your business has customers from across the globe, multilingual capability is a must-have feature for a chatbot. As the chatbot can communicate with customers in multiple languages. This can help businesses reach a wider audience and provide service to customers who may not speak the same language as the business.
You also need to ensure that the languages are thoroughly tested before deploying them to customers. Because using a mere translation features can be a disastrous move, so training the chatbot before deploying it to customers is important.
10. Security & Privacy
Security and privacy are critical features for any website customer service chatbot. Businesses should ensure that their chatbot is secure and compliant with relevant data privacy regulations to protect their customers’ data and are certified by the relevant agencies.
With the security compliance badge, it easily helps companies to build trust with their customers. Ensuring that there will be no threat of data loss and it will be privately regulated within them.
Concluding thoughts
In conclusion, there are several must-have features that businesses should consider when implementing a customer service chatbot for their website or mobile apps. The above features that we have short-listed can be helpful for businesses to provide more effective and efficient support to their customers. It also helps boost the overall user experience for your customer and customer service executives.
Frequently asked questions
Here are some of the common FAQs faced when it comes to the evaluation of CS website bot features.
1. What are the other AI features that I need to consider which will help improve my website chatbot’s performance?
Other popular AI features can be Deep Learning and Expert systems that can be considered. Both features together help businesses identify areas where they need to improve their customer service. By analyzing the datasets and training, the chatbot can better understand the customer’s needs and provide more accurate and relevant responses.
2. Can I personalize the chatbot experience for customers?
You can personalize the chatbot experience based on how well you have trained them on factors of sentiment analysis. Because analysis and training are key when it comes to delivering personalized responses and making your customers feel privileged.
3. What are the advanced customer support chatbot features?
A few advanced chatbot features include sentiment analysis, natural language processing (NLP), and multilingual capabilities. These features can help improve the performance of a customer service chatbot by providing more personalized and accurate support to customers. Additionally, they also support businesses to automate customer interaction workflows and provide a better experience to them.
4. Can I integrate my customer service chatbot with all third-party apps?
It depends on the chatbot platform you are using and the third-party apps you want to integrate with. Some chatbot platforms offer pre-built integrations with popular third-party apps, while others may require custom integration work. Additionally, some third-party apps may not offer open APIs that allow for integration with external tools. It is important to research the compatibility of your chatbot platform with the third-party apps you want to integrate with and ensure that the necessary APIs are available for integration.