The World of Customer Service is Soon to Change
Exceptional customer service helps small businesses stand out in crowded markets, but achieving 24/7 stellar availability can be challenging with a small team and limited budget. Enter the AI chatbot.
AI chatbots offer a cost-effective way to enhance customer service capabilities, and they’ve been widely used and praised in the business world.
If you’ve been hesitant to use them, unsure of their capabilities or how precisely to leverage their power, this introductory guide will break down the ins and outs of AI chatbots for small business marketing.
What Is an AI Chatbot?
AI chatbots are programs that use AI to simulate human communication with customers. Chatbots have existed for years, slowly trickling down from an enterprise-level technology (think chatting with a bot on an American Airlines site), to becoming easily accessible to any business. Before AI, you would program your chatbot with answers to frequently asked questions. The chatbot would use keywords or exact phrase matching to choose the correct responses. For example, if someone mentioned ‘refund’ on a chat, the ‘database’ would match responses that were pre-programmed to respond to customer messages that contained refunds. They worked, but not super great. Think of them as those annoying phone assistants that would never understand your statements when they prompted you to say the reason for your call.
Sophisticated AI chatbots, on the other hand, use algorithms and LLMs (the brains of AI) to process and replicate human language. This means they learn from every interaction with you and your customers to better answer questions and requests. Instead of just matching with queries, they can interpret your message, and give you a response based on data you feed it.
Simply put, AI chatbots interpret users’ intent and context to generate responses on their own.
How an AI Chatbot Benefits Your Small Business
With not having to supervise them much, AI chatbots work as around-the-clock receptionists or virtual sales reps on your website. They are always ready to answer questions, concerns, and inquiries, saving your team time, effort, and money that would otherwise go into covering customer support shifts. For smaller teams, this means actually having someone ‘online’ at all times, ready to provide a lead with answers and prompting them to follow up and contact you.
For larger enterprises, they improve customer service while freeing up time for employees to focus on other business-critical tasks.
Alongside providing basic support and information on your products and services, AI chatbots can also book calls and schedule appointments. In this way, a chatbot also serves as an AI lead gen tool, qualifying leads for you, so you can spend more time following up with people who are actually interested in your services. With more integrations appearing constantly, and improved LLMs, the possibilities of virtual workers on your site are limitless.
Types of AI Chatbots
Some AI chatbots are made to handle basic requests, while others can perform more complex customer service tasks. Common AI chatbot types include:
- Transactional Chatbots: These are task-specific bots that answer simple questions, such as those about your business hours, shipping status, or available services. Most modern day AI chatbots can provide this pretty easily, assuming you give them the information they need.
- Conversational Chatbots: These advanced chatbots learn from interactions to decipher customer intent and chat the way a human would. They offer a more personalized experience. The more they interact, the more they learn, and the more personalized they become.
- Hybrid Chatbots: These are a combination of traditional chatbots and AI. They use a rule-based structure to answer simple questions and AI to answer detailed inquiries.
How Much Does an AI Chatbot Cost?
To add an AI chatbot to your website, you can opt for building a custom solution from the ground up or partnering with a chatbot provider. An in-house-built solution can be quite pricey, as you basically need to have a team that will develop and maintain the chatbot over time.
When you partner with a third-party provider, such as Tidio or Podium, you get to use their AI chatbot and customize it to your brand for a monthly subscription fee. The price varies based on your business size and the number of users, but there are no upfront or other additional fees. This is the best form of setting up an AI chatbot on your site if you’re a small business. While having a custom AI chatbot on your own is cool, these chatbot providers give you everything you need (and sometimes even more).
Unless you need very specific needs, or have major security concerns, custom built is likely not something you should go after.
AI Chatbot Limitations
However beneficial they may be, as of the time of this writing, AI chatbots can’t do it all. You’ll still need a human customer service and sales team to build and maintain customer relationships if your sales cycle is long, or your product is more complex.
Since AI chatbots don’t have emotional intelligence and can’t actually understand your customers, you still need humans to handle complex, emotionally sensitive issues. AI chats can do a great job of mimicking us, but they can make mistakes or say the ‘wrong thing’ now and then. Not a good risk to take when dealing with potential customers.
What’s more, as high as 71% of customers would still rather interact with a human than a chatbot. Until AI easily passes the Turing Test, it’s best to use AI chatbots strategically for the easiest inquiries, so you can free up your team for the customers who need a human touch.
Like other technologies, your AI chatbot will also be vulnerable to bugs and glitches. So while they can be quite independent, they still need to be maintained and supervised.
Is an AI Chatbot Worth the Investment?
Today’s advice is that AI chatbots are meant to work with your human customer service team, not replace them. They should help your employees and team meet customers’ needs, free up time for them to focus on other critical tasks, and aid you in nurturing relationships and scaling your business.
This may change in the coming months or years, so stay tuned as Motoza continues to explore the wonderful and existing technologies that are coming our way.
Need a helping hand in expanding your business? Motoza is here to further boost your scaling efforts with expert marketing services. Contact us today to learn how we can help you attract more customers.