Chats and Chatbots: Functionality, Advantages and Disadvantages

Online business representation requires effective ways to communicate with customers, social media promotion and partner networks. It is clear from online reviews that the perception of a company often depends on how well it communicates with its customers. “Responsive support” and “adequate answers to questions” can be a real competitive advantage.

Advantages and disadvantages of chatbots

Chatbot – is a program that knows how to correspond with real people and/or imitate voice communication, doing the work of consultants. Chatbots can be used in almost all areas of Internet business and are found on any site, sometimes even on personal sites, because it is a convenient tool for notifying visitors, answering simple, frequently repeated questions. According to statistics, about 70% people contact bots with just such questions.

The most common version of a bot is a pop-up window in the lower right corner in which the operator supposedly writes something, but when the client asks something, he is prompted to fill out a form to contact the manager and he is likely to answer within a day. But now there are bots with enormous functionality available to anyone. Chatbots in messengers are experiencing the most rapid development. Most often, bots are only needed to answer questions of varying degrees of depth – starting with the simplest and ending with the terms of selling a house, a tour, a telephone rate, ordering food, and so on.

A chatbot can pre-interview a candidate for an interview, offer tests in order to weed out completely unsuitable candidates, and bring the rest to the real HR.
Through a chatbot you can run promotions, give gifts, give out promo codes – do simple work aimed at attracting consumers. Chatbots are increasingly programmed to form automatic sales funnels, automating the interaction of CRM, e-mail services, messengers, social networks, sending out news, offers. But it’s impossible to list all the things bots can do now. From the user side chat-bot is very convenient for actively used sites, resources of large companies, because in this case, the lines are often overloaded, it is difficult to reach the operator, and if it is in another city or country, it makes no sense, especially if the question is simple.

Many people are more comfortable communicating by text rather than by voice, because it’s clearer, you can think about the answer, and then a call to a human specialist either won’t be necessary, or it will be a really complicated question. But objectively speaking, many bots are more likely to annoy users because they are not set up properly. In general, a chat-bot should work in conjunction with a specialist, then it will really be a good assistant to the business.

A misconfigured chatbot may promise to answer and disappear, may give monotonous meaningless or just plain wrong answers. The bot may have a limited perception of customers’ reactions, so the chat may turn into a drain of foul language. It’s fair to say that customers may simply be expressing their dissatisfaction with the bot’s performance in this way. That’s why it’s important to set up proper and varied bot responses that take into account a more or less extensive range of human reactions. Chatbots are now moving into messengers, where users sit all day, or at least visit more often than websites. In terms of functionality, chatbots in messengers are no different from bots on websites, and the same requirements should be applied to them.

Chatbots can be useful on various sites, but especially on resources where there is a lot of standardized information and a constant large flow of users, so chatbots are very actively used on the sites of banks and other financial and payment systems, mobile operators, Internet service providers, online stores and so on. In particular, in MTS chatbots provide up to 60% of communication with customers. One of the progressive features of chatbots is that they can learn, in constant communication with people they can learn to mimic human speech, and the bots understand human language rather than commands, which means, in theory, the chatbot can “smarten up” after each dialogue. The main advantages of chatbots for business include:

• 24-hour availability;
• through constant availability – greater customer reach;
• When properly configured, chatbots have a fairly high level of effectiveness in communicating with customers;
• with no costs for call centers, especially multi-lingual ones – great cost-effectiveness;
• Bots can collect quite a lot of useful data about customers if they are actively communicating all the time.

The main disadvantage of a chatbot is that it is still a very monotonous tool with limited functionality, and if you have relatively complex tasks, you need to turn to people. But at the same time, chatbots perform a number of very useful tasks:

• Retains customers by answering typical questions at all times;
  Answering questions from overseas clients;
• Automates the sale of goods and services and, when properly configured, attracts customers;
• Chat can be programmed for payment transactions.

Top services for creating chatbots

Chatbots are created using special platform constructors. A constructor can be used without programming skills to properly configure a chatbot. They offer ready-made solutions that integrate with popular messengers and sites, there are builders for creating bots from blocks and there are tools for creating chatbots yourself, from scratch.

Aimylogic (https://aimylogic.com/ru) is a service for creating chatbots with artificial intelligence, in Russian and English. It has ready integration with Bitrix-24, Vkontakte, Telegram, WhatsApp and other social networks and messengers, you can integrate with websites. The service offers a variety of bots, including a chat bot for lead generation, a chat bot realtor, you can also build your own chat bot.

Bot Kits (https://botkits.ru/) develops Russian-language bots for websites, Telegram, Facebook, Vkontakte, Viber. The bot is based on block diagrams, bots collect the available statistics, analyze it for the answer. There is a test period of 14 days, in which you can try all the functionality of the bot.

Botmother (https://botmother.com/ru) is a designer of Russian chatbots for Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, you can also make your own chatbot. The first bot can be tested for free in these messengers. There is also the possibility of a refund within 7 days.

Botsify (https://botsify.com/) is an English-language bot builder with artificial intelligence for websites, Facebook Messenger, Slack and other messengers. A free test period of 14 days is available.

Chatfuel (https://chatfuel.com/) – English-language bot builder for Facebook Messenger with templates for e-shops, realtors with the ability to work for free if the number of users is less than one thousand.

Chatgun (https://chatgun.io/) – Russian-language chatbot for Vkontakte, in which you can test the functionality for free, the bot can participate in conversations and carry out targeted mailings.

Dialogflow (https://dialogflow.cloud.google.com/) is a natural language recognition service from Google, English-language, supports Russian, integrates with Google Assistant, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram, Skype, Viber and other platforms. Standard rate is free. Uses cloud technology for training.

Flow XO (https://flowxo.com/) is an English-language bot builder for Facebook, Slack, SMS and Telegram. Up to five bots are offered for free.

Gupshup (https://www.gupshup.io) is an English-language bot builder for Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Viber, Skype, VKontakte that can understand natural language.

Mapuschat (https://manychat.com/) is an English-language bot builder for Facebook Messenger that is available for free. It can form chains of emails and track conversions.

Manybot (https://manybot.io/ru) is a constructor of free multi-lingual bots for Telegram. It can send news to subscribers, provides automatic publishing from Twitter and YouTube, and supports feedback.

Morph.ai (https://morph.ai/) is an English-language bot builder for marketing campaigns on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and websites. Able to learn, understands natural language, has a large analytical toolkit.

Robochat.io (https://robochat.io/) – bot builder for VKontakte, which can generate answers to questions, there is business automation functionality, quest games, anonymous chat, some commercial functions. There is a free version.

How exactly to create a chatbot need to specify on a particular platform, but, in any case, it is not the most difficult activity, even for those who have not had experience programming.

How do I choose a chatbot?

A chatbot is a business tool, and its effectiveness should be measurable. In the work of chatbots such parameters are evaluated as:

• the efficiency of tasks for which the chatbot has integrated with the site or messenger;
• the number of users of the bot, its relevance;
• the effectiveness of bot communication with customers.

In terms of performance efficiency, you need to analyze whether the workload of employees has decreased, and if so, then the chatbot performs its main task. Also, if sales grow with the launch of the chatbot, this is also a telling result. Analysis of how users who first got acquainted with a product or service through the bot react can provide interesting information; if they became customers, then this is a positive result.

The demand for a chatbot is assessed by the number of users who contacted it with a question. The absolute number of users depends more on the size of the company and the development of its communication channels, the place of the chatbot is determined by comparing how many users come through other channels – through advertising, through mailing lists, etc.

The percentage of active chatbot users who contact the chatbot first is important, it is an indicator of the usefulness of the chatbot and the service as a whole. In this case it is especially important that the chatbot gives meaningful responses. It is more difficult to check how many users will recommend a resource after chatting with a chatbot, but it is possible to find out through a special question in the same bot.

If the first contact with the bot becomes the last for a large number of users, this is a negative result, if the bot was supposed to be a serious channel of communication with customers. Repeated appeals to the chatbot are a positive result. Again, it’s important that the chatbot continues to communicate with people clearly and effectively. If the bot is used to send messages, then the number of read messages is important. Approximately, the proportion of read messages should reach 35%, not less. The effectiveness of bot communication can be determined by such criterion as the duration of one “conversation” with the bot. Not necessarily a positive indicator will be a long conversation, on the contrary, if the bot was conceived as an “instructor”, its task is to explain everything quickly and clearly. But if the bot’s task is more complex, – involving the client in the communication, then a long dialogue will be positive.

In this context, it is important not only the time of communication, but also the meaning of communication – you need to analyze exactly what the conversation is about. If the user stubbornly tries for a long time to get a clear answer to a simple question from a chat bot and then swears for a long time in the chat, this is unlikely to be a good indicator. For bots that “understand” human speech, the percentage of errors in the course of communication is important. Bots that fully recognize human speech do not yet exist, but the fewer errors in understanding requests, the better. The main indicator of not only the dialog part, but the overall performance of a chatbot is goal achievement. If the goals are achieved – then the bot is useful, if it is not achieved or achieved but not completely, it is necessary to find out what component of the chatbot’s work is faulty and try to fix the situation.

Chats for business

Chat is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, way to communicate on the Internet. At first chat rooms were something like a hobby club on the Internet, but now it is one of the popular ways for companies to communicate with customers. Typically, chat is not the most important channel of communication, but it is almost always useful for establishing and maintaining contact with customers and is an additional channel that can provide a lot of important information.

Most often chat is used for answering customer questions online, for consultations and for solving medium complexity questions, which are difficult for a chatbot, but not so difficult as to write a support letter. But chat isn’t just for communications, it’s also needed for lead management, for generating leads and, ultimately, for increasing sales. Chat can also be a powerful source of information about the dynamics of the business, about real problems, because it allows you to get effective feedback from customers online.

The benefits of online chat

For users, chat is convenient because it is easy to contact the support team, often there is no time limit for communication, so you can find out everything you need, get comprehensive information, and if something is unclear, you can return to the chat again. Not necessarily the same specialist will answer, but the chat saves the history of messages. Also through chat you can ask to contact a more competent specialist. If you do it all through email, you have to do too many manipulations, plus the emails will eventually clog up the whole inbox and outbox. The phone is not always available, the call can be interrupted by lack of money in the account, a long conversation is just uncomfortable and not all the answers, recommendations, rates and so on can be remembered, and in the chat they are visible in writing.

If you have to wait a long time for an operator on the phone, you can’t do anything else. Chat can be on, you can wait for an answer while continuing to work or surfing the Internet.
The fact that chat is a written method of communication allows you to save information, reread it, and sometimes, incidentally, find mistakes in the operator’s answers. In chat, you can have more detailed discussions, send screenshots, files, links, it’s very difficult for the operator to interrupt the communication with a common phrase, you have to really look for ways to solve the client’s problem.

On the other hand, chat is one of the few ways to convince a customer to buy something by communicating directly: to answer all questions, to show competence, to describe the benefits of a product or service, to provide additional information. Businesses benefit a lot from chat, too. To a certain extent, you can save on support service, because one employee can communicate in several chats at once, without creating queues like in telephone call centers.

Chat can directly affect the percentage of returns or money for goods and services, because in the chat the client has the opportunity to find out all the necessary information and make a competent decision. And this decision can be in favor of the company, because adequate communication with the operator does not provoke the client to fight for every penny, and as a result the average cost of the order increases. In this case, the most important thing is that the operator knows everything about the product or service, can advise something appropriate and not advise what is not necessary, be able to inform about promotions, discounts and so on. According to some reports, a well-constructed chat conversation can increase conversion rates by 15-20%. On the basis of communication with customers, the company gets good material for the study of the target audience, its need, in time to see the problems of the business and fix them. Chat programs allow you to see which page the client is on and the operator can initiate the communication himself.

Organizing an online chat room

The basis of online chat is not a program, the most important thing is competent operators. It is in this aspect that companies often have problems. In addition to competence, the support service should be polite and patient. A huge number of customers go to the chat room only when they have problems and many of them are “on edge”. This is especially important if the company is wrong, then the operator will still have to calm the client down and look for a solution to the problem.

The operator should remain polite even if the customer is extremely annoyed and gets personal. It is not the task of chat operators to deal with aggressive customers, just as it is not the task of chat operators to respond to compliments. At the same time, the operator should always be friendly, not aloof, to clarify the name, last name, how to address, and so on. The operator should be tolerant, even if working in a chat room that shows what the customer writes before sending – some customers may start writing a message in a direct insulting tone, but then erase it and write more deliberately. The team should have a list of the most frequently asked questions, and answer them accurately and politely every time if there is no way to connect the bot.

Online chat should be placed in a prominent and convenient place on the site, traditionally this is the bottom right corner of the interface. Attention should be paid to the fact that the chat does not obscure important information and does not look the brightest element of the site. Chat is an unobtrusive assistant. Chat should be consistent with the style of the site and be attractive in terms of design – this is not the most important thing, but it can add extra pluses to the perception of the company. Optimally, if the chat room is open 24 hours a day, but if that is not possible, then you need to study when the site receives the main flow of visitors – at this time, the operators must work. If the chat room is not round the clock, you need to designate the hours of operation of the chat room and strictly adhere to it.

If the conversation with the client began before the end of the working day, but clearly goes beyond it, then it would be client-oriented not to abandon the dialogue in connection with the end of the working day. It’s better to bring the communication to the end, to help solve the problem, it will add pluses to the company’s image. If the chat is disabled for some reason, the client should see the exact information where to go and when, and also have the opportunity to leave a question in the chat so that the operator will answer later. On some sites text chat is supplemented with the possibility of audio and video chat. This may be necessary in cases where the user needs to “point the finger”, that is, visually show some functionality, as text information can look too complicated. In this context, cobrowsing function can be very useful, when the operator sees the site “through the eyes of the client” and can guide him through the site.

If the company is large enough or has a variety of services, the chats should be distributed across departments, transitions from the chat on general issues to the chat of a specialist should be fast, there should not be any pauses or delays – it is enough to linger, as the client will feel that he was thrown from one incompetent specialist to another and wait until the client says “Fuck you” and leaves the chat. By the way, apart from operators, you should engage other employees to work with customers in the chat. The users appreciate it when they can contact a real specialist, the head of the department, etc., through the chat, because this builds trust in the company. In turn, the employees will be aware of the real requirements of consumers.

The operator in the chat should provide the information the client needs in a particular case, this is especially important if there is a problem to be solved. Then any information that is not relevant to the problem, even potentially very interesting, causes only irritation to the client. For a full-fledged communication with the client, the operator will need to see the basic information – where the client came from, the first time or he often asks questions, how long he is on the site, what pages he is interested in. This will allow you to communicate with the customer more specifically. The information obtained should be memorized, the chat can be connected to the CRM, so the client has the impression that the company remembers about him and his individual preferences.
It should be noted that professional chat rooms are needed primarily for start-ups and mid-level companies that run a complex business that raises a lot of questions from customers and businesses whose success depends on customer centricity.

As practice shows, business giants, unfortunately, chat rooms are not very important, they pay little attention to this method of communication, their chats are not customer-oriented, the operators do not have enough information, can not solve the problem. Often chat rooms are used to “leak” some kind of advertising or introductory information and the client’s question is used only as a reason for all this – this can be seen in the chat rooms of banks, payment systems, recruiting resources, telecommunications companies.

Top Chat Developers

There are a lot of developers of online chat rooms, there are chat rooms with functionality limited to communication, there are chat rooms with advanced functionality, for example, to generate sales.

JivoSite (https://www.jivo.ru/) – one of the popular developers of chat and call (or simultaneous) services to the site. Chat text is visible before sending, chat can be connected to CRM, you can configure it to collect contacts. Chat can send files, you can switch between operators and groups, generate statistics.

Carrot quest (https://www.carrotquest.io/) – multi-channel support service, presenting various tools, CRM, email lists, web analytics and including online chats, there are chats in which you can communicate in the search tasks.

Livechat (https://www.livechat.com) – one of the most famous services on Runet. It is a multilingual service – it supports Russian, English, and more than 20 languages. LiveChat is aimed at keeping the client on the site, tracking the moment when the visitor is about to leave. The service allows you to control several chats, actively invite clients, store chat history, analyze information about clients, talk to an unlimited number of clients, and so on.

Zoho SalesIQ (https://www.zoho.com/) is a popular chat system with customer tracking. It can manage chats from mobile devices, determine customer geolocation and other information, store visit history, has offline messaging feature, CMS and e-commerce connectivity, and more – a feature-rich chat service.

Freshchat (https://www.freshworks.com/) – a commercially oriented service aimed at increasing sales, there are functions to manage access, notifications, distribution of clients between consultants and so on.

LiveEngage (https://liveengage.liveperson.net) is a feature-rich chat room, compatible with all browsers and mobile devices, and can measure the effectiveness of real-time feedback on the site.

LiveAgent (https://www.liveagent.com/) is a multi-channel service with 24/7 customer support. Can set response templates, request priorities, integrates with email, can send files, and so on.

Conclusion

Chats and chatbots are now essential elements for representing almost any business on the Internet. The main benefit of chatbots is that they allow you to reduce costs by solving routine tasks with software tools. And chatbots are most useful as a means of building communications with clients.