For businesses, every conversation they have with their customer matters: it’s a tool to build intimacy and brand loyalty.

In chatbots, business leaders seem to have discovered an enduring solution that combines customer intimacy with automated productivity improvements.

That’s why across many popular sites and B2B websites, you find artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots driving sales, marketing, and customer service.

They present a refreshing contrast to the otherwise colorless customer interactions of a bygone era.

Remember the times, not too long back, when traditional live support was trending: someone sitting on the other side of the window was answering basic questions of the customers over and over again. It was tedious no doubt, and was also woefully inadequate: available only for fixed hours it couldn’t offer 24*7 support, and varied time zones made the fundamental weakness of such support widgets all the more apparent.

Thankfully, the advent of AI has automated the whole process to a degree that vastly improves the level of communication and customer service.

A website bot goes about its job pretty efficiently. It not only answers the basic questions of your services or products but can go through the flow of connecting to a human agent or send an email.

Implementing ‘know-all’ bots is rather ‘cool’ than making a user scroll down the pages of the website. You just need to have a bot on the landing page to answer all the basic questions in real-time.

Top Features of a Website Bot

Apart from providing customers with 24*7 support and responding to repetitive questions asked in no time, here’s a full stack of operations that a website bot is really good at:

AI knowledge management

Chatbots can find an exact match for a user’s query from the knowledge base maintained, tested and trained by the developer.

Web search

If the bot does not find any answers from the knowledge base, it can then fish out an answer from the website and respond.

Follow up questions

A chatbot conversation logically connects one question to another. The knowledge base of the bot enables it to raise follow-up questions to maintain the flow of the conversation.

Omni-channel support

Natural language processing (NLP) driven chatbot not only engages your customers but can also aid your staff. A bot with the same knowledgebase can be deployed across channels like Messenger, Slack, Email and more.

Capture leads

The website bot can help to capture leads by asking customers to fill their details in a friendly chat format or collect different kinds of data useful for your business.

Multi-lingual support

The website bot can detect the language of the user and even switch languages during the conversation.

Hand-off to live agent

The bot can detect the sentiment of the user using Sentimental Analysis and hand-off the query to a live agent window including the chat history, giving a seamless experience to the customers.

Data collection

The bot captures data from the chat forms and sends to an API for processing and then responds to the user via email or chat.

But before adding a bot on your site, you should understand what kind of visitors you are looking for and whether they are getting a clear understanding of the products or services you are offering. The questions that are basically being asked to the bot includes: “Why my business needs a chatbot?”, “What is the price of the bots?”, “How can I build a chatbot?”, etc.

The bot can be made more intelligent and capable of handling all queries of a customer by adding blocks of questions with the responses.

Chat survey

The bot can ask the user a few questions before or during the conversation and get personal information like name or email address. Later, the data collected can be used for marketing and sales purposes regardless of how the conversation continues.

Lead generation when offline

Thanks to website bots, live chat is possible even if the agent is not online. For example, when a customer clicks on the live chat widget, and in case the live agent is not available, the bot can collect all the necessary information such as customer’s inquiry, name, email, and phone number and inform the customer that they will contact as soon as possible.

Engage users when they want to leave the website

Customers bounce from a website when they find some information to be lacking, not finding the services interesting or other then the bot can ask a few questions to the user for generating a lead or just get some feedback to improve the website.

Request for a phone call

There are some customers who still prefer using phones over other forms of communication. A bot can ask the customer to leave their phone number if they are interested in any of your products or services. The feature helps a lot in providing sales and customer service through that channel.

Guiding customers

Sometimes customers wander around the website looking for specific information. In such scenarios, the bot can ask the customers about helping them thus overcoming sales obstacles and increase sales.

Website bots are the future of your business. It implies that if you don’t have a bot, you may be missing out on great opportunities for generating leads. After all, its conversations that make a business.