These days, your customers expect to be able to communicate with you through every channel. Text, call, Facebook Messenger, social media comment, live chat, email…you get the picture. Customers should be able to get in touch with you easily, especially via your website. This often means implementing a chatbot.
Chatbots are automated programs or bots that engage with your customers through chat. Typically integrated into chat software for small businesses, these programs analyze human communication and provide relevant responses quickly. The aim is to create an interaction that closely mirrors the experience of interacting with a live agent with careful automation and personalization.
Before live chat entered the picture, every customer query, issue, and complaint necessitated human intervention. Because it’s common for customer issues to come up outside regular business hours, over weekends, or even holidays, maintaining staffing to meet unpredictable demands around the clock is costly and challenging for many small businesses.
Chatbots offer an excellent solve by conveniently managing customer interactions 24/7 and can be a real life-saver for local businesses. They streamline workflows, freeing up your employees for higher-priority tasks. They also mitigate long wait times typically associated with email or phone-based customer support as they provide instant help to multiple users simultaneously. Bottom line: they enhance your response quality while keeping your expenses in check.
Because a chatbot is a no-brainer, we’re not here to convince you to get one. We’re here to help you choose the right one for your business. Read on for 13 essential chatbot features to consider in 2024.
Podium’s Webchat Features
At this point, we should probably let you in on a little secret: not all chatbots are built equally. For example, Podium’s Webchat tool can solve many problems that businesses have with other chatbots.
Webchat operates via text and collects lead information before you even start a conversation, setting you up to deliver an amazing customer experience from the get go. Because this tool uses SMS, customers are able to converse with you asynchronously, moving from desktop to mobile and back again whenever they please. This means your customers are no longer tied to their desktops when they want to talk with you, unlike other chatbot experiences.
And the experience is even better for you. All of the messages, whether from phone or desktop, come into one place, so you and your team can maintain 100% transparency at all times and make sure every single customer gets the service they deserve in a timely manner.
13 Must-Have Chatbot Features:
So, what should you look for when choosing the best chatbot that will sweet talk your customers into closing the deal? We’ve got you. Here are 13 features you should look for when shopping for your next chat partner and why they will make a difference in your day to day.
1. Seamless Integration
Integration with your existing tech stack is one of the most important features, as it provides optimization at every level. It ensures smooth communication and data exchange between your chat tool and other systems, reduces manual intervention, and streamlines workflows. All these benefits come together to offer your users a cohesive and unified experience, every time.
2. Multilingual Capabilities
In an increasingly diverse and multicultural marketplace, one language simply isn’t enough anymore if you want to offer the highest level of customer support. Multilingual support allows you to cater to a broader audience, expanding your reach to a global user base and enhancing the impact of your conversations. It also demonstrates your commitment to serving a diverse customer base, increasing your accessibility.
3. Omnichannel Capacities
An omnichannel chatbot ensures your users have a seamless and consistent experience across your various channels: websites, mobile apps, messaging platforms, etc. This offers customers more flexibility and choice by allowing them to select their method of communication without sacrificing quality or convenience.
4. Real-Time Metrics
Real-metrics enable you to analyze user interactions as they happen. Understanding user behavior in real time gives you a huge advantage by allowing you to quickly make adjustments based on user preferences, improving your overall user experience.
5. Easy Set-Up
If it’s not simple, it’s not well-designed. And your chat tool should be making your life and your customers’ lives easier, not harder. An easy setup process makes it more likely that your staff will adopt and embrace the chat tool. It increases efficiency and allows you to create more effective, personalized conversations by giving you the tools you need to quickly tailor your settings.
6. Simple Customization
Every target audience is different, and your chatbot needs to cater to yours perfectly in order to maintain your brand and voice. Simple customization allows you to adapt your live chat to your specific business needs and personalize it to resonate with your customers. You maintain brand consistency across channels and increase engagement by offering a more personalized experience. Win-win!
7. Training
When it comes to chatting, pre-game is paramount. Your chatbot of choice should offer training on how to successfully use and get the most out of it. It should help your staff understand its capabilities and functionalities, teaching your employees how to improve the efficiency of their conversations. With training, your staff are more likely to achieve your business objectives and collect accurate information because they will know how to navigate and use the live chat to its full potential.
8. Emotional Intelligence
Yes, emotional intelligence isn’t just for relationships–and it isn’t just for sales, either. Every conversation you facilitate should display high-level emotional intelligence With emotional intelligence features, your chatbot can interpret the emotional tone of user inputs, enabling you to respond more appropriately and better understand and connect with customers. Essentially, it helps you offer next-level communication.
9. Security
A secure chatbot protects sensitive user data such as personal information, preferences, and communication history with your business. Security features instill trust and credibility with your customers. And when they know that their information will be safe with you, they’re more likely to give it. (As always, make sure to abide by user privacy and data protection regulations in your local area.)
10. Templates
As you know, it’s hard to start with a blank piece of paper. That’s why the best chatbots come with customizable templates. Temples ensure that you can provide consistent and standardized responses to FAQs or common queries, especially when it comes to handling customer interactions after hours. They provide an adaptability that makes it convenient to tailor your responses to the unique characteristics of your business.
11. AI
AI enables chatbots to maintain context during conversations, making it possible to offer meaningful responses and personalized interactions that really resonate with your customers. This makes for more natural conversations that flow smoothly, providing your customers with world-class comfort and support. AI-powered chatbots draw from an expanded knowledge base and employ advanced machine learning, allowing you to get more out of your chatbot platform and tap into the power of conversational AI, complex customer data, and routing for each chatbot conversation.
12. Chatbot API
APIs enable your chatbot to exchange and retrieve data with external systems in real-time. This ensures that the chatbot has access to your latest information, improving your response accuracy. APIs also enable chatbots to scale efficiently and handle a large volume of requests simultaneously. This scalability is crucial for businesses with varying levels of user engagement.
13. Intent Recognition
Intent recognition allows your chatbot to identify user intentions accurately, enabling it to perform tasks more efficiently. This can include providing information, processing transactions, or assisting you with specific actions.
Benefits of Chatbots for Businesses
Having a chatbot for your business offers several tangible benefits, contributing decisively to improved efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall success. Chatbots provide:
- 24/7 availability, enabling you to provide high-quality customer support and information at any hour.
- Cost savings by significantly reducing the workload of your customer support staff.
- Scalability by increasing the number of interactions you can effectively handle simultaneously (especially during peak hours).
- Consistency by ensuring that users receive uniform information and assistance across channels.
- Flexibility by allowing your customers to connect with you the way they want to and leave their desktop while continuing their chat (specifically with Webchat and text-based chatbots).
Most importantly, they provide you with peace of mind knowing that you’ll never let another customer who visits your website slip through the crack, no matter the time of day or occupation levels of your staff. Having the right live chat is like having another hand. Period.
Common Chatbot Pain-Points
However, it’s not all roses. There are a number of pain points you should be aware of when adopting a chatbot. Here’s a list of challenges and limitations chatbots face today and how they might be solved in the future. Many of today’s chatbots:
- Struggle to maintain content and understand complex conversations
- Lack emotional intelligence
- Are extremely difficult to integrate with existing systems and take up a great deal of time
- Present security concerns
- Sound like chatbots instead of human agents
Many of these problems are currently being addressed and explored as AI technology advances. By incorporating AI chatbot features, algorithms, improved chatbot functionality, and tech-powered conversational experience and text into your live chat (or finding an AI chatbot with specific solutions for the listed difficulties), you can own complex conversations and offer secure, convenient, personalized interactions that increase customer engagement. Make sure to stay current with AI chatbot advances so that you can keep your chats up-to-date with the latest tech.
How to Choose the Right Chatbot
Choosing the right chatbot for your business involves carefully evaluating several factors, namely features, cost, and fit. First, determine your objectives and use cases. What do you want the chatbot to achieve? Do you want it to handle customer support, lead generation, ecommerce?
Next, consider the preferences and communication habits of your target audience. Evaluate which chatbots can seamlessly integrate with your existing tech stack including CRM systems, databases, and other relevant tools. Determine which features are absolutely necessary and which you can live without, or are not necessarily pertinent in your industry. Then, find the chatbot that delivers the most of what you and your customers need, and evaluate in terms of your budget.
If you have a smaller budget, you might have to sacrifice a few features. But don’t worry–if you choose the right platform, you’ll be able to add more as you scale. And the success you’ll experience with a great live chat should make up for the cost. And then some. (Pro Tip: Consistently collect customer feedback to keep tabs on what’s working and what’s not.)
Emerging Trends in the Chatbot Industry
Now that you have a lay of the land of the different types of chatbots and how they meet customer needs, it’s time to look forward. Here are four emerging trends in the chatbot space and how they could change the industry completely.
As we mentioned, chatbots are increasingly leveraging advanced AI and natural language processing (NLP) to engage in more context-aware and human-like conversations. This includes honing in on user intent and sentiment analysis and providing hyper-personalized, complex responses and even recommendations more quickly.
Integrating with voice platforms like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or others, chatbots are also expanding beyond text-based interactions, moving into voice-activated and virtual assistant spaces that offer self-service with better formats and audible, relevant information.
