In times when stepping outside was a mortal risk, many businesses worried about being unable to reach their customers properly. But chatbots came up as a solution which saved time, money and enabled automated customer service. Chatbots have enabled businesses to provide 24/7 customer support. More and more businesses are adopting these bots to generate leads, or solve queries.
A chatbot uses artificial intelligence to impersonate humans and update itself to provide better results. This blog is going to help you understand everything about chatbots- from what they are to how they are developed. Read on to find out what chatbots actually are.

What Is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a software made using AI to impersonate humans in text-based conversations. They interpret and process the user’s words to provide a pre-set answer.
Businesses use chatbots to effectively address and solve customer’s queries. This allows a business to save extra costs and enables automated lead generation and custom support.

Krishna Yadav

The Benefits of Chatbot for Your Business are as follows:

Instant Resolutions

Chatbots are loved for the very reason of instant resolutions, as in the case of a chatbot, the answers and resolutions are both lighting fast. While it would take at least seconds to even connect to human support, chatbots can solve 1000s of queries in that time and be available to every user at the same time. People hate to keeping waiting for support, and the only answer to it is chatbots.

Priority Queuing Support

An analysis of the users queries while allocating support (even based on seniority) can be a real thing if you hire chatbot developers. Even have built solutions where the users would be put in a priority list based on the severity of their issue and mapped to support to improve efficiency and performance of the entire support team. This benefit stands out to be the most important one, but only if it is implemented by a top chatbot app development company.

Multi-channel

A well-developed chatbot can be easily integrated into any channel, or medium the user is accessing your software at. There are multiple benefits of the same as you would save development and customisation costs when it comes to integrating support windows in different offerings. While being present on multiple channels, the same chatbot can also provide help at those channels simultaneously, which is almost impossible for human support staff.

Reduced Human Dependency

A chatbot cannot replace human empathy and problem-solving capabilities but can reduce dependency when either doesn’t come into the picture. A chatbot can easily solve navigation-related queries, general queries, run scans for anomalies, payments, tracking, and provide support instantly to the user. Chatbots can be a great addition to solve low-level queries and problems and significantly reduce human support dependency in the process.

Scalability

When you get a chatbot developed by the experts, you won’t have to worry about scalability. A single chatbot program can handle thousands of queries at once, so you won’t have to worry about long queues of users waiting for support. While it is technically impossible to provide as much support through human staff, the chatbots are built for this purpose and would cost a fraction compared to human support costs.

Let us begin with the features you should include in your chatbot.

Features of chatbot

NLP

Natural language processing governs how the users would interact and use your chatbot. With NLP, the chatbot won’t be able to connect with users on a deeper level, and that’s why it is one of the most important features your chatbot should have. On a bigger scale, there would be dependencies based on how capable you want your chatbot to be, but the a bility to communicate remains the most important part of a chatbot.

Export Option

Not many people would use this option, but it is good to have a feature with custom chatbot development for customer service. Provide options to export the chat transcript in multiple formats, and it would double sure users that they are in the right hands. The export option can also be combined with an import option to enable a case history analysis, all using the chatbots and without the intervention of the human staff.

Live Tracking

Live-tracking requires different API integrations from respective providers, and you can easily enable it in the chatbot. Rather than dedicating a big section towards live-tracking, you can simply integrate it into the chatbot. This feature would ease the most demanded service by the users and would at the same time help you save app space by fetching everything from APIs and databases.

Software Integration

Chatbots can be a great medium to fetch data with a simple query and can be integrated with solutions such as apps, CRMs, and more. Using this feature, you would essentially build a bridge through which any user can come and operate your software solution. All they would need to do is type or speak to the chatbot about what they are looking for, and your chatbot solution would search the data in your software and fetch it to the user.

Payments Integration

For a lot of business offerings, managing payments, refunds, and likewise, gets to be the most difficult part. Hire chatbot developers who can integrate features like auto accessing the situations, issuing refunds, cancelling orders, and whatever else is required on their own. Payment related queries are the most popular ones in almost all on-demand service providers and product-based business apps, and chatbots allow a seamless support system for it.

Overlay

While this is a feel-good feature, it can be a make or break in many situations and chatbot offerings. Chatbot overlays allow users to stay connected while the chatbot may have to transfer the case to human support and keeps the chat active in the meantime. With users facing issues and wanting to use the app at the same time, this feature can come in really handy and be appealing at the same time.

Cost of Chatbot Development

Now that you understand how to develop a Chatbot, let’s take a look at how much it is going to cost. There are two ways to develop a chatbot – firstly, you can hire a team of top software developers but it is very costly and time-consuming. Secondly, you can hire a software development services provider company experienced in Chatbot Development. This reduces the extra cost and time required to hire separate developers.

Other than this, the cost of chatbot development depends on the number of features and the type of chatbot you want to build. Developing a basic chatbot with AI can start from $30,000. While developing an ML-driven well-functioning chatbot can cost around $90,000.