Customer service is an interactive and elaborate process for understanding a customer and meeting their needs based on its capabilities, resources, and capacity for the product sold or the service rendered. In this context, the customer’s expectation begins from the moment they contact the business, purchased, subscribed or contracted the service.
Hence, customer service is an end-to-end process that begins from sale to the end of a product or service life cycle or its usability for the customer. This concept originates with the customer and terminates with the customer.
Customer service is the centre of every business. To sustain and grow, you must direct your focus and efforts towards building a good customer service team.

Why Use Chatbots?

A chatbot by definition is an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can simulate a chat or conversation with a user.

1. Although there is nothing like the human touch, a chatbot is better equipped to give each customer what they expect: a direct answer to their question. If you have worked in an online business for some time, you can understand that customers can be quite demanding. They get frustrated each time their call is put on hold for too long or their question is not given an immediate response.

Yet, the fact is, you are in business to serve the same customers, so you need to make sure you quickly resolve their issues.

2. Though your customer service team does not work around the clock, your potential customers expect quick answers to concerns.
3. With the daily improvement of technology, traditional methods of engaging customers are also improving. Industries like entertainment, banking, healthcare, fashion, news, and more have embraced chatbots. According to research, by 2023, 85% of all customer interactions will take place without humans.
4. All are heading towards the use of chatbots as a means of communication. A chatbot is one of the distinguishing features for brands that provide a good customer experience over the rest.

Below Are The Characteristics that A Chatbot Must Have:

1. Small Talk Interactions:
   Chatbots must have the ability for small chats. It needs to efficiently handle everyday questions and provide a more realistic, human-like answer to generate meaningful results.
2. Predictive Intelligence:

A chatbot must have the ability to observe past conversations, customer behaviour, create a profile of customer preferences. It must frame intelligent, skilful responses and make business more intelligent, efficient, and successful.

3. Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

This is the heart of any modern chatbot. Also known as NLP, it uses deep learning to generate a response by analyzing human input. It occurs when the analysis and the generation of responses are acquired via the deep learning algorithm.

4. Advanced Messaging

When enabled in Chatbot, advanced messaging gives bots the ability to send and receive documents, images, files, and links. Boost them with features such as clickable buttons that show users tiles and cards over links, images, and shortcuts.

5. Intelligent Analysis

Analytics displays the information about how your visitors interact with your bot. Through Analytics, you will understand your customers’ urgent needs, how many customers have engaged with the bot, etc. Analytics is an important piece to drive business; when done right, it drives better sales, optimizes experiences, and improves targeted marketing.

6. Topics and Intra Topic Steps                     

When something about a topic is discussed in chat, such as a beverage selection in a food chatbot, it then moves on to the next step, like the payment option. This is defined as a smooth transition from topic to intra-topic. This built-in intelligence should be present in a chatbot.

7. Extended Support

Chatbots must have the ability to provide a positive experience and necessary information, thus providing a pleasant intimacy with customers. Eventually, the Chatbot should provide a hybrid experience of all of these features and incorporate images and structured content into the conversation, thus making the experience richer and more useful.

What Do Customers Think Of A Chatbot?

More than half of online shoppers in the UK are contemplating using a chatbot.

They are comfortable with using this artificial intelligence (AI) powered app to better understand a brand, particularly if a bot can answer their questions correctly.

About 40% of the online shoppers even said that they would be happy to use AI, if it was on the website, to purchase clothes; think eBay ShopBot.

From their perspective, there is not much difference between speaking to a chatbot and a real person. They say it could improve their online experience.

However, customers of high-value products like cars and jewellery see a big distinction between a human customer service representative and a bot that simulates a human conversation. This group of careful shoppers prefers to have someone guide them through the site and respond to their questions in detail.
Three Reasons Why You Need a Chatbot
Whether you’re an online startup or a seasoned eCommerce entrepreneur, using a chatbot can benefit your business in the following ways:

1. You can program a chatbot to transfer a difficult question from a customer to a staff member or yourself promptly. Hiring and training new employees to lead your business will cost more than creating a chatbot. This is not a substitute for hiring people; nothing can replace the empathy of humans. Though we’re all advocates for skilled people, the combining of their talents with A.I. is a smart way to move your business forward.
2. They can quickly provide answers to simple questions. Chatbots come in handy in daily operations because they recognize and react to human speech. They’re designed to analyze customer data and respond to frequently asked questions from visitors. These prompt answers give a customer confidence to purchase and not wait.

3. Chatbots are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Undoubtedly, Chatbots are among the latest communication tools you need to leverage for your e-commerce business. Merging the efficiency of chatbots with your customer support’s interpersonal skills is sure to make your customers happy, which ultimately leads to higher sales.