Virtual assistant chatbots have become commonplace on websites across the internet. Whether handling customer service requests, providing customized instructions or qualifying a potential new lead, these virtual assistant chatbots help websites to offer around-the-clock tailored support to their visitors.

Here are eight great benefits of utilizing a virtual assistant chatbot on your website.

1. Around the clock support

Unlike their human counterparts, virtual assistant chatbots do not need to rest or take a break. These chatbots can provide customer service around the clock, addressing queries outside of usual operational business hours.

Even if the chatbot can not handle the customer service enquiry in full, they can help to collect the necessary information for a member of the customer service team to attend to when they next begin their shift. 

2. Instant responses

There is nothing more frustrating than waiting around for a response. Anyone who has ever been on hold to their bank for hours will attest to this.

Automated chatbots can provide quick responses in real time, either providing the response in full or signposting the user towards where they can find the information they require.

3. Cost effective solution

A virtual assistant chatbot can reduce the need for a large human workforce providing customer service, helping to reduce operational costs.

Even if a human workforce is required to perform the more specialized customer service tasks, the chatbot can help to streamline the role.

4. Scalability

A virtual chatbot is able to handle multiple requests at once, without affecting the performance. This can ensure a consistent service during peak times without the associated disadvantages of having an underutilized workforce during quiet times.

5. Personalization

Personalizing the experience is the key to delivering a successful customer experience. Chatbots can offer tailored responses depending on the information that the visitor provides.

If the chatbot is linked to a service that can provide information from known users, this can influence the chatbot’s output. 

6. Qualifying leads

Incorporating a chatbot into your lead generation funnel can help to identify hot leads and engage them effectively, helping to increase conversion rates.

Many sales processes involve a few repetitive steps, such as collecting information about the customer and their requirements. By automating this, you are freeing up your sales team to focus upon closing the hot leads.

7. Ensuring consistency

Customer service teams can provide inconsistent support, whether it be down to inconsistencies in their training or simply down to the varying nature of human personalities. This can cause issues for businesses if their support can not always be relied upon to deliver a trusted service.

A virtual assistant on the other hand can be trained to provide a consistent response every time, ensuring peace of mind for your customer service team.

8. Improve customer retention

Many website visitors are seeking an instant response to their query. If you can not provide this, in some opportunities the visitor will seek an alternative destination for an answer to their question, rather than sticking around to wait for yours.

By providing the opportunity for instant gratification, you can increase retention on your website by ensuring that people find what they were looking for. 

Visit here to discover further insight on some of the benefits mentioned above as well as others, demonstrating why there is such a clear demand for website assistants.

Extracting the most out of your virtual assistant chatbot

As anyone who has used a chatbot will tell you, not all chatbots are created to an equal level of high performance. There are some infuriating chatbots out there that provide inconclusive results and do not seem to understand even basic responses.

To avoid that, we recommend the following:

Define clear objectives

Is your chatbot designed to qualify leads, signpost users towards a user guide or keep them engaged until a human agent is available to take over?

Having a clear idea of the problem you wish to solve will help to guide your development towards a functioning and useful virtual assistant. 

Understand your audience

Tailoring your online AI-driven assistant to serve the needs of your expected audience is crucial. Do you understand the types of questions they will ask, and the tone they will expect? Analyze customer service data to get a clearer understanding of their queries, preferences and behaviors.

This information will help you to develop a chatbot that fully understands and helps your users with timely assistance.

Design a smooth experience

Simplicity should be at its core, with easy navigation and providing quick, snappy responses. Nobody wants to use a clunky, cumbersome user interface - remember it is supposed to be a huge help and not a hindrance.

Ensure the user is given clear instructions on how to best utilize the chatbot as well, such as when to provide certain bits of key information.

Build in a fallback option

Every so often, there will be a certain user or query for which a chatbot virtual assistant just will not cut it.

Giving the customer the opportunity to escalate the discussion to a human assistant, or having in-built detection tools to do it automatically, will help to ensure complex queries are dealt with effectively.

Personalize the interactions

Personalization of customer service can help to enhance user engagement.

Use the data collected from previous interactions to tailor the responses, helping to steer the conversation towards a productive and beneficial ending more frequently. 

Leverage Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of AI that is powering significant improvements to chatbots. By enabling chatbots to understand, interpret and respond to human language in a more natural and intelligent manner, NLP is helping to deliver the next generation of virtual assistant chatbot.

Chatbots trained using NLP typically have a better understanding of user intent, as they can understand the intention behind a user’s message, rather than just scanning for specific keywords that triggered specific responses. This contextual awareness helps chatbots to provide a personalized response to your users.

NLP allows chatbots to understand a wide variety of languages, including regional dialects and even slang! This flexibility allows effective communication with a diverse user base, making sure you do not miss out on any customer.

If sentiment analysis has been included in the training, it will be able to detect the emotional tone expressed by the user, such as whether they are happy, frustrated or confused. By having this information on hand, the chatbot can provide an empathetic response that displays the appropriate emotional intelligence. This makes interacting with chatbots a more pleasant and fulfilling experience for customers. The more advanced virtual assistant chatbots can be trained to retrieve and summarize information from custom data sources. Whether this be online sources, your own material or a custom database of information, an NLP-powered online assistant can provide a much wider scope of information retrieval compared to the earlier generations.

Custom training is a difference-maker

An off-the-shelf chatbot is a good start to automating your customer service, but they fall short of what modern digital customers expect. The service is too bland and ‘off-the-shelf’, they often do not have the depth of knowledge or understanding to be of true assistance. 

On the other hand, a fully custom developed solution tailored around your business requirements and powered by NLP will deliver the highest level of automated service.

You can undoubtedly expect a more intelligent, responsive and user-friendly solution.

If you have a clear idea of the role you want a virtual assistant chatbot to undertake, NetGeist is your ideal data partner. Our range of customizable chatbot tools ensure your virtual assistant is tailored to perform the specific tasks you envisage. 

Let us know the roles you want your virtual assistant to undertake, and we can get you started on your journey to an automated future.

Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.