Why Online Businesses should integrate an FAQ Chatbot

Whilst most retail businesses close for the evening, online businesses serve customers 24/7, 365 days a week.

This round the clock service is one of many reasons online businesses integrate chatbots on their website, helping to answer FAQs and supporting customers at any time of day or night.

Throughout this blog, we’ll explore some of the other benefits of FAQ chatbots for online businesses.

What are FAQ Chatbots?

FAQs, or frequently asked questions, are added to websites to try to proactively help customers with potential issues or enquiries. 

Businesses will write FAQs inspired by past interactions with customers, as well as their own intuition. 

FAQs are designed to improve the customer experience by providing relevant information. Usually, these FAQs take the format of a long list of questions and answers. 

Whilst they can be separated into specific categories or be accompanied by a search bar to make it easier to find help, these FAQs are blanket responses and not necessarily relevant to the exact situation that the customer might find themselves in. 

There might be a particular mitigating circumstance that renders the general FAQs as not relevant to that particular user, such as the operating system or device they are using.

Instead, a chatbot can be trained to provide answers to the frequently asked questions. Chatbots are a type of computer programme that is designed to simulate a conversation with a human user. Custom chatbots are developed to provide expertise for conversations about certain topics. 

For online businesses, training a chatbot to be able to converse regarding FAQs represents a significant opportunity to improve sales conversion rates and customer satisfaction with their online experience.

Benefits of FAQ Chatbots

Round the clock support

Retail studies have shown that late-night shopping sprees spend $165 on average. Clothing, shoes and electronics are commonly purchased items in the twilight hours. Whilst larger businesses may have the resources to offer 24/7 customer service, many smaller businesses will find it simply not economically viable to offer support at all times. 

In these situations, customers with questions may end up leaving the website frustrated, unable to find the answer to their question. 

That’s where an FAQ Chatbot would come into play.

Trained to answer commonly asked questions, these chatbots are able to understand what they are being asked. This contextual understanding is provided by the extensive chatbot training process, where textual data such as previous customer service logs will be used to train the chatbot into understanding what customers will be asking, and the answers they should be provided with. 

Through a process of continual learning, chatbots will become smarter over the time the more they are used.

Improved workflow for customer service

FAQs chatbots do not just provide a more streamlined experience for customers, they also help to make your internal operations more efficient. 

Answering or writing FAQs can be a laborious task, especially for products that are frequently updated rendering previous guides as outdated. 

By automating the process through the use of a chatbot, your customer service teams can prioritise their time on tasks that are more specialist, targeting their help at those who need it most. 

By reducing the overheads needed to provide human support for menial tasks, these cost savings can either be passed on to the consumer or the profits increased for the business.

Offer instant, multilingual support

The beauty of online stores is the ease of expansion worldwide, businesses can sell overseas easier than ever before. However, the language barrier remains ever present. Whilst this may not prove too much of a stumbling block for simple items, more complex purchases such as software packages or flatpack furniture often require significant swathes of information to help the customer use the product they have just purchased. 

It simply isn’t feasible for businesses of any size to hire staff who can have conversations in every language, yet chatbots offer a cost effective solution. Multilingual chatbots can converse with customers in multiple languages, with the more advanced chatbots trained to identify the language in the initial message and to automatically respond in the relevant language. When training a custom chatbot, businesses can choose specific languages to offer support in. 

An important thing to note regarding multilingual chatbots is that they do not simply translate the language used in a conversation, they are trained to understand the deep and complex nuances of each individual language, ensuring the conversation is sensitive to the customer’s dialect and culture. 

Reduce bounce rate and gain insightful data

Bounce rate is the percentage of web visitors who leave a website without interacting with the content. A high bounce rate is the bane of many online businesses, who may be investing large sums into advertising to get visitors to the site, only to see them leave immediately. 

A prominently displayed chatbot will help to reduce the number of potential customers leaving your site frustrated by a lack of information. These FAQ chatbots can guide customers through the purchasing process, providing relevant information at the right time of their purchasing funnel. 

Chatbot logs are also a valuable source of information regarding consumer perceptions and experiences. By understanding what people are asking, businesses can tailor their sales process to provide a product or service better suited to the requirements of the customer. 

For example, software providers can analyse their chatbot logs to discover which third party products to prioritise integration with, based on how many customers are requesting ‘how-to’ information. 

‘How-to’ informational searches are very popular due to the direct nature of the question and many news sites publish articles responding to this variety of questioning, with examples found here on Technology.Org.

Top tips for training an FAQ Chatbot

• Be precise, customers want concise information that is directly relevant to their question, rather than general noise. To achieve this, train the chatbot on a closed, controlled dataset rather than public information
• Keep the chatbot up to date, especially if you are updating the product 
• Sometimes there will be situations the chatbot is not suitably equipped to handle. Ensure you have a simple process in place to escalate customers to a human agent to handle the request.

Let NetGeist lead the way for your custom chatbot

Here at NetGeist.ai, we specialise in building chatbots using the innovative large language model technology that can respond to virtually any type of question. 

This means our custom chatbots can be utilized for different industries and provide correct assistance in numerous scenarios. Learn more about our solutions with the help of virtual assistant Robert that is able to provide answers on the company's products, services and beyond.